Where has the two-state solution gone?

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s failure to mention the idea of making peace based on the two-state solution will benefit the elections campaign of the Likud and Yisrael Beytenu’s joint list only slightly. But it will add to Israel’s burden all year round.

The speech Netanyahu gave at Bar-Ilan University did not remove even one community from Judea and Samaria or prevent the construction of any settlement blocs. But it provided talking points to Israel’s friends who defend it all over the world. As long as Israel is willing to use this solution, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has no convincing excuse to stay away from negotiations with it. But if Israel itself fails to fulfill what the prime minister promised, who will be able to tell the Palestinians in Ramallah that they are the ones rejecting peace-

The Bar-Ilan formula was never included in the Likud’s platform or a government decision. But it bound Israel by force of a statement made by Netanyahu. Ignoring it now is a mistake that will be hard to remedy after the elections. Every discerning person on earth will realize from the timing of the omission that the majority in Israel opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, so the phrase “two states” is being shelved during the campaign.

By this omission, Netanyahu is also giving up hope of convincing some of the voters of the Labor Party, Hatnuah and Yesh Atid to support his political plans and vote for the Likud. The prime minister is not competing against them, but only against the right-wing factions. A pity.

Anyone following events in the countries around Israel knows that the Palestinians are continuing their policy of negating the two-state solution. Tzipi Livni, who stood near the places where the decisions were made, knows that no proposal, not even the most radical of all, as put forth by Ehud Olmert, will satisfy the hunger of the Palestinian wolf.

In this case, it would have been wise to support the two-state solution as a diplomatic tool, as suggested by Moshe (Bogie) Ya'alon in his book "The Long Short Way." Ya'alon, a Likud man and one of the third-generation adherents of David Ben-Gurion’s philosophy, gave the matter a lot of thought and concluded that no peace would be made in the foreseeable future, and what the sides needed was skill in crisis management since there would be no permanent solution anytime soon.

Palestine is not willing to make peace based on the two-state solution. Even Yeshayahu Leibowitz, the most important ideologue to arise on the radical Left after the Six-Day War, knew that. Contrary to his image, the ascetic professor never promised anyone a rose garden, as if the country would know peace for forty years if they withdrew from the territories. (He knew the source of Nathan Alterman’s poem, “Dreams Speak Falsely”).

In his response to a young student in 1970, Leibowitz wrote that he favored withdrawal from the territories. Afterward, he said, “We must entrench ourselves in our Jewish state and defend it. ... I do not believe there is a chance for real peace between us and the Arabs in the foreseeable future, and so there is also no chance for security. We are condemned to exist for a protracted length of time with neither peace nor security” (from "I Wanted to Ask You, Prof. Leibowitz: Letters to and from Yeshayahu Leibowitz").

Obviously, Leibowitz and Ya'alon would not have agreed on the borders from which Israel would fight the next war. But both realized, each in his time, that there was no peace on the horizon. Both shared the opinion that without peace, what exists is a state of crisis management or war.

Crisis management requires tearing away the screen of lies of the Palestinians, who refused clear peace initiatives offered by Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert. But the two-state solution is an effective crisis-management tool. The Likud lost it during the current elections campaign in its conflict with the far right, and Netanyahu and his foreign minister will miss it when they meet with the new American secretary of state, John Kerry, in about two months. A total loss.

The tainted hope

The indictment against Avigdor Lieberman is no small matter. Either version, A or B, is harsh. It is true that it looks like a stick of Bazooka bubble gum — as broadcaster Geula Even put it — compared with the huge file against Lieberman that was shelved by Attorney-General Yehuda Weinstein. But the current case stands very well on its own.

When we get down to it, Lieberman had good reason to rejoice. Weinstein relieved him of the really heavy charges, and the matter of interfering with an investigation — the charge on the current indictment — looks to him like "small things" (as in the saying “The law cares not for small things”). He dreamed of being done with this affair by the time the Knesset was dispersed, and then coming back to the next government claiming that he had taken his punishment and paid his debt to society.

But Weinstein’s slowness, which served Lieberman for three years, has changed direction. Now, his slowness is an obstacle to the defendant. How the wheel turns.

Lieberman and his friend Aryeh Deri are a traumatic experience in the public arena. They represented underprivileged groups, demanding redress that has not yet been done. There was hope that soon, people on the fringes of Israeli society would be able to rise to its highest levels. The Jewish state was seen as the land of unlimited opportunity for its new immigrants. So as much as some people rejoiced in the fall of Deri, who was convicted of taking bribes and sent to jail, others were sorry to see his success in public life tainted with criminal acts.

Lieberman has not been convicted. Even Weinstein’s report, which dealt with the fact that he had not been prosecuted, showed him in fearsome shadows. These shadows have grown stronger still with the indictment concerning Ze’ev Ben Aryeh’s appointment as Israel’s ambassador to Belarus. Another tainted hope.

An earthquake

Right after MK Uri Ariel (National Union), the energetic chairman of the State Control Committee, notified Arie Avneri of the Ometz movement and Legal Forum for the Land of Israel Chairman Nachi Eyal that he intended to establish a government investigative committee to probe the case of Boaz Harpaz’s document, several of former Israel Defense Forces Chief of the General Staff Gabi Ashkenazi’s supporters came out into the open. They tried to minimize the affair’s importance, but on January 14, 2013, the state comptroller’s report will finally be published, and the drowsy public will realize that Ariel is not exaggerating when he calls the affair an earthquake. What happened in the IDF and the way Ashkenazi behaved in his interactions with Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s bureau match Ariel’s disturbing description.

Supposedly, an investigative committee is important because Weinstein has been dragging his feet for eight months in replying to the request by former State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss, Ariel and Ometz and the Legal Forum to begin a criminal investigation of the matter. Things are actually more complicated than that. It is completely obvious that what the journalists found out during the two and a half years since the foolish attempt to pin the “Harpaz document” on Maj. Gen. Yoav Galant, together with what was written, erased and written again in the state comptroller’s three drafts, are only part of the information in the possession of the police and the State Comptroller’s Office.

This picture is even gloomier than the one due to be published in two weeks, which is gloomy enough. Not all the facts reached MK Ariel. It’s possible that once they become known, it will be possible to say that the earthquake turned into a political and ethical tsunami. That is, if the public wakes up from its apathy concerning what happens in the IDF and the former chief of staff’s bureau, and the consequences that this contemptible behavior will have for the civilian government’s control of the IDF General Staff.

With excuses like these

The film “Jenin, Jenin” tells a false and slanderous story of the IDF troops who fought in Samaria during Operation Defensive Shield. This did not stop Dr. Michal Chacham of Beit Berl College from screening it for her students. One of them, Iris Almog, found it unbearable. Many of her relatives had been murdered in the attack on the Maxim restaurant in Haifa. But Chacham showed no sensitivity and insisted on screening the film. Almog burst into tears and left the classroom.

Two days ago, Omri Maniv reminded readers of the newspaper Maariv that Chacham had signed every wicked petition possible — from supporting Tali Fahima to defending the escaped criminal Azmi Bishara. Nothing can be expected of her. But the response of the board of the institution named for Berl Katznelson — one of the greatest Zionists of the founding generation’s Labor movement — was astounding and infuriating. “The screening of the film does not imply ideological identification of any kind on the part of the lecturer or Beit Berl College.”

Is that so? Was the film chosen at random? Does Chacham not have political opinions? The board of an academic institution that seeks to defend a screening of “Jenin, Jenin” should find more intelligent phrasing. With such a formulaic excuse, one could not earn a bachelor's degree, even at Beit Berl.

The world that vanished

On the 15th day of the Hebrew month of Shevat about 64 years ago, 120 members of the mythical first Knesset gathered in the Kessem Cinema near the Tel Aviv shoreline. We children stood at the entrance, collecting the Knesset members’ autographs. I lost interest after getting about 30 to 40 signatures, but another boy, Emanuel Edeni, persevered. Sixty-four years later, he is one of the stars of the three-part television series, “Mishtahaveh Umodeh,” by Hadas Levi Setzemsky, which is being broadcast on the Knesset Channel this week.

Menachem Begin once asked whether it was true that seven of his autographs were being sold in exchange for one of his rival, David Ben-Gurion. Begin always gave autographs willingly, while Ben-Gurion did not. One day, he put off Edeni by saying he would give him an autograph next time. A week later, he told Edeni “next time” once again. “But you told me that last week,” the boy insisted, and ran away from the policeman guarding Ben-Gurion. Ben-Gurion stopped and told the policeman to bring Edeni back. “Promises must be kept,” he said, and signed.

The Knesset was an innocent place. Several of its members believed that a salary was almost superfluous. There was no money in the treasury anyway. Dr. Uzi Landau — the son of MK Haim Landau — recalled that one day, Dr. Yohanan Bader brought five pounds to his mother because the Landau household had children while he, Bader, had none. There was no money to pay salaries to everyone, and Knesset members who had children were eligible for advances.

The salary was also not enough for Golda Meir, who was raising two children on her own. She earned extra money as a washerwoman in the kindergarten that her son Menachem, later a well-known cellist, attended. Fortunately for her, there was no obligation to report it to the state comptroller back then.

This is a film from another world. Eliyahu Lankin borrowed a suit from a friend for his swearing-in, but on the way, a car went through a puddle and got it wet, and he had no change of clothes. Golda, the tough woman who was known as “the only man in the government,” had a magical love affair with David Remez. She wrote in the romantic language of a smitten high-school girl. But when she wrote to him, “Have mercy on Ben-Gurion and conduct the meeting,” Remez firmly turned her down: “No mercy.” It’s all in writing.

A feminist struggle also took place in the Knesset of that time. After a highly-publicized incident of rape in Tel Aviv’s Meir Park, Rabbi Yehuda Leib Hacohen Maimon suggested a nighttime curfew for women going out on their own. Golda retorted that it was a good idea — and should actually be imposed on men.

A vanished world, gone without a trace.