Peace Is Nowhere to Be Found on Israel’s Agenda, Columnist Contends

Haaretz’s Gideon Levy wants us to wake up and smell the Zionist coffee: Israel has never cared about a “just peace,” only about “collective anxieties” that “now take precedence over all else,” he writes. In other words, Levy claims, “The Israelis want occupation, not peace.”

According to the Israeli journalist, at the core of the nation’s “primal beliefs” is the idea that the land it occupies is “destined for the Jews alone.” As long as that concept remains, he argues, it seems impossible that the Palestinians and Israelis will ever come to any true compromise.

Haaretz:

The Israeli longing for peace seemingly died about a decade ago, after the failure of the Camp David summit in 2000, the dissemination of the lie that there is no Palestinian partner for peace, and, of course, the horrific blood-soaked period of the second intifada. But the truth is that even before that, Israel never really wanted peace. Israel has never, not for a minute, treated the Palestinians as human beings with equal rights. It has never viewed their distress as understandable human and national distress.

The Israeli peace camp, too — if ever there was such a thing — also died a lingering death amid the harrowing scenes of the second intifada and the no-partner lie. All that remained were a handful of organizations that were as determined and devoted as they were ineffectual in the face of the delegitimization campaigns mounted against them. Israel, therefore, was left with its rejectionist stance.

The single most overwhelming item of evidence of Israel’s rejection of peace is, of course, the settlements project. From the dawn of its existence, there has never been a more reliable or more precise litmus test for Israel’s true intentions than this particular enterprise. In plain words: The builders of settlements want to consolidate the occupation, and those who want to consolidate the occupation do not want peace. That’s the whole story in a nutshell. …

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—Posted by Natasha Hakimi Zapata