Bernard Keane on Adam Bandt, Israel and the double think solution

Right at the outset of this conflict, I worried that Israel was overestimating the strength of its hand. In the US, the Israel lobby’s lobbying has been as successful as the NRA’s lobbying. And it follows a similar strategy — zero tolerance. It holds a very tough line and then goes after those who break ranks. It’s been incredibly successful at this.

Just as Republican Congresspeople know that the NRA will target their preselection as the Republican nominee if they step out of line, even to the extent of saying background checks on gun purchases mightn‘t be a bad idea, the Israel lobby has successfully marginalised those who want to push back against Netanyahu’s excesses. goes after after those who deviate from their preferred position. I think they’ve been way too successful for their own good. As John Mearsheimer has argued, American politicians underwrite Israel’s security while being apparently unable to have much of a say on Israeli policy — in contrast, for instance, to Ronald Reagan’s influence a generation ago.

The Israel lobby defends its red lines and goes after the chant ‘from the river to the sea’ as genocidal. But when did you last hear a protest chant that was well considered? In any event it’s essentially the position of a good portion of the Israeli cabinet, including, as you’ll read below, Benjamin Netanyahu.

This is hypocritical of course, but that’s not my point. I think Israel has begun walking into the night. Moreover those who are leading the process are quite deliberately encouraging developments — like expansion of West Bank settlements — and so ramping up the difficulty of ever changing course. That’s how adversarial politics works.

Little Israel is not Big America. I remember my economic history teacher telling me that, America’s economic history wasn’t very interesting. “It’s just big and rich”. In other words with such a big, free market it could make many mistakes and still grow its living standards faster than other countries. Likewise America’s foreign policy can afford many hypocrisies. Little Israel has now got the youth of the world against it. It might take a decade or two, but that’s all it took for the condemnation of the world to liquidate those who occupied all the commanding heights of power in Apartheid South Africa and the Jim Crow South once they became international pariahs.

Already the mainstream support for Israel that remains in Western countries is a product of muscle memory and fear of the Israel lobby. But numbers make their weight felt pretty quickly in electoral politics and, there are many more muslims in the electorate than Zionists. So, the risk for Israel is that, at some stage in the next three decades things will collapse quite quickly. Those moving from pro-Israeli to anti-Israeli stances will deploy the traditional vehicle for effecting 180 degree reversals. The bandwagon.

Here’s Bernard Keane:

But while Bandt was caught out when pressed to give details of his claim that Australia is exporting weapons to Israel, his unwillingness to endorse a two-state solution represents a rare example of politicians refusing to engage in the standard double-think on Israel and having the guts to challenge what is a facile media assumption by editors and journalists.

If the likes of David Speers, The Australian and Labor have a problem with people who don’t back a two-state solution, here’s a good place to start. As Crikey pointed out when Benjamin Netanyahu visited Australia in 2017, the Israeli prime minister doesn’t believe in one. When asked about a two-state solution, the alleged war criminal and corruption defendant replied that he’d prefer “not to deal with labels but with substance … if Israel is not there to ensure security, then that state very quickly will become another bastion of radical Islam … we have to ensure that Israel has the overriding security control of all the territories, all the territories.”

And of course we know that Netanyahu has worked assiduously to prevent a two-state so

lution during his lengthy time as PM, using a vast expansion of illegal settlements on Palestinian land to create “facts on the ground” that will prevent any meaningful Palestinian state. Indeed, his efforts to support Hamas to undermine a two-state solution were a key factor in that depraved terror group’s capacity to launch such an horrific attack on Israel on October 7. Netanyahu’s relentless opposition to a two-state solution is widely and uncontroversially acknowledged in more grown-up countries than Australia.

Netanyahu has been enormously successful in this endeavour, to the general disinterest of the Australian media and mainstream political class, even when Israeli settlers engaged in a savage campaign of terrorism against Palestinians in the West Bank over the past two years.

Continuing to assume that a two-state solution is the default reasonable position on Palestine-Israel reflects both ignorance and an unthinking complicity with Netanyahu’s agenda: let the West endlessly talk about a two-state solution while Israel slowly but surely reaches a point where a meaningful Palestinian state can’t exist, given the extensive infiltration of Israeli colonists across Palestinian lands, the infrastructure of apartheid that “protects” them, and their relentless attacks, backed by the Israel Defence Forces, on Palestinians.

More (Behind Crikey’s paywall) here

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