Isrealism?

It's been requested that I take a break from posts about my usual tubthumping topics (Republican racism and sex-and-politics), so I'll do a little post about Israel. Matt Yglesias, echoing the general consensus of the liberal blogophere, calls himself a "realist" for speaking the unspoken Truth - namely, that Israeli settlements are the true obstacle to peace:

This paragraph from a Jerusalem Post editorial on US-Israeli relations in the Obama years highlights the extent to which Israel desperately needs a U.S. administration that’s willing to tell it some stuff it doesn’t want to hear:

There are other issues that may cause stress in the US-Israel relationship. Settlements, always a sore point, take on greater importance when American diplomats believe a diplomatic breakthrough with the Palestinians is achievable. There is little support in Israel today for relinquishing control of the West Bank, given its bitter experience after removing all soldiers and settlers from Gaza. Israelis no longer believe that territorial concessions on their part will bring peace with the Palestinians. Most believe that the real issue blocking “peace” with Hamas and its allies is Israel’s existence, not its settlements. With Hamas in firm control of Gaza and growing in strength on the West Bank, it stretches credulity to believe that the Israeli public can be persuaded to entrust its security to agreements signed with Palestinian leaders who can’t or won’t honor commitments.

Obviously, there’s a wide range of disagreement about how central the continued existence and expansion of Israel’s settlements are to preventing the emergence of peace. I would say they’re quite central.

Did you read that? QUITE central, he said! Awwwww, snap, he told you!

But there's no support for what Matt "would say" - not in his post, and not in reality. I am no fan of settlements - it is obviously wrong to bully people off their land - but I must admit the Jerusalem Post has the weight of evidence on its side. Israel pulled out of all Gaza settlements, and Gaza was promptly taken over by a hardline guerilla army that attacks Israel daily. In the West Bank, Israel kept its settlements and checkpoints in place, and not a single attack has come from the West Bank for years. Now, maybe Gaza is attacking in order to force Israel to de-settle the West Bank. But Hamas says it's fighting for the destruction of Israel, so it's a little bit of a stretch for us to disbelieve them. As for the diplomatic angle, the settlements are surely unpopular in Arab countries, but those countries are either already doing their best to destroy Israel, or not likely to start doing so.

So unless Yglesias and other anti-settlement blogges can come up with some countering evidence, it seems pretty clear that the argument agains settlements will remain completely moral in nature. You can say the West bank settlements are unethical, and you'd be right, but you can't say that they obviously harm Israel's security.

The real issue here is that Yglesias, like Ezra Klein, like many other American Jews (including me), doesn't want to be associated with a country that unethically bullies people off their land. Israeli hawkishness forces diaspora Jews to make a choice - either cut off your emotional ties to Israel and treat it as just another morally ambiguous foreign country, or support human rights abuses against Paletinians. Only by acting angelic, even in the face of Palestinian rocket fire, can Israel allow Jews to avoid that choice. But avoid it much longer they won't - Israel's only a bunch of humans, and its stock of angelic-ness ran out around the same time Hezbollah and Hamas got rocket launchers.

As for me, I've made my choice; I have stopped thinking of Israel as an kind of overseas ethnic homeland (even if I ever did think of it that way, which is doubtful). To me, Israel is a country that has many good points - a fairly democratic, free society, a healthy economy, a true desire for peace - but it is no better or worse or more or less important than any other country with those good points. The settlement-building is cruel and unfair, but I might do it if I were in Israel's position. It's an ambiguous enough situation where I don't really feel the need to take a strong side. And, being a Jew but not an Israeli, I think I just won't.