The War of the Words

That Israel is very good at fighting wars, but not nearly as successful in fighting the “war of the words” – the information battle, hasbara – as are the Arabs, is by now well known. Israel has allowed the Arabs to invent a people (“the Palestinians”) and to rename a place (the “West Bank”), and to promote historical amnesia (“who cares about the Palestine Mandate?”) There are many other lexical battles that the Arabs have fought and managed to win. But there is no need to acquiesce despairingly in this state of affairs; those Arab verbal victories can be undone by Israel and its supporters if they remain vigilant in the use of words.

As for the “apartheid” canard, no Israeli leader, diplomat, or other government official should wait for the charge of “apartheid” to be flung about, either by Arabs or BDSers. They should pre-empt, constantly, by saying something like this: “We are described by our shameless enemies as pursuing a policy of apartheid. Let’s get this straight. There are states in the Middle East that practice a kind of apartheid. But Israel is not one of them. In Israel, Arabs sit in the Knesset, serve on the Supreme Court, go abroad as Israeli diplomats. Arabs study with Jews in our universities. They work side by side with Jews in offices and factories. They are treated in the same hospitals with Jews. They play in the same orchestras, and on the same sports teams, with Jews. Some Arabs may, if they wish — they are not required to — serve in the IDF. Where is the apartheid in any of that?” That paragraph should be always at the rhetorical ready, whenever the accusation of “Israeli apartheid” has been, or is likely to be, mentioned.

Is Israel an “occupying power”? It is not enough to explain that the word “occupier” does not apply to the West Bank because Jordanian sovereignty was recognized only by the UK and Pakistan. Israel must go on the offensive, and insist that Jordan was the “military occupier” of land that belongs to Israel, for that land west of the Jordan River was part of the territory that the Mandate for Palestine assigned to the Jewish National Home. Israel could not exercise its claim only because Jordan held onto the West Bank. By its victory in the Six-Day War, Israel did not create a new claim, but at long last could exercise the claim it had never relinquished. Israel has as much right to all of Judea and Samaria (a/k/a the “West Bank”) as it does to Tel Aviv, or Haifa, or Ashdod, or Jerusalem.

Will a “two-state solution” work? Whether Netanyahu accepted the notion of a “two-state solution” more than a decade ago — as did Ehud Barak when he offered virtually the entire West Bank to Arafat, followed by Ehud Olmert, who offered a similar deal to Mahmoud Abbas in 2008, and in both cases the Palestinians walked out on them – should not determine how Israel now talks about the conflict. Israelis should abandon the talk of a “solution,” which suggests a factitious finality to a conflict that will go on forever, and substitute the truth, that the Arab war on Israel is not a problem that can be solved but is, rather, “a situation that can be managed.” Every Israeli leader, diplomat, spokesman, and every supporter of Israel, should be ready to discuss, not an impossible solution but, rather, “how we reduce this conflict to manageable proportions.”

If the Arab-Israeli conflict is a “situation to be managed,” do we have any examples of other situations that needed “to be managed”? The Cold War immediately comes to mind. The West managed to avoid a war with the Soviet Union through a strategy of deterrence. That is, after Moscow had established Communist regimes in most of Eastern Europe, the West – a little late — recognized the urgent need to become, and remain, strong enough to dissuade the Soviets from further aggression. The NATO military alliance was one part of the answer; a massive increase in American defense spending was another part. And deterrence worked to prevent further aggression by the Soviet Union.