December 09, 2016
The Tower of David, Israel
Source: Bigstock
It’s a difficult balancing act, even for many who are instinctively pro-Israel: on the one hand, to support Israel’s surely undoubted right to exist as a sovereign state and, in the words of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, as a national home for the Jews; on the other, to recognize that the Palestinians in the occupied territories are also entitled to have their right to exist, and to have a state of their own, recognized.
Barbara Tuchman defined folly as the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests, despite the availability of feasible alternatives. A majority of Israelis may have reached the point of saying there is no feasible alternative to present policies, and this appears to be the position of the Israeli government today. But is this in Israel’s long-term interest, or is the commitment to the status quo an example of folly? I wish I knew.
To quote Tuchman again: “In the first stage, mental standstill fixes the principles and boundaries governing a political problem. In the second stage, when dissonances and failing function begin to appear, the initial principles rigidify.” That’s certainly the case in Israel. Rigidifying is all too evident. Then, Tuchman warned, “policy founded on error multiplies, never retreats.” Disengagement becomes unacceptable. In the third stage, “pursuit of failure enlarges the damage,” until you arrive at what she called “the classic humiliation in Vietnam.”
Perhaps, even after fifty years, Israel is still locked into Tuchman’s first stage. Will the second and third ineluctably follow?
