TABLET MAG
by Lee Smith
November 19, 2014

Israel may face a wrenching choice between its democracy and Jewishness. And that’s normal.

Maybe all of Europe will soon follow the Swedes in recognizing a Palestinian state. Last week the E.U.’s new foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini expressed Europe’s general impatience and called for the prompt creation of a Palestinian state. The world, she said, “cannot afford” another war in Gaza. And to make good on her word, the E.U. is now threatening to sanction Israel if it continues to avoid taking the steps toward a two-state solution.

It’s worth noting that the E.U.’s threats to sanction Israel come on the eve of a likely nuclear deal with Iran that will relieve sanctions on the Islamic Republic. For Iran, sanctions relief will entail a virtual gold rush with European businesses investing billions in Tehran’s energy and auto sectors. In other words, the way Europe sees it, Israel’s partial military occupation of 2.2 million Palestinian inhabitants of the West Bank is far more dangerous to world peace than the rise of a nuclear-armed pariah state that wages terrorist operations on every continent in the world except Antarctica.

And it’s not just Europeans who see the world from this particular angle. The president of the United States argues that a Palestinian state is good for America, and especially for Israel. Without the creation of a Palestinian state—and soon—Obama fears, Israel is in grave danger. As he told Jeffrey Goldberg, he hadn’t yet heard “a persuasive vision of how Israel survives as a democracy and a Jewish state at peace with its neighbors in the absence of a peace deal with the Palestinians and a two-state solution. Nobody has presented me a credible scenario.”

According to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, the most likely scenario is that there’s going to be a third intifada if Israel doesn’t get out of the West Bank. The status quo, says the secretary of state, is simply unacceptable. In saying so, Kerry added his name to a long line of policymakers who have stated that if Israel doesn’t make compromises for peace (U.N. General Secretary Ban Ki Moon), or take risks for peace (Obama), it’s in big, big trouble…..In fact, the real wonder isn’t that Israel doesn’t withdraw from the West Bank tomorrow, but that otherwise rational people still seem to take the land-for-peace formula seriously, given the fact that Israel’s last two attempts to dutifully implement the world’s preferred easy solution—southern Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005—were the cause of the bloody wars that the world can “no longer afford.”…..

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