Following a series of violent incidents involving settler and pro-settler Jewish Israeli extremists, including the attempted lynching of a Palestinian youth in Jerusalem, many Israelis expressed concern about the rise in violent hatred within their society and wondered where it was coming from. Several incidents over the weekend demonstrated that this trend is only intensifying and clearly pointed to why.

For the answer, Israelis need look no further than across the Green Line: settler terror is an inevitable consequence of the occupation and the myriad policies of the Israeli state that enable this extremism.

As they have for numerous years, extremist settlers are again violently disrupting the Palestinian olive-picking season, which is now underway. Settlers have been attacking Palestinians on their way to pick olives and destroying trees and orchards. Palestinians complain that the settlers are operating with impunity under the watchful eyes of Israeli authorities who do little to restrain—and even less to arrest or prosecute—them.

Increasingly, occupation forces are also coming under settler “price tag” attacks (retribution for government crackdowns on illegal activities), with three undercover Israeli police officers posing as Palestinians violently attacked by extremist settler youths near Hebron. The police say they did nothing to provoke the youths, who have been arrested because they made the mistake of assaulting occupation forces rather than Palestinians.

The recent violence comes in the wake of earlier attacks against Israeli forces by extremist settlers, and a constant barrage of assaults on Palestinians. Some of these attacks have been videotaped in a manner that suggests Israeli forces on the scene stood by impassively. Attacks have also been spreading to target Christian sites including churches and monasteries.

“Price tag” violence has become part of a deep-seated culture of hatred and impunity on the part of Jewish Israeli extremists. Like the racist Ku Klux Klan in the American deep south during the civil rights era, violent settlers are encouraged by incitement from radical establishment figures and operate under a well-founded belief that the system will not act systematically or forcefully to restrain or punish them in most cases.

This atmosphere of impunity, and even encouragement, was dramatically illustrated by a celebratory sendoff at an Israeli settlement over the weekend for a man convicted of severely abusing a Palestinian teenager. The event honoring this thug was attended by local settler leaders and rabbis, and by a member of the Knesset.

One of these rabbis, the notorious extremist Dov Lior, encouraged the assassination of former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and is noted for violent and racist statements against Arabs and other Gentiles. He serves as the head of the “Council of Rabbis of Judea and Samaria” (settler rhetoric for the occupied West Bank), and is employed by the Israeli government as the rabbi of the Kiryat Arba settlement. Among many other extreme statements, he endorsed a book by another radical settler rabbi that advocated the killing of Gentiles, including infants, “if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us.”

It is true that such extremism doesn’t characterize all, or perhaps even most, Israeli settlers. But this mentality is part and parcel of the settlement movement and nothing effective is being done either by that movement or by the Israeli state to seriously counteract the continued growth of such hatred and extremism. The Israeli police on several occasions have announced the establishment of units to focus on such extremism, but this does not appear to have done anything so far to restrain or counteract the flourishing of the culture of violence, hate and impunity.

In his recent U.N. speech, which was basically a litany of familiar and mostly justified complaints, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas led with the issue of settler violence. But it’s not clear was what, exactly, Abbas can do about it other than complain. Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has also repeatedly stated that these attacks, along with Israeli government incursions into Palestinian ruled areas, constitute some of the most serious threats to the credibility of the Palestinian Authority.

These attacks are intended to send a message to Palestinians that they live under Israeli occupation and that there is little or nothing they can do to protect themselves from settler rampages. Given that the Israeli government typically offers little more than rhetorical condemnations of this violence, that message is being received loud and clear. It therefore constitutes one of the gravest threats to the promotion of a culture of peace, and stability on the ground, between Israel and the Palestinians, as it enacts the relationship of dominance and subordination inherent in the occupation on a daily basis.

Other Israelis need not wonder how or why such attacks take place. They are the inevitable byproducts of the occupation itself, the culture it promotes, and the rhetoric and mentality of the settler movement that is so generously subsidized and protected by the state itself. But because they are such a direct and grave threat to the rule of law, the cultural health of its society, and prospects for peace, settler terrorism is profoundly antithetical to Israel’s real interests. And until the Israeli government finally decides to act decisively against the violence and the culture that informs it, rather than coddling and subsidizing them, the problem is only going to get worse.

After all the grandstanding by various Muslim leaders at the recent U.N. General Assembly meeting, and by the Organization of Islamic Conference, on the need for global anti-blasphemy laws, the Egyptian legal system has been thoughtful enough to provide us with a timely demonstration of what such restrictions look like in practice. Two Coptic Christian children Nabil Nagy Rizk, 10, and Mina Nady Farag, 9, were arrested yesterdayon charges of “insulting religion” in the governorate of Beni Suef. The two children are being held in a juvenile detention center awaiting further investigation and possible criminal prosecution.

The children stand accused by the Imam of a local mosque of destroying papers, including some containing Quranic verses. The incident is disturbingly reminiscent of an ongoing scandal in Pakistan in which a Christian girl is being persecuted for allegedly destroying copies or pages of the Quran.

This is what anti-blasphemy laws inevitably lead to: the arrest and persecution of religious minorities, including children, in order to “protect sensibilities” of religious majorities. What it shows is that anti-blasphemy laws have nothing to do with “respect” or “sensitivity” to religious sentiments but are all about authority, control and social domination.

Because these laws appeal to extra-legal and extra-constitutional sentiments, values and principles that exist above and beyond the law itself, they lend themselves perfectly to abusive and discriminatory application. In the case of prosecutions regarding the dissemination of the inflammatory, offensive anti-Islam online video clip “The Innocence of Muslims,” a Coptic Christian named Albert Saber has been arrested and remains in detention for allegedly posting the clip online. But no measures have been taken against the Salafist Al-Nas television station that broadcast significant portions of the video to its large audience in the earliest effort to whip up a public frenzy that led directly to the violent incidents that rocked the Middle East a few weeks ago.

Al-Nas defended its actions as responsibly alerting the public to a “threat” to Islam, but in fact it was the principal vehicle for disseminating the content of the clip in the Arab world. Had they ignored it, the ensuing chaos might well never have come to pass. The channel cynically served as the main public relations vehicle for the video, because the Saudi-funded extremist station and its radical backers understood that their political allies would be the direct beneficiaries of public outrage, which they were delighted to stoke to a fever pitch.

Yet they have not been prosecuted under Egypt’s anti-blasphemy laws, because they are extremist Muslims purporting to act “in defense of Islam.” So anti-blasphemy laws are again revealed to be entirely about social and political context, authority and control, and nothing to do with content.

Amazingly, there has been virtually no pushback or reaction to remarks by the Emir of Qatar Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani in his recent U.N. speech, which sought to place the blame for the violence entirely at the feet of the authors of the video and implicitly exonerated the rioters and extremist organizations behind them for the deaths for which they were directly responsible. He alleged that “freedom should not cross reasonable limits and become a tool to hurt and insult the dignity of others and of religions and faiths and sacred beliefs as we have seen lately, which regrettably led to the killing of innocent people who have not committed any crime.”

This is a perfect window into the through-the-looking-glass world of blasphemy-ban advocates. In this reality, those who engage in offensive speech (and there’s no question that the video is patently Islamophobic and hateful) bear the full responsibility if others cynically exploit their intentional, calculated provocations for their own political and social purposes. If people are killed, that’s the fault of the provocateurs, not the killers. These statements implicitly absolve extremist and violent reactions to provocative speech and suggest that the proper response is not to denounce and yet still protect offensive expression, but to suppress it in order to prevent a violent reaction.

The Emir, in effect, was making common cause with the violent extremists, using their deplorable and criminal behavior as a rationalization for the suppression of offensive speech. It’s a thinly-disguised exercise in bullying, and an updated version of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger’s old “madman” diplomatic strategy: if you don’t make an agreement with me on my terms, you’ll bear the full responsibility for what those other crazy people do.

Of course, it’s an even worse form of bullying to arrest children on trumped up charges of “blasphemy.” Yet this is happening, time and again, in several Muslim-majority states. The latest examples from Egypt are only the most recent.

That’s what the push for a global anti-blasphemy ban—which will not and must not succeed—is ultimately designed to do: rationalize such oppressive restrictions in those Muslim-majority states where they actually apply. And, in practice, that means religious minorities, including children, will inevitably be subjected to grotesque abuses. If this isn’t a wake-up call for everybody who thinks they are committed to freedom and democracy, I don’t know what will be.

In my recent columns I’ve been critical of calls for a global “blasphemy” ban from the Organization of Islamic Conference and other Muslim leaders. But free-speech protections, if they are to be meaningful, must be universal. The greatest threat to them is double standards that are the bedrock of advocacy for the slippery slope of restrictions.

Some Muslims and their sympathizers point to anti-“hate speech” laws in Canada and some European countries as an example of double standards or how restricting the content of speech can be compatible with liberal values.

Precisely because these objections are plausible in the general Western, if not American, contexts, they again demonstrate how pernicious such bans are. The best defense has been that the United States, with its extremely permissive atmosphere on expression, provides a better aspirational model.

But even in the United States there are lurking threats to free speech designed to stifle political expression. One of the most troubling recent examples of this is an effort by members of the California State Assembly to urge or coerce public universities in California to crack down on “anti-Semitic hate speech” in the name of defending Jewish students and other supporters of Israel.

A recently passed non-binding resolution by the assembly includes a disturbingly over-broad definition of “anti-Semitism.” It includes numerous kinds of overtly political opinions, including calls to boycott, divest from or sanction Israel; suggestions that Israel is a racist, apartheid or Nazi-like state; or that Israel has engaged in crimes against humanity such as ethnic cleansing or genocide. Even more absurdly, it defines anti-Semitism as holding Israel to standards of behavior not required of “any other democratic nation,” or questioning the legitimacy or propriety of maintaining Israel as a Jewish state.

This dangerously over-broad definition of anti-Semitism is based on working documents published in 2005 by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia. Its orientation reflects a mistake common to anti-hate speech efforts. Rather than attempting to establish any kind of clear, coherent guideline for distinguishing between anti-Semitic speech and what is simply unpleasant or provocative speech, it functions as a catchall. It prefers to include anything that might conceivably be a vehicle for anti-Semitism, even when that’s probably not the case. There are analogous definitions of Islamophobia that are equally pernicious.

Even though much of what is described above, and in the resolution, isn’t necessarily, or even probably, genuinely anti-Semitic, this still begs the question of what the California legislature is doing pressuring public universities on the subject of speech. The controversy over the resolution, and its unworkable definition of anti-Semitism, demonstrates that the state, including public universities, has no business trying to regulate speech unless absolutely unavoidable. It reveals that, especially on questions involving Israel, what is labeled anti-Semitic is often highly subjective, and, worse still, highly politicized.

The California legislature was responding to recommendations by a campus committee on anti-Semitism that recommended a ban on “hate speech.” Phobic, abusive, fear or hate mongering, and highly offensive speech is a real problem in free societies. Measures to respond to it by restricting speech, however, are a perfect example of the purported cure that is worse than the perceived disease.

When the crackpot historian David Irving was given a prison sentence in Austria for lectures in which he questioned the historicity of the Holocaust, almost all mainstream Jewish-American groups condemned or distanced themselves from laws criminalizing such stupid and offensive opinions. Yet some of these same organizations have been strongly supportive of the California campus “hate speech” crackdown campaign.

Fortunately, it won’t work. Experience suggests that “hate speech” bans invariably fail and frequently boomerang on the groups initially pushing for them. Certainly in the United States, the default towards free speech is strong enough that a position advocating censorship is almost always a losing one, socially, politically and legally.

In Western societies that try to restrict “hate speech,” the enforcement of such laws is almost always a political struggle that illustrates the inherent subjectivity at play. The cases invariably highlight the tension between the value of free expression and misguided efforts to get the state to forcibly protect society from unpleasant, provocative, bigoted or racist opinions.

Muslim advocates of a global “blasphemy” ban are right that efforts to restrict “hate speech” undermine Western claims about free expression and raise the issue of double standards. But the answer isn’t to extend such restrictions even further to cover “blasphemy.” It is to recommit to the value of free speech.

No good can come from trying to use state power to suppress offensive expression. Those who politicize such efforts do the most harm, because their double standards are evident and motivations obvious. Muslims who would restrict speech to “protect Islam” have no greater allies than Jews who would do so to “protect Israel.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/09/21/free-speech-a-cloistered-value.html

One of the most troubling responses to the Middle East violence provoked by a controversial anti-Islam video clip came from the eminent scholar Stanley Fish. Writing in the New York Times, Fish reads the protests entirely through the Western traditions that led to contemporary American free-speech protections. By casting the protesters as a binary, polar opposite of American sensibilities, and then trying to sympathize with them, Fish is simultaneously but groundlessly triumphalist about Western free speech values and disparaging about their universality.

Fish creates an indefensible framework implying that free speech can only be the product of Western, and indeed, Protestant political, social and intellectual traditions. Fish argues that the Protestant “bargain with the state” was to get freedom of religion in exchange for keeping it out of the public sphere. From that, he notes, we derive everything essential in American free-speech rights.

The implication is that it is almost impossible for any society that is not directly the product of the Protestant Reformation to embrace some variant of the principle of defending even unpalatable speech. His foil—demonstrating this supposed uniqueness—is not surprisingly the Muslims of the world, specifically the video protesters. Fish is convinced that, “the entire package of American liberalism… is one the protesters necessarily reject.”

Fish omits completely how organized groups in various countries sought to use the protests for their own political purposes. Worse, he badly misreads the psychology of many of the individual protesters, which was admirably summed up in the Sydney Morning Herald by Waleed Aly.

Fish implicitly argues that Islamic traditions invariably produce a totalitarian religious social order, relying on reductive, orientalist caricatures of what in fact are extremely heterogeneous Muslim histories, and intellectual and political heritages. There are deep traditions of pluralism within Islamic theology and Arab culture. Moreover, there is no tradition of mob protests associated with insults against Islam or the Prophet Mohammed. This mob reaction to perceived insults is not “traditional,” but rather grounded in a concatenation of circumstances, new interpretations of religion, and emergent political ideologies that developed during the 20th century.

Like all religions, Islam can be mobilized to legitimate almost any social and political program. The present burst of intolerance, chauvinism and paranoia on the Islamic religious right is clearly and traceably the product of a specific set of cultural and historical circumstances, most notably the encounter with colonialism, and the program by Islamists to reinterpret Islam along reactionary political lines over the past century.

Fish’s implication that this kind of intolerant reaction is essentially hardwired into all non-Western and non-Protestant traditions begs the question how Catholic and Orthodox Europe, or Latin America, ever adopted liberal values. And his framework suggests liberalism can only be adopted in Asia and Africa through colonialism, mimicry or Western cultural hegemony, and maybe not even then.

It is solipsistic, if not narcissistic, to imagine that—because the culturally-specific features of contemporary American liberalism (that, after all, in our own history was long in the making and is still not fully accomplished) derive from certain Protestant Western European traditions—this is therefore the only context in which such values can be firmly rooted. By pretending to “understand” the illiberal attitude of what he imagines the protesters’ mindset must be, Fish simultaneously privileges the American, Protestant and Western traditions (in that order) and implicitly dismisses all others as belonging to different experiences that cannot produce an adherence to values such as free speech.

Modernity may have originated in the West, but it no longer belongs exclusively to the West. Almost all existing societies participate in and help shape it. A few decades ago, Partha Chatterjee suggested that for the postcolonial world, modernity was always and inevitably “a derivative discourse,” that would invariably be defined in the West. With the rise of numerous postcolonial powers, that argument looks harder to defend.

Obviously there are going to be significant differences in the ways in which modernity and liberalism take root in different societies. Even among societies emerging from the Protestant Western tradition, American free-speech rights are uniquely permissive. Canada bans hate speech. Britain has official secrets, prior restraint, anti-blasphemy and notoriously lax libel laws. Numerous countries in Western Europe have made it a serious crime to question the historicity of the Holocaust.

Given these variations within societies emerging directly from the Western Protestant Reformation—all of which can still be called liberal societies that value and protect free speech—it should be obvious that globally there will be even greater variations. It’s wrong to think that the essential values embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: freedom of conscience, freedom of expression, freedom of religion and so forth, only be grounded in Western traditions. These are universal values because there is something innate to modern humanity that strives to realize the essence of these freedoms, whatever culturally-specific variations may occur.

In an effort to be open-minded gone terribly wrong, Fish forecloses the idea that other cultures and traditions, specifically the Islamic and Arab ones, can inform and secure freedom of speech and, implicitly, other liberal values. A quick survey of freedom of speech around the world suggests he is wrong about the unique ability societies rooted in the Protestant Reformation to embody these values. They have already spread far and wide. There is no reason to think that the Arab or Islamic worlds, or any other major cultural block in the modern world, is somehow uniquely immune them.

Ben Cohen’s response to my recent piece systematically proves every point I make about Israel’s cynical new campaign to raise the issue of Jewish refugees. In particular he demonstrates that this is not about defending the rights of Jewish refugees, since no substantive demands on their behalf are made, but simply about using them to try to obliterate the claims of Palestinians. It’s one of the oddest cries for “justice” I’ve ever encountered, since it seeks merely to deny the claims of others.

Cohen thinks the source of my “umbrage” is a conference. It’s not. It’s a much broader campaign, organized by the Israeli Foreign Ministry, to raise the issue globally as part of Israel’s political strategy. Israeli diplomats around the world, for example, have been instructed to raise the issue at every possible opportunity. Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, who makes no secret of his hostility to a peace agreement and support for the occupation, is leading the campaign.

Bona fide efforts by Jews from the Arab world to recuperate their history are legitimate and desirable. There is nothing to be gained by covering over aspects history that I described as “a stain on Arab honor.” Cohen suggests I repeat an “oft-heard claim of Arab propagandists that Jews lived in harmony and equality with their Arab and Muslim neighbors until the Zionist movement started meddling.” In fact I argued the contrary: that while Israel’s government was enthusiastic about the mass migration, growing hostility to Jewish communities in the Arab world after and before the creation of Israel made normal life impossible.

If the issue of Palestinian refugees did not persist and was not a final status issue, the Israeli government would not be launching this campaign. Cohen claims I am “fixated… with the notion of an Israeli plot.” It’s not a plot. It’s a well-publicized, announced campaign, with obvious political and diplomatic intentions.

Cohen’s repetition of crude hasbara talking points is demonstrated by his dismissal of “the hoary myth of the ‘Nakba,'” in contrast to “the horror of the ethnic cleansing” of Jews from the Arab world. This is the essence of the campaign: to downplay and dismiss the sudden and crushing destruction of Palestinian national society and the displacement of most of its residents in 1948, while describing the far more complex and protracted migration of Jews from Arab states to Israel, under multiple circumstances with many different experiences, in the most reductive and emotionally charged language possible.

Cohen’s main point is that, “We’ll give up our refugee status… if you give up yours.” Or rather that’s what he wants Palestinians to say to Jewish Israelis of Arab origin. Like the Israeli Foreign Ministry, Cohen wants Palestinians to drop what both parties agreed would be one of the four major final status issues: the question of the Palestinian refugees. That’s the purpose behind the campaign, dovetailing with many other efforts to achieve the same effect.

It’s telling that this is the only indication of what “justice” for Jewish refugees, to which Cohen refers many times, might look like. He doesn’t ask for their right of return to their countries of origin, because they don’t want that. He doesn’t raise the issue of their property rights, because that would also beg the question of who owned what in Palestine on the eve of the creation of the Israeli state. It would imply the right of Palestinian owners to all the property seized by Israel’s “Absentee Property Law” of 1950 and other actions that expropriated the lands and other possessions belonging to what had been the country’s majority inhabitants in 1948: the Palestinians.

So, “justice” for Jewish refugees doesn’t mean restoring any of their own rights to property, return and so forth. Instead this is just cynically using their narrative to deny Palestinians the ability negotiate over their own refugee issue. The message is in effect: Drop this issue, even though we agreed to negotiate over it in 1993.

As a question of history, memory and narrative, raising these issues is a perfectly reasonable project, although it doesn’t sit very well with the broader Zionist narrative. But as an effort to eliminate a core, long agreed upon, final status issue (the Palestinian refugees) or suddenly introduce a new one (Jewish refugees), the campaign perfectly reflects the politics of its leader, Ayalon. His argument is, in essence, that Jews must have their state—Israel—as a refuge, but Palestinians shouldn’t have one of their own. That’s the idea of “justice” that informs this campaign.

Ayalon’s hostility to Palestinian statehood, and insistence that there is no occupation and that Israel has full national rights in all of the territories under its control, are the obvious subtext. Cohen’s response to me confirms, not dispels, that undisguised reality.

Recently Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon announced on twitter that he was launching a new “viral campaign” about Jewish refugees and migrants in Israel from the Arab world. From his official perch, Ayalon has jumped into a debate that already engendered much back-and-forth, including on Open Zion, when it was introduced in the U.S. Congress in late July.

This new effort is part of a broader pattern on the part of some Israeli officials and their supporters to raise the issue of Jewish refugees from the Arab world to “counterbalance” or offset the issue of the Palestinian refugees. These efforts are also linked to Israeli-inspired efforts in the U.S. Congress to redefine Palestinian refugees to include only those who were alive during the 1948 war and to defund the UN agencies that care for the refugees. There is a broad-based campaign to try to render the Palestinian refugee issue irrelevant as a final status issue so that Israel need make no concessions because of it.

It’s long been a shibboleth of Israeli hasbara that there was “an exchange of populations” between Israel and the Arab world of roughly similar sizes, and therefore Palestinian refugee claims are moot. But the analogy is flawed in many ways and the new campaign is politically and diplomatically pernicious.

There is no doubt that the mistreatment of Jews in many Arab states in the decades following, and to some extent preceding, the establishment of the State of Israel represents a terrible stain on Arab honor. In many Arab states, persecution, anti-Semitism, violence and even expulsions contributed to the exodus of Jews from the Arab world. But the mass migration unfolded over many decades, and a great many different experiences and factors contributed to the profoundly regrettable emptying of the Arab world of most of its Jewish citizens.

The analogy is both a red herring and a sleight-of-hand.

It’s a red herring because when they first started negotiating in Madrid and Oslo, the parties agreed that there were four key final status issues: borders, security, Jerusalem and Palestinian refugees. Until recently, no Israeli government attempted to raise the issue of Jewish refugees and migrants from the Arab world in Israel in the negotiations, just as Palestinians have avoided bringing up issues involving the Palestinian citizens of Israel.

It’s a sleight-of-hand because the political impact of the dispossession of the Palestinian refugees is precisely the opposite of the “ingathering” of the Arab Jews in Israel. The Palestinian Nakba of 1948 was the destruction of a national society. The migration of Arab Jews to Israel, by contrast, and especially from the Zionist perspective, was the realization of a national agenda. However painful and ugly the circumstances at times were, it was the realization of the very purpose of the Israeli state. And these Arab Jews make up a huge percentage of the Jewish Israeli majority, so their presence in Israel has been and is essential to the fulfillment and maintenance of the Israeli national project.

For this reason, Israel strongly encouraged Jewish migration from the Arab states, and was heavily involved in promoting it through various means. There is an ongoing and heated debate about whether an Israeli-supported Jewish underground movement planted bombs against Jewish targets in Baghdad in 1951 in order to sow fear and prompt Jewish flight. Given the 1954 Lavon affair in which Israeli agents attacked Western targets in an effort to try to poison Western-Arab relations, it’s not unthinkable these accusations could be true (in 2005, the surviving conspirators in the Lavon affair were officially honored by Israeli President Moshe Katzav). But it’s also not particularly relevant, since anti-Jewish sentiment and behavior in Arab societies, including Iraq, were independently making normal life difficult and sometimes impossible.

There has never been a groundswell movement for Jewish refugees and migrants from the Arab world to return, and Israel has rarely raised the issue except to try to counteract the Palestinian refugee question. There is a fundamental contradiction between regarding ingathering and “aliyah” as a glorious fulfillment of the promise of Zionism on the one hand and as a terrible human tragedy on the other.

The negotiating process is already overburdened with difficult emotional issues. During the Annapolis meeting in November, 2007, the Israeli delegation attempted to raise, for the first time, the question of the “Jewish character” of the state of Israel. Neither the Palestinians nor the Bush administration acquiesced to the introduction of this question. Both the Palestinians and the Americans understood that it had profound implications for the Palestinian refugee question. And they understood that in normal diplomatic relations, states define themselves without demanding a recognition of their “character” from their neighbors as a condition for peaceful relations.

However, since returning to office in March 2009, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has harped on the issue so incessantly that he may have succeeded in making it a de facto fifth element, yet another complicating factor that makes achieving a final status agreement all the more difficult. It’s probably the case that, thanks to his efforts, some kind of language will have to be found to satisfy Israelis on that issue, although it will almost certainly have to come at the end, and not the beginning, of final status negotiations.

Both the Jewish refugee issue and the “Jewish character” of the Israeli state are clearly efforts to undermine one of the few remaining aspects of Palestinian leverage in the negotiations. For decades, everyone serious about the achievement of a workable two-state solution has understood that the most difficult political issues facing Israel and the Palestinians are Jerusalem and refugees, respectively. There has been an implicit assumption that a quid pro quo of painful concessions on these issues is a sine qua non for achieving a peace agreement. All the Israelis and Palestinians who have been serious about negotiations have understood this from the outset.

So it’s difficult not to see Israeli efforts to secure an end run around the refugee issue, foreclosing it as a practical matter of negotiations, as linked to a desire to stonewall on Jerusalem. However, since no Palestinian leadership is likely to accept an arrangement in which the Palestinian capital is not based in East Jerusalem, these efforts are fundamentally incompatible with the actual realization of a peace agreement.

Deputy Foreign Minister Ayalon—who in the past launched an online campaign to deny there was any occupation of Palestinian lands at all—and his boss and party leader Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman haven’t been coy about their lack of enthusiasm regarding peace with the Palestinians. The history of the suffering of both Palestinians and Jewish Arabs must be honestly confronted, recognized and honored. But deliberately trying to introduce ever more final status issues, and delve even deeper into the painful histories that peace must overcome, is willfully and deliberately unhelpful. No wonder the new campaign about the Arab Jews is being championed by those Israeli leaders who make no secret of believing that a peace agreement with the Palestinians is neither achievable nor desirable.