Public opinion in Europe and America is principally informed about developments within Israel by a select group of spokesmen, whose voices are heard over and over again. It represents itself as an enlightened opposition to mainstream prejudices, critical of much in Israeli political and intellectual life from a progressive point of view. The reality is quite different. Intellectuals of the Zionist Left play a crucial part in sustaining the oppression and exclusion of the Arab populations of Palestine. A look at the period from the collapse of the Camp David negotiations at the end of July 2000, through the outbreak of the second Intifada in October, up to the Israeli elections of February, 2001, offers a graphic demonstration of this role.

The starting-point of the Zionist Left was the assumption that there was only one central contradiction in Israeli politics—the rivalry between Labour and Likud, or the contrast between peace and war. Its intellectuals expected the Palestinians to accept this presupposition, and assist ‘the good to overcome the evil’. In the year 2000, what this meant was to help Ehud Barak overcome Ariel Sharon. Everything boiled down to just this one choice. Or in slightly more theoretical language: the sum of contradictions ‘among us’ is the only totality, everything else is secondary and insignificant; therefore, the focal contradiction in our lives has to become central in theirs, too.

The repression of the contradiction between Palestinian interests and the Israeli occupation, between the occupation and Palestinians’ lives under it, has been a long process, of which the Oslo Accords were a culmination. But it has since continued with the transformation of Meretz from a centre-left to simply an ‘anti-religious’ party, followed by the disappearance of Peace Now.footnote¹ Its next stage was the ‘obligation’ of the Left—and even of the Palestinians—to assist Ehud Barak to be re-elected as Prime Minister.

What argument did intellectuals of the Zionist Left use to try to force Palestinians to swallow this partial, limited contradiction—the choice between Barak and Sharon—as if it were the only one that mattered? Realpolitik, naturally. Who has to foot the bill for this political realism? They do. Who doesn’t have to pay anything for it? ‘We’ don’t. Menahem Brinker, a well-known professor of philosophy in the Hebrew University and University of Chicago, announced to the Israeli Left during Barak’s journey to Camp David, in an article in Ha’aretz: ‘Barak came to Camp David with a far-reaching political plan. No former Israeli leader has ever offered the Palestinians a similar plan. The Left has no reason whatsoever to criticize his red lines’.footnote²

In other words, the Left could only commend Barak because he was ready to ‘give’ the Palestinians such a lot. Not everything, of course. Brinker immediately goes on to explain: ‘I am interested in peace on the ground, not merely on paper, and therefore I must understand that there are some objective circumstances that impose certain limits on Barak’s concessions.’

Anyone familiar with the map of Barak’s proposals knows what Brinker had in mind by ‘certain limits’—the lying sales-talk of all those who marketed a shopping list for the Palestinians that offered them ‘90 per cent’ of the West Bank: that is, 90 per cent of what would be left of it after Israel kept its expansion around Jerusalem, its military roads and bases, its settlements. To those who over the years have got used to thinking of the Palestinians as a ‘demographic threat’, calculating with fear ‘how many Arabs will be living among us’, it comes quite naturally to reduce their land to percentages, too. What is unthinkable is to envisage them as citizens of their own country, capable of travelling from place to place within it without countless roadblocks (which Barak’s map granted them for ever), with a natural love of their land, and of freedom of movement within it.

Brinker, an ‘old sage’ of Peace Now, no longer has time for the difficult daily struggle against the settlements, the only thing his movement—rich in money and reputation all over the world, including the Arab countries, but very poor in activists—has done in recent years. The Ha’aretz report goes on: