Rice clearly hopes to use whatever leverage she can get to bring the two sides closer to a deal within the parameters of the 2004 exchange of letters between Dov Weisglass and herself, which should be read very carefully for what they say and what they do not say about subjects like the future of Jerusalem and the settlements in the West Bank. In the current climate, she may well believe that a failure in which America is seen as having pressed the Israelis hard and outlined the parameters for a future deal is better than nothing. Rice’s assumptions are certainly questionable, especially in view of what happened after the Arafat/Barak negotiations fell apart in 2000.
Pressuring Israel to make concessions to active terrorists in the hopes of bringing about a future peace is not a political strategy with a long history of success. Yet it might behoove Rice’s right-wing critics in the American Jewish community to stand back from their rhetorical rocket launchers for a moment and ask themselves whether the greater existential threat to Israel’s existence comes from rag-tag Palestinian militias penned up in the West Bank and Gaza, or from a nuclear-armed Iran – a threat that Israel will most likely have to meet on its own in the same way the IAF took out Saddam’s Osirak reactor. Given the nature of the Iranian threat, Israel may have little choice but to pay whatever price the Americans ask up front – and then strike.
Yet there is still something disturbing about the remarks Rice is reported to have made, however direct or vague they might have been, and however tactically clever they might seem to their author. Offhand analogies between Palestinians and Southern blacks or Israelis and Southern whites make a mockery of real pain and suffering by ignoring the specificity of actual historical experience. Comparisons of Palestinian “freedom fighters” with the American civil rights movement would merely seem ridiculous (imagine the membership of Hamas and Fatah joining hands and singing “We Shall Overcome”) if they were not also part of a bullying assault on historical specificity that has come to characterize much recent political discourse in America. The determination to avoid dealing with historical reality is evident both in the angry, unreasoning assaults of the Left (9/11 was an inside job!) and the grand follies of the Right (let’s remake Iraq!).
It is ironic, or perhaps depressingly inevitable, that we are awash in this kind of 1930’s European-style gutter politics at a moment when the stakes could not be higher. Comparisons of Israelis to history’s most devilish racists and Palestinians to history’s most noble victims are hardly meant to further anyone’s understanding of a complex situation in a part of the world with no shortage of local history. Rather, the point is to shut down discussion before it begins by threatening that anyone who disagrees will be branded as a racist.
Condoleezza Rice, the political science professor and provost of Stanford University, would likely judge such bullying and divisive rhetoric harshly, as the product of a second-rate mind that is afraid to engage in reasoned discussion and debate. When she returns to private life, she will feel ashamed of herself.
That said, I don’t see the slightest bit of evidence that the secretary of state actually believes that Mahmoud Abbas is Martin Luther King in disguise, or that she has flashbacks to her childhood in Birmingham every time she sees the Separation Fence on her way to Ramallah. But a whisper or two can’t hurt, right?