T. Belman. This is a fun exchange. First Herzog attacked Levy for attacking him. Then Levy came back doubled down on Herzog. Worth reading.
Opposition leader Isaac Herzog responds to criticism levelled against him by Haaretz’s Gideon Levy, arguing that making peace also means fighting terror – not just accepting the Palestinian narrative hook, line and sinker.
By Isaac Herzog, HAARETZ | Aug. 21, 2015
It’s always amusing to read Gideon Levy criticizing someone else for using cliches (“The left’s counter-terrorism unit,” Haaretz, August 20). After all, Levy is the expert in the use of cliches. He has been singing For the same song for years, publishing the same article and the same text, twice and sometimes three times a week: “Occupation, occupation, occupation and once again occupation; only the Jews are to blame and only the Palestinians are right.” Levy has been a one-trick pony since way back in the 1990s.
My meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) this week lasted for an hour and 15 minutes. We sat privately and conducted a penetrating, detailed and in-depth conversation. Too much time has passed since an Israeli leader sat with Abu Mazen and spoke to him directly and at length. He is afraid of the unbridled terror. He is doing quite a lot to combat it, but is very concerned by the fact that we may be on the brink of a third intifada, and that it is liable to erupt on his watch. Under his responsibility. He is particularly concerned by the stagnation and by the lack of hope on the diplomatic front.
I described my viewpoint to him; I explained that I want to take take my party back to the path of late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, which means a tough and uncompromising war against terror, and at the same time, a courageous diplomatic initiative. As I told Abu Mazen, in the war against terror I really am more extreme than Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. His policy of speaking to Hamas and isolating Abu Mazen will lead to Abu Mazen’s resignation and to Hamas taking control over Judea and Samaria. Hamastan five minutes from Kfar Sava. That’s not how to fight terror and its leaders.
On the other hand, I see a rare regional opportunity, with other countries in this region – which are also threatened by the ISIS crazies and the Iranian sweet talk – as well as Israel and Gaza, which want to continue the quiet and are willing to think about rehabilitation and calm, have a shared interest in moving towards direct peace negotiations between Israel and the PA. That’s the key, and that should be encouraged. We must not award a prize to Hamas, but rather foster calm and turn the PA into a partner – and there are plenty of means available of doing so.
Towards the end of the burning-hot summer there is such a moment, in which it is possible to restore hope to the region.
But people like Levy are stuck in the 1990s and fail to understand that it’s impossible today sit down around the negotiating table with the Palestinians and to emerge, locked in a brotherly embrace, moments later with a with full peace agreement that features a return to the 1967 lines and a division of Jerusalem. Levy writes as though he hasn’t been here in recent years. In a previous article he mocked me because my wife and I gave our blessings to the cadets in a pilots’ training course. Levy used to be a Zionist. I’m no longer sure that he is one.
After Gaza fell into the hands of Hamas, and the State of Israel was attacked with missiles, and tunnels were dug under dining rooms on kibbutzim in the south, it’s no longer possible to continue talking only about a bilateral agreement with the Palestinians. We have to talk about a trailblazing diplomatic move, supported by the moderate countries in the region.
Levy thinks that the Palestinians are always right. That the terror attacks against us are their natural right. That a boycott against the Jews is the imperative of the hour and that the time has come for U.S. President Barack Obama to impose the same kind of sanctions that he imposed on Iran on Israel. In effect Levy, like the messianic right, is leading to a state with an Arab majority between the Jordan and the Mediterranean.
In contrast, the huge camp that I lead loves Israel and wants a Jewish and democratic state, existing alongside a Palestinian state in security and peace. Only when I and the leadership of the huge camp I represent prove that in defense of the country, on security issues and in times of danger, we always side with the state, and only afterwards do we have time for debates and disagreements. Only then will we be able to win the trust of the majority in Israel and to bring these ideas to fruition.
I believe that leadership is always obligated, while adhering to its values, to make a tactical recalculation. Not to close its eyes in the face of what is happening – and always to be daring enough to confront a changing reality and to try to change the present and the future.
MK Isaac Herzog is the opposition leader and chairman of the Zionist Union faction.
Sorry to Bore You Isaac ‘Rambo’ Herzog, but I Won’t Shut Up About Occupation
Fortunately the Israeli press is full of writers who never mention the occupation. These people, like the opposition leader, know that the Israelis are always right.
Zionist Union leader Isaac Herzog has been complaining about my repertoire. For years I’ve been playing the same tune. Sure enough, you could say I’m a one-trick pony, as Herzog does.
The penetrating diagnosis by the Zionist Union leader is that I have been “publishing the same article and the same text, twice and sometimes three times a week: ‘Occupation, occupation, occupation and once again occupation; only the Jews are to blame and only the Palestinians are right.’” That’s what he wrote in Haaretz last week.
Herzog was responding to my criticism of a boast he made after meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah. Herzog said he would be more extreme in fighting terror than Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
I’m sorry I’ve been boring Rambo Herzog, the fighter of terror. Fortunately the Israeli press is full of writers who never mention the occupation, which in no way interests them. These people know that the Israelis are always right, always the victim, always the hero.
The Palestinians, meanwhile, just want to throw us into the sea. These journalists sing the repertoire that Israeli propaganda has fed them; people who devotedly buy all its lies, whose consciences are always clean. They say “the picture is complicated” and know how to make readers feel good, as Herzog does.
That’s most Israeli journalists. Herzog should limit his reading to them — I should have stopped pestering him long ago with this occupation stuff of mine. A groundbreaking statesman like Herzog, a leader with courageous ideas that break with convention, has no energy for trivial matters. I should have respected that.
Still, just for the sake of unimportant factual accuracy, I should mention that unlike Herzog, I have also sifted through my share of ideas. We started together in the Labor Party, now Zionist Union’s senior partner. I arrived a few years before he did, when I still bought concepts such as “the Jordanian option,” “territorial compromise” and “functional compromise” — among the best sleight of hand of the generation of Herzog’s father, designed to solidify the occupation’s hold. (Sorry, that word slipped out).
Then I favored the Oslo Accords, then the two-state solution. Then I thought the chance had been missed. I too didn’t believe in a boycott. Now I think it should be equal rights for everyone in a single democratic state, and there is no alternative — yes to a boycott. The short version.
During this whole period, Herzog and his Labor Party have remained stuck, only changing their excuses. They want a “process.” Before this year’s election, Herzog talked about a five-year (!) process. After the election, it was at least two years. What will it be in the end?
Now he has a new groundbreaking idea: The days are over in which you can go into a room with the Palestinians and come out hugging one another after signing a peace agreement. Is he hinting that peace was possible and his party missed the chance?
As Herzog wrote, now that the Palestinians have dug tunnels “under dining rooms on kibbutzim” (where?), we need “a trailblazing diplomatic move, supported by the moderate countries in the region.”
That’s Herzog and his party at their best: First we’ll make peace with the Sultanate of Oman and then with the Palestinians. But it will always be the other way around — if we end the occupation, the whole Persian Gulf will follow.
And I really do write about the occupation all the time. I’ve been trying to report on its crimes for 30 years or so. It’s an obsession of sorts: A person is convinced that his country has a malignant disease and that no issue is more crucial.
I’m sorry if that bores Herzog, but it’s a cruel reality for millions of people. It’s the reality that hasn’t changed, not the person writing about it. The Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza (and a handful of Israelis of conscience) are a lot more fed up with the occupation than Herzog is in his posh Tel Aviv neighborhood. Yes, he leads a huge political camp, as he took pains to mention twice, people who may not have voted for him but surely agree with him on one point: Enough with the nagging (about the occupation).
So to the head of the Israeli left, I say thank you for bringing this to my attention. But I won’t stop.
Both of these reptiles spew the same venom, just in slightly different words! Herzog’s grandfather must be twisting in his grave to see the disgrace Booji has brought on the family, but at least Booji is less of a traitor than his father, and Gideon Levy should just go an sign up with ISIS, which is where his sympathies lie!
Levy is the Israeli Thomas Friedman, a self-styled savant who has been continuously wrong for decades because he lives in a liberal fantasy world that bears no resemblance to Planet Earth.
The idiocy is that Arabs and now the Palestinians do not agree to a Jewish State in the middle east no matter the size of the borders. This has been the issue for 100 years.
Israel needs to take the borders it deems in the national interests period end of the story.
These leftists are just grasping at straws if we would only move one inch here or give the Pals that piece of land it would all resolve itself. They are simply not dealing with reality.
Jordan quit fighting Israel and so did Egypt not because they fell in love with Israelis because not stopping the fighting with Israel was destroying them.
Two things:
Issac Herzog doesn’t apologize for his party’s imposition of the disastrous Oslo Accords upon Israel and the importation of PLO terrorists from Tunis into the heart of Israel in the 1990s.
Gideon Levy can’t see that the status quo has continued, not because of Israel but because the Arabs are unwilling to accept a Jewish State no matter where the borders are drawn.
There is a reason the Israeli Left hasn’t won an election for almost twenty years. Issac Herzog and Gideon Levy illustrate why its destined to remain in the political wilderness.