Rabbi Andrew Rosenblatt speaks with Einat Wilf, Israeli author and thinker, who shared her views on the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (photo by Adele Lewin)
Israel and its region are in a moment of danger and opportunity, according to Einat Wilf, who spoke in Vancouver April 25.
The Israeli author, commentator and former Labour Party member of the Knesset, said Israel and those who wish to destroy it have been locked in a repetitive series of disasters for almost 80 years. The current moment could alter – or enforce – that dynamic.
“This is a moment when, if we do not do the right things, we will remain stuck in a loop,” she said at Schara Tzedeck Synagogue.
The cycle of conflict has dragged on because of a scenario in which, she said, “the Jews are never allowed to win, the Arabs are never allowed to lose – or at least are never allowed to acknowledge defeat.”
Wilf calls this the “tragedy of ceasefires.”
The Arab world tried to prevent the creation of a Jewish state and then, since 1948, has attempted to undo the existence of that state. This is the core of the conflict, she argued.
“When it becomes clear that they are about to fail, what people call for is a ceasefire,” she said. “But what would actually help us is not a ceasefire. What would help us is to bring back the great ideas of victory and defeat, because those are actually necessary for us to get to peace.”
Instead, the world demands that the parties go back to the negotiating table, as if nothing had happened, she said.
“People talk about the conflict constantly going on, as if it’s by some bizarre coincidence,” she said. “It’s not. It’s because the Arab side for decades has been constantly told, try again, try again. If you haven’t succeeded this time, try again.”
One of the ruptures in the dialogue, Wilf said, is the idea that the only thing standing between
Israelis and peace is the establishment of a Palestinian state. This has been the driving force in decades of peace efforts, “only to realize that this is not what the Palestinians had ever wanted.”
The problem, she said, is that many Jews and others refuse to take the plainly stated Palestinian and Arab message at face value. Many Jews on her social media feed disagree with her, she said. Many Arabs, by contrast, are up-front.
“The Arabs on my feed would write this: ‘You are settler-colonialist, white Europeans. Get out.’ I love that,” she said. “They’re saying there shouldn’t be a Jewish state.” And yet, the Jews who comment, she said, keep coming back to settlements, the occupation and other issues that ignore that the root of the problem is a Palestinian and larger Arab refusal to accept the existence of a Jewish state in any part of the region, said Wilf.
Two Israeli prime ministers, Ehud Barack in 2000 and Ehud Olmert in 2008, tried to negotiate a resolution, only to find that two different Palestinian leaders, Yasser Arafat in 2000 and Mahmoud Abbas in 2008, walked away and reverted to violence, she said. Between those two administrations, a different prime minister, Ariel Sharon, decided that, if the Palestinians would not sign an agreement, he would just give them land.
“He gets out of the Gaza Strip to the last square inch, and we know what they did with that control of the territory,” said Wilf.
The devastation experienced by Gaza and its people in the current war is a tragic moment, but also a possible turning point.
“Moments of ruin and destruction, both in personal as in collective lives, can be moments of growth and transformation,” she said. “But only if you acknowledge the possibility.”
Wilf admits that people say she speaks harshly.
“I do,” she agreed. “Because we have not benefited from people who soften the message. We try to cut corners, we don’t go to touch the molten lava that is at the core of our conflict.”
For years, long before Oct. 7, European capitals have been sending money to Palestinian regimes to feel good about themselves, she said. “But it does no good. It just extends the conflict.”
She tells European audiences to change their approach. “You want to do good?” she asks. “You need to tell the Palestinians, given that your goal in the last century was to prevent and then to undo the existence of a Jewish state: you lost, and it’s over. You can find a dignified life next to a Jewish state but not instead of it.”
Hard truths are difficult to dislodge, said Wilf, and they can be perpetuated at the highest levels. When Joe Biden, then the US president, visited Israel after Oct. 7, Wilf said, he went out of his way to argue that Hamas does not represent ordinary Palestinians.
“It’s a lie that we often tell to comfort ourselves,” argued Wilf. “Hamas is merely the most brutal and successful executor of the ideology that we’ve come to call Palestinianism.”
The ideology, she said, does not hide its goal of eradicating the existence of Israel “from the river to the sea.”
Terms like “right of return” hold equally brutal meanings.
“You look at Palestinian Arab texts from the ’50s, the ’60s, they are very clear about the term,” she said. “They talk about ‘We will tear their hearts out of their bodies, their fingernails from their limbs.’ That’s why you have euphoria on Oct. 7 – euphoria across the people of Gaza, euphoria across the people of the West Bank, Palestinians and their collaborators around the world. The euphoria was not [because Palestinians were] breaking out of some open-air prison…. The euphoria was that they finally saw the moment that they had been groomed for, for decades.… Hamas executed Oct. 7 on behalf of Palestinianism, on behalf of the Palestinian people – for them and of them.”
That is the only way to understand what happened, she argued, or to understand how billions of dollars in international aid have resulted not in social progress but in a militarized terror regime with hundreds of kilometres of tunnels under schools, mosques, homes and kindergartens.
“You can only do something like that among a supportive population, when you are intent on carrying out the vision of that population,” she said. “So, the enemy is not just Hamas. That’s too easy. The enemy is Palestinianism. And that ideology has to die so that Jews and Arabs can finally live.”
An ideology can indeed be killed, she argued. “In fact, it happens all the time. We all live in a world where ideologies are constantly killed and dying and replaced by others.”
A first step, Wilf contended, is rejecting what she calls “trauma determinism” – the idea that people who are collectively traumatized can only respond with violence and stubborn resistance. This manifests in the idea that Israel’s actions will only further radicalize Palestinians. “I don’t know that there is much further to radicalize,” she noted.
Trauma determinism is not real, she said – or, at least, it need not be. “Exhibit A: the Jewish people,” she said. But she also raised the examples of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. “They suffered violence. The issue is not the violence,” she said. “The issue is what is the story that gets told. That’s why this moment is so important. Because, just like nothing succeeds like success, nothing fails like failure. People begin to run away from failure.”
To move on and embrace peace, she said, Palestinians, like Germans and Japanese before them, have to acknowledge defeat.
“Embracing defeat is not necessarily a bad thing,” she said. “And that process needs to happen. I’m not denying that there is ruin and devastation in Gaza. The question is, how is that ruin and devastation understood? Because, if the story is big, bad evil Israel did that to you and you are just innocent Gazan victims of Israel’s evil nature, then nothing will change. What needs to happen is something that has never happened in the last century of the conflict, which is a connection between cause and effect, action and consequences.”
Palestinians, the broader Arab polity and the world need to understand that the ruin and devastation inflicted upon Gaza is the outcome of their ideology. Some other peoples in the region have awakened to this idea and begun to give up their fruitless hostility to Israel, Wilf said.
“It is always the mark of failed societies in crisis, looking to scapegoat, looking to find someone to blame, looking to divert attention from their failures,” she said. “It’s not a coincidence, therefore, that those countries in the Arab world who are trying to forge a modern vision, a forward-looking vision of what it means to be an Arab and Muslim, are the ones that are letting go of anti-Zionism and normalizing relations with Israel. This is the only vision forward. And I’m under no illusions. It remains a minority view in the Arab and Islamic world. But, for the first time ever, it exists, vocally.”
While they might not embrace the term themselves, Wilf suggests these parties are exhibiting what she calls “Arab Zionism” – the simple acknowledgement that Israel exists and has a right to do so.
It is voices in the West who are most resistant to change, she said.
“The tragedy of this moment is that some in the Arab world are waking up from decades of anti-Zionism as a waste and a ruin, and seeking to have a different vision,” said Wilf. “You have so many here in the West rushing to fill the void and to essentially keep fueling the conflict so that the erasure of Israel can finally be achieved. That is the tragedy. It is also, of course, remarkably dangerous. Because what’s happening now in the West, as much as it pretends to be about the conflict, it’s not.”
It’s about something more insidious, she contended. What is portrayed as anti-Zionism has historically shown itself to be something baser.
“What happens to Jews when societies allow anti-Zionism to become institutionalized?” she asked. Everywhere that anti-Zionism rises to the level of being institutionalized or legislated, the environment turns hostile to Jewish life, she said.
“In the Arab world, how did they get rid of their Jews in the two decades when anti-Zionism was at its height? They never legislated against the Jews. They legislated against Zionists. Iraq, Egypt – the legislation was against Zionists,” she said. “But the way it works is that the Jews are charged with Zionism and no Jew – I know some really try hard but no Jew – will ever be able to disavow Zionism because, heaven forbid, they just celebrated Passover and said, ‘Next year in Jerusalem.’ And that’s how it works.” If such actions are not stopped, she said, “ultimately, no Jews are left.”
“This is what happened in the Arab world, in Iran, in the history of Europe, in the Soviet Union, in Venezuela and it’s happening on American campuses as we speak,” she contended.
Now, efforts are underway in Canada and elsewhere to codify “anti-Palestinian racism,” which Wilf dismisses as a prohibition against Zionism.
On the other hand, there is, she clarified, genuine anti-Palestinian racism. “It is the racism of refusing to listen to Palestinians and take them at their word,” she said. “There is a refusal to really acknowledge them as agents in history who know what they are doing and who actually have their own rational vision of no Jewish state.”
The future depends on how Palestinians and the world interpret the destruction that has taken place in Gaza.
“We are facing a moment that has at once great peril but also great hope,” said Wilf. “Amazingly, so much rides on whether we will ensure that the ruin and destruction in Gaza will finally be associated as the consequence, the outcome, the effect of the Palestinian choice to pursue the always-destructive vision of no Jewish state, because, if they can finally be made to embrace defeat, and to begin the slow process [toward peace] then, at the end of the day, I can assure you that, if they become Arab Zionists, it would be better for everyone.”
Rabbi Andrew Rosenblatt welcomed the audience and thanked the Hayes Family Israel Initiative for funding Wilf’s visit, in memory of Dr. Arthur and Arlene Hayes z”l.