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“Of all the Palestinian lies there is no lie greater or more pernicious than that which calls for the establishment of a separate Palestinian state in the West Bank… “
Prof. Amnon Rubinstein, ‘Palestinian Lies’ in Haaretz, 30 July, 1976.
In many ways, Professor Amnon Rubinstein is the epitome of an elder statesman of the Israeli Left, having had long and distinguished careers in both politics and academia.
“The founding father of Israeli constitutional law”
In the 1960s and 1970s, he was a professor of law at Tel Aviv University and dean of its Law faculty. He entered politics in 1977 and served as Knesset Member until 2002. From 1992, he was one of the leaders of the far-Left Meretz party in the Knesset (then with 12 seats)—serving as Minister of Science and Technology, Minister of Energy and Infrastructure, and Minister of Education on behalf of the party. On leaving politics he was appointed Dean of the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center (today the Reichman University, Israel’s first private university).
In 2006, Rubinstein won the Israel Prize, for law. The Prize committee described him as “the founding father of Israeli constitutional law”, noting that “In both his profound academic writings and his diverse public activities, he advances the values of democracy, equality and human rights.”
It is interesting, therefore, to encounter some of Rubenstein’s prior pronouncements on the Israel-Palestinian conflict, particularly as a benchmark to gauge just how far the discourse has moved (read “regressed “) since then—descending into a dangerous morass of mindless, politically correct mantras that fly in the face of sound, factually correct analysis.
An arrowhead aimed at Israel’s heart
For example, Rubinstein took strong issue with the proponents of a Palestinian state, located on the hills overlooking Israel’s coastal plain. In an article, entitled, “The Pitfall of a Third State“, in Haaretz, written just a year before he entered active politics (6 Aug.1976), he warned: “A third state in the West Bank, is liable to an arrow-head aimed at Israel’s very heart, with all the power of the Arab world behind it.”
Tersely, he dismissed the claims of proponents of Palestinian statehood, that: “if they [the Arabs] threaten us with artillery from Kalkilya [an Arab town close to the ‘Green Line’], we will threaten Kalkilya with our artillery.”
To this, he retorted: “… the answer to this is very simple. The Arab world can exist, prosper, and develop not only if our artillery threatens Kalkilya, but even if it hits it. Israel, small and exposed, will neither be able to exist nor to prosper if its urban centers, its vulnerable airport, and its narrow winding roads, are shelled.”
Ominously, Rubinstein underscored the basic asymmetry of the conflict: “This is the fundamental difference between them and us, this is the terrible danger involved in the establishment of a third independent sovereign state between us and the Jordan river.”
Warning of the dangers of a sovereign Palestinian state between the Hashemite kingdom and the Jordan River, he wrote. “If it [the Palestinian state] is an independent sovereign state, one cannot deny it the right to maintain an independent military and armaments, to sign international pacts, to invite foreign advisors, and so on. Who can guarantee that all these rights will not be exploited in the most extreme manner in order to harm us? In order to threaten our urban centers?”
Debunking demilitarization
Conversely, he cautioned as to the likely adverse results of demilitarization: “Now imagine the following situation: Of all the countries in the UN, the Palestinian state would be the only one on which such restriction would be imposed on its sovereignty. It would be the only one that has no army or air force. It would be the only one in the world labeled as a second-class state. In essence, it would resemble the black protectorates [Bantustans] in [Apartheid] South Africa”
According to Rubinstein: “Such inferiority—which will never be accepted…—will mean increasing the humiliation of the Palestinians, and with it, the intensification of the animosity towards Israel and the perpetuation of the Arab-Israeli conflict.”
“This”, he asserted grimly, “is the real pitfall entailed in the proposal to establish a separate Palestinian state between us and the desert ”
Moreover, as a leading liberal voice for human rights, Prof. Rubinstein’s views on Palestinian’s right to self-determination are of considerable interest. Significantly, he states: “We should not accept the claim that the Arabs in the Land of Israel have the right to determine for themselves how to organize their political lives. The question is an international one, and Israel, as the party liable to be harmed more than any other party by such a measure, has the right—and the duty—to express its opinion and act to ensure that its opinion is accepted”.
Not since the time of Dr. Goebbels
To back up his position, he points out: “It is untrue that the principle of self-determination stipulates that any group of people can decide by itself on its own political framework. Even in the era when the concept of self-determination was at its peak—i.e. after the First World War—it was not implemented in a simplistic and mechanistic manner. Indeed, after the map of Europe was redrawn, numerous national minorities remained within other nations…”
Interestingly, this was not the only instance in which Rubenstein expressed grave reservations as to the establishment of a Palestinian state. Indeed, a week previously, he penned another article in Haaretz (30 July, 1976), entitled “Palestinian Lies“. In it, he criticizes, in the harshest terms, the notion of Palestinian statehood. He declares:
“It is difficult to imagine any other issue for which the international media have been so successfully exploited—from the point of view of the Arabs—as has the Palestinian issue. Not since the time of Dr. Goebbels [Head of the Nazi Propaganda Machine], there has ever been a case in which continual repetition of a lie has borne such great fruits…”
Further castigating the notion of Palestinian statehood, he chides: “…of all the Palestinian lies there is no lie greater or more pernicious than that which calls for the establishment of a separate Palestinian state in the West Bank…”
The quicksand of political pollical correctness
Of course, Rubinstein is no longer an influential figure in Israeli politics today. However, the review of his past public pronouncements is still of value. Indeed, as alluded to earlier, it allows a sobering assessment of how far the political discourse in, and on, Israel has become ensnared in the treacherous quicksand of a politically correct quagmire, which threatens to submerge the proud achievements of the Zionist enterprise in the treacherous sludge of slurs and slander.
