In Ankara this week, NATO committed to building its very own military industrial complex, pursuing the same “total security” doctrine that some Israelis, in their case, now see backfiring.
Ezra Klein, one of the resident Zionists in The New York Times’ opinion section (or is everyone appearing in those pages a Zionist of one or another stripe?) had a guest on his Wednesday podcast who had some mind-focusing things to say.
May Pundak is an Israeli human-rights attorney and co-founder of A Land for All, a group of Israeli and Palestinian activists. Pundak has interesting bloodlines: Her father, Ron Pundak, helped frame the Oslo Accords in the early 1990s.
Here is part of what Pundak told Klein:
“I found myself advocating for the two-state solution for many, many years. But at a certain point I started feeling that this model is crumbling beneath my, between my fingers, and I can’t — I don’t believe in it anymore…. This idea of peace, of negotiations, of a two-state solution is becoming not relevant in the public discourse.
Like, there is no conversation about this…. And that two-state solution has become an empty shell for people to talk about something but not take any action….
What is the alternative? The alternative right now is either continuing in the footsteps of this government, which is to destroy the Palestinian peoplehood, or a fake status quo. And so the first thing that we need to commit ourselves to is realizing that if we’re not going to solve this conflict, it will solve us, right? This is the reality. And my question to you or to us, to us Israelis is like, has this ensured your safety and security? The answer is no….
For people who are actually concerned with safety and security for their children and a better future and life, the current paradigm has not ensured our safety and security, until this day. It’s not only Oct. 7. What about what’s happening now with Israel re-entering Lebanon? What’s happening with Iran? What’s happening in the south? I mean, what’s happening in the west? There is no place that we actually feel safe right now. And I think that that’s an important realization that we have to say out loud and confront. We’re not safe now. This has not given us safety.”
May Pundak’s is nothing remotely close to the majority view among Israeli Jews, 80–odd percent of whom think the Netanyahu regime should keep on with its reign of terror across West Asia. But she is not alone, either, as she confronts the reality she describes.
Three days before Klein interviewed Pundak, the Times published another opinion piece in this line under the headline, “Israel Is Not Invincible.” This one is by Mayron Zonszein, an Israeli with the International Crisis Group. Noting J.D. Vance’s recent remark, “You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have,” Zonszein frets over the deterioration of relations between Tel Aviv and Washington.
Vance at the Lake Lucerne, Switzerland, meetings on implementing the U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding on ending hostilities last month. (Luke Schroeder / X /VPPressSec/Wikimedia Commons/ Public Domain)
A couple of snippets from her piece:
“Mr. Vance has spotlighted a real issue: … If Israel is at war at all times and with everyone, it becomes impossible to distinguish between genuine and overblown threats or between when Israeli military force is necessary, effective and justified and when it is just a reflex and a way to avoid any negotiated agreement….
This is the fundamental flaw in Israel’s current modus operandi… Israel is not only not invincible; it must seriously consider changing its strategy. There is not a military solution to every problem…. Israel’s embrace of total war and permanent military force, without an achievable endgame, is backfiring, undermining its very effectiveness and utility.”
It is just as noteworthy that these perspectives now appear as Times op-ed pieces. A little Timesology here will be useful: The paper has a long habit of putting things in the opinion section when they need to be said but it refuses the responsibility of carrying them as news.
The reality Pundak describes and Zonszein regrets is the reality of failure. It is the failure of a policy the Zionists call “total security” and it is made of walls, domes, endless bombings and atrocities without limit on the ground. And, as groundwater seeps upward in rotting wood, the realization that total security has failed is beginning to bleed into Israeli discourse.
NATO Versus ‘Security Through Peace’
A popular slogan graffitied on one of the sections of the East Side Gallery, a permanent open-air exhibit on the longest surviving section of the Berlin Wall, reading: “No more wars. No more walls. A united world.” (Dr Santa /Wikimedia Commons/ Public Domain)
Listening to Pundak Wednesday morning, there was a jump-cut in my mind — and I’ll explain this shortly — to the NATO summit in Ankara this week. There we saw, setting aside President Donald Trump’s barrage of juvenile insults, the alliance’s commitment to a regime of seamless hostility as it faces East.
Another declaration of unflagging support for Ukraine, another pledge of military aid, this one for $80 billion, and in the background, the Finns’ mid–June announcement that they will permit nuclear weapons on their soil. NATO. Members Germany, Britain and France in the lead are dedicated to constructing Europe’s very own military-industrial complex: They do not call this the pursuit of total security, but that is what it is.
What was not done or said is what seals the case for me: Not a syllable uttered in the Turkish capital this week, per usual, about the good sense of resuming diplomatic contacts with the Russian Federation. Utter silence, the thought never crossing the minds of those in attendance.
I credit Arne Seifert, a distinguished fellow at the WeltTrends Institut für Internationale Politik in Potsdam, for suggesting the connection between the Israeli and European ways at the world. “‘Peace through security,’ the Israeli narrative, has failed since the nation’s founding,” Seifert writes. “Experience suggests the opposite is the case, ‘security through peace.’ This will be possible only through peace with all Israel’s neighbors.”
Seifert’s piece on this topic appeared in the June 30 editions of Zeit–Fragen, Horizons et débats and Current Concerns, the German, French and English versions of the twice-monthly journal published in Switzerland (and for which I am a contributor and editor). In “War is the enemy of Europe” he draws the same conclusion for the Continent:
“Europe, if it so wished, could draw on its own experience. An overarching framework based on stable inter-state relations, good working relationships at leadership levels, and the recognition of the military status quo [an operational equivalence] has proved to be a kind of master key to appropriate relations between and among states. Historically this has maintained a balance of power among the major powers.”
Seifert (who I am pleased to count a friend) brings a valuable consciousness of history to this moment in East–West relations. He served as a senior official in the German Democratic Republic’s Foreign Ministry from 1964 until its dissolution in 1990, and in much of what he writes you detect the value the East bloc placed on — this word that is lost to us, regrettably — co-existence.
“Co-existence,” it turns out, fell out of the West’s vocabulary even before Germans dismantled the Wall in November 1989 and the Soviet Union collapsed two years and a month later.
Seifert on this period as prelude to the Ukraine crisis:
“All these opportunities for a sustainable European security order had already been squandered or shattered before the ‘Two-plus–Four Treaty’ between the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic was signed in Moscow on 12 September 1990.
Twenty-eight years later, in 2018, Gernot Erler, a Social Democrat then serving in the Federal Foreign Office, remarked: ‘Today we are witnessing a deep crisis between Russia and the West. And at first glance this appears to have stemmed from the conflict in Ukraine…. The crisis clearly has deeper roots. It is becoming increasingly apparent that the conflict is not the cause, but rather the product of a longstanding process of loss of trust and alienation.’”
To alienation and lapsed trust I add the overweening hubris to which the West has succumbed since 1989, the utter lack of imagination among those who shape and execute the West’s policies toward the East and — consequence of these two — their more or less uniform incapacity to see from the perspectives of others, which I count a 21st century imperative.
The Israelis, I should add, exhibit all of these shortcomings in spades.
Seifert’s long institutional memory and the insights he draws from it give us a wonderfully clear way of thinking about the two conflicts that now bring us — in both cases, for sure — dangerously close to a nuclear incident of one or another kind. It is this: Total security as a national strategy was never fated to prove out and now fails.
There is no way forward for the West or for Israel until they abandon these inherently destructive impulses in favor of a revived commitment to co-existence, however long it takes for this to manifest. This is inevitable in time. As so often in the tumultuous geopolitics of our time, it is a question of new thinking — which in this case comes to a return to what others once had right.
The Israelis, beginning with the more intelligent voices among them, are discovering this as we speak. The Europeans, were they at all wise, would take a lesson from them.
TO MY READERS. Independent publications and those who write for them reach a moment that is difficult and full of promise all at once. On one hand, we assume ever greater responsibilities in the face of mainstream media’s mounting derelictions. On the other, we have found no sustaining revenue model and so must turn directly to our readers for support. I am committed to independent journalism for the duration: I see no other future for American media. But the path grows steeper, and as it does I need your help. This grows urgent now. In recognition of the commitment to independent journalism, please subscribe to The Floutist, or via my Patreon account.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Return of Co-Existence
In Ankara this week, NATO committed to building its very own military industrial complex, pursuing the same “total security” doctrine that some Israelis, in their case, now see backfiring.
Ezra Klein, one of the resident Zionists in The New York Times’ opinion section (or is everyone appearing in those pages a Zionist of one or another stripe?) had a guest on his Wednesday podcast who had some mind-focusing things to say.
May Pundak is an Israeli human-rights attorney and co-founder of A Land for All, a group of Israeli and Palestinian activists. Pundak has interesting bloodlines: Her father, Ron Pundak, helped frame the Oslo Accords in the early 1990s.
Here is part of what Pundak told Klein:
May Pundak’s is nothing remotely close to the majority view among Israeli Jews, 80–odd percent of whom think the Netanyahu regime should keep on with its reign of terror across West Asia. But she is not alone, either, as she confronts the reality she describes.
Three days before Klein interviewed Pundak, the Times published another opinion piece in this line under the headline, “Israel Is Not Invincible.” This one is by Mayron Zonszein, an Israeli with the International Crisis Group. Noting J.D. Vance’s recent remark, “You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have,” Zonszein frets over the deterioration of relations between Tel Aviv and Washington.
A couple of snippets from her piece:
It is just as noteworthy that these perspectives now appear as Times op-ed pieces. A little Timesology here will be useful: The paper has a long habit of putting things in the opinion section when they need to be said but it refuses the responsibility of carrying them as news.
The reality Pundak describes and Zonszein regrets is the reality of failure. It is the failure of a policy the Zionists call “total security” and it is made of walls, domes, endless bombings and atrocities without limit on the ground. And, as groundwater seeps upward in rotting wood, the realization that total security has failed is beginning to bleed into Israeli discourse.
NATO Versus ‘Security Through Peace’
Listening to Pundak Wednesday morning, there was a jump-cut in my mind — and I’ll explain this shortly — to the NATO summit in Ankara this week. There we saw, setting aside President Donald Trump’s barrage of juvenile insults, the alliance’s commitment to a regime of seamless hostility as it faces East.
Another declaration of unflagging support for Ukraine, another pledge of military aid, this one for $80 billion, and in the background, the Finns’ mid–June announcement that they will permit nuclear weapons on their soil. NATO. Members Germany, Britain and France in the lead are dedicated to constructing Europe’s very own military-industrial complex: They do not call this the pursuit of total security, but that is what it is.
What was not done or said is what seals the case for me: Not a syllable uttered in the Turkish capital this week, per usual, about the good sense of resuming diplomatic contacts with the Russian Federation. Utter silence, the thought never crossing the minds of those in attendance.
I credit Arne Seifert, a distinguished fellow at the WeltTrends Institut für Internationale Politik in Potsdam, for suggesting the connection between the Israeli and European ways at the world. “‘Peace through security,’ the Israeli narrative, has failed since the nation’s founding,” Seifert writes. “Experience suggests the opposite is the case, ‘security through peace.’ This will be possible only through peace with all Israel’s neighbors.”
Seifert’s piece on this topic appeared in the June 30 editions of Zeit–Fragen, Horizons et débats and Current Concerns, the German, French and English versions of the twice-monthly journal published in Switzerland (and for which I am a contributor and editor). In “War is the enemy of Europe” he draws the same conclusion for the Continent:
Seifert (who I am pleased to count a friend) brings a valuable consciousness of history to this moment in East–West relations. He served as a senior official in the German Democratic Republic’s Foreign Ministry from 1964 until its dissolution in 1990, and in much of what he writes you detect the value the East bloc placed on — this word that is lost to us, regrettably — co-existence.
“Co-existence,” it turns out, fell out of the West’s vocabulary even before Germans dismantled the Wall in November 1989 and the Soviet Union collapsed two years and a month later.
Seifert on this period as prelude to the Ukraine crisis:
To alienation and lapsed trust I add the overweening hubris to which the West has succumbed since 1989, the utter lack of imagination among those who shape and execute the West’s policies toward the East and — consequence of these two — their more or less uniform incapacity to see from the perspectives of others, which I count a 21st century imperative.
The Israelis, I should add, exhibit all of these shortcomings in spades.
Seifert’s long institutional memory and the insights he draws from it give us a wonderfully clear way of thinking about the two conflicts that now bring us — in both cases, for sure — dangerously close to a nuclear incident of one or another kind. It is this: Total security as a national strategy was never fated to prove out and now fails.
There is no way forward for the West or for Israel until they abandon these inherently destructive impulses in favor of a revived commitment to co-existence, however long it takes for this to manifest. This is inevitable in time. As so often in the tumultuous geopolitics of our time, it is a question of new thinking — which in this case comes to a return to what others once had right.
The Israelis, beginning with the more intelligent voices among them, are discovering this as we speak. The Europeans, were they at all wise, would take a lesson from them.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been restored after years of being permanently censored.
TO MY READERS. Independent publications and those who write for them reach a moment that is difficult and full of promise all at once. On one hand, we assume ever greater responsibilities in the face of mainstream media’s mounting derelictions. On the other, we have found no sustaining revenue model and so must turn directly to our readers for support. I am committed to independent journalism for the duration: I see no other future for American media. But the path grows steeper, and as it does I need your help. This grows urgent now. In recognition of the commitment to independent journalism, please subscribe to The Floutist, or via my Patreon account.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.