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Re-engaging with Reality
(Ha'aretz) Jonathan Spyer - Israel's disengagement transcends the simple act of redeploying from the Gaza Strip and four northern Samarian settlements. There is a larger withdrawal taking place, which is not geographical. This is the withdrawal of Israeli policy from the idea of rapprochement between the Jewish state of Israel and Middle Eastern politics as currently constituted, represented in its local version by Palestinian nationalism and its Islamist opponents. The peace process of the 1990s represented the high-water mark of Israeli attempts to engage with the Palestinians, and through them with the dominant political language of the region. That experiment, as is known, was not successful. Regional politics, in its Palestinian variant, was ultimately responsible for the failure. A familiar combination of grand myth-making, militarist fantasies of revenge, and an abject disinterest in developing real and tangible instruments of government and administration left the process doomed. Israel developed and coordinated its unilateral redeployment with its U.S. ally, rather than its Palestinian neighbor. And it has, at least since the election of Ariel Sharon in 2001, answered insurgency not with frantic new political initiatives, but with determined counterinsurgency. The writer is a research fellow at the Global Research in International Affairs Center, Inter-Disciplinary Center, Herzliya.