BS Summary: This article contains 34 faulty reasoning types, including Indoctrination, Biased Writer Voice, and Ambiguity (Equivocation), with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 19.2% saturation with 247 hits. Analysis detected 3,518 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,288 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 62% and a BS Rank of 68% (5,439 of 16,813 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 67.70% of the article peer group.
British-Israeli author and analyst Daniel Levy isn't ready to give up on the place he calls Palestine-Israel.
The old two-state model, he says, is likely dead.
But there are ways to move toward peace.
“We have to expand our political imagination, to going back to the idea of how do we coexist in this space, which sounds fantastical.”
Levy is a former advisor to Israeli prime ministers, and a negotiator of the Oslo Accords — the process that was meant to end in a permanent peace treaty between Israel and the Palestinians.
Despite the utter destruction of Gaza, the unshakeable entrenchment of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and the ongoing "Greater Israel" project, Levy sees a way through.
Levy is currently the president of the NGO/policy institute, U.S.
/Middle East Project.
He recently delivered the Michael Bell Annual Lecture at Carlton University in Ottawa.
After his talk, he joined host Nahlah Ayed to discuss how Palestine and Israel can move toward a peaceful coexistence.
Below is an excerpt from their conversation, and from Levy’s lecture Israel’s zero sum endgame for Palestinians — can Middle powers make a difference?
There seems to be some consensus that the two-state solution is dead.
And if that is the case, as a former negotiator, how would you approach the current situation?
Where would you start as a starting point?
So I don't want to feign ignorance at the idea that most diplomats and most states would still offer rhetorical salutations to two states — and it's not the policy of the Israeli government, but it is still the policy of the PLO and it is the policy for the vast majority of states around the world.
So I would simply say that that is absolutely vacuous and, therefore, if one doesn't start by citing ritualistic, rhetorical devotion to two states, where should one start?
I think there are some obvious places.
The most obvious is stop sending the signal to Israel and Israelis that this is normal, this is okay, of course you can do these things.
People make the accusation, Israel is held to a higher standard, nonsense.
Israel is held to no standards, held to a lower standard, and it's not good for Israelis either.
If you want to understand how Israel has gone on this journey, you have to understand the practical lived experience of Israelis that they could get away with this, that there has not been a cost and consequence.
So I don't think Israel can be sanctioned into withdrawing its occupation and illegal policies towards the Palestinians.
But I do think it can be indulged into doing even worse.
And therefore you have to shift that incentive structure, that cost benefit calculation.
And you know what, all you have to do in order to make that happen is live up to your own supposed commitment to international law, to the rulings of the International Court of Justice, to things that often exist on your own statutes in terms of restrictions that you should have on trade etc.
That's one thing.
Secondly, give Palestinian national politics the space to breathe.
Stop trying to dictate what the Palestinian Authority has to do or not do, whether Hamas can be part of political structures or not, what discourse Palestinians can adopt.
Because what I am convinced of is [that] you can put the building blocks in place that will allow us to create a political process that has a chance of succeeding where heretofore those processes have stunningly failed.
And first and foremost the obvious thing: stop the killing.
End what is a daily horror show of mistreatment of Palestinians across the territories that are controlled by Israel.
It is so poisoning [to] obviously Palestinian society, but I would say also Israeli-Jewish society.
Excerpt from Daniel Levy's lecture
In Daniel Levy's lecture at Carleton University, he offered a series of possible outcomes if the situation in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories remains unresolved.
"I do think that just as Oslo came about in a moment of punctuated disequilibrium, global geopolitics was shifting.
The local Israel-Palestine scene after the first intifada was shifting.
I think we're now in another period of punctuating disequilibrium, massively accelerated by the person who sits in the Oval Office today.
And for the carriers of that zero-sum Zionist flame, this is the moment to finish the job.
They are very open about this.
There's nothing discrete or subtle about the goal of definitively ending the Palestinian question and removing the Palestinians.
So one scenario, which I take seriously — and there's questions of timeline: do you do it fast?
Do you do it slow? — Gaza isn't the end of this.
Whether it's through eradication, through ethnic cleansing, through encouraging out migration, through a push into Jordan — and believe me, people in Jordan take this prospect very seriously — that's a scenario.
A second scenario, which I also take seriously, is that this is wildly over ambitious from a country of 10 million people in that part of the world.
Where half of their own population don't enlist for the military, in terms of young people today because they either come from the ultra-orthodox Jewish community who don't serve in the army, or from the Palestinian-Arab community, most of whom don't serve in the army."
This kind of overreach — when you set up a zero-sum equation, you better be damn sure that there's only one possible outcome.
That the zero-sum can only apply to the success of your side and the vanquishing of the other side.
And then is there a third way?
Do we see a different option?
I think that would require, first of all, a Palestinian reassertion of Palestinian political agency.
I don't see it coming from anywhere else.
Some friends think this could be a joint Israeli-Palestinian thing.
I think it has to first come from the Palestinians, which would challenge that community that is mobilized around Palestine, and it would challenge Israeli society by offering a different way out, and of course it would challenge Palestinians to get beyond these divisions.
I think that takes us beyond the two-state paradigm as is probably obvious from everything I've been saying.
I found it fascinating when I was doing some research for this evening that I presume in one of the last interviews Michael [Bell] gave he talked about how two states had been an option, had seemed viable, strongly suggesting that that was no longer the case.
So I don't think you can follow the logical conclusion of what I think is a correct diagnosis and a correct prescription for addressing the incredibly dangerous time we are in if multilateralism and rules of law collapse without addressing Palestine differently.
And if one were to do so, then you're at the beginning of changing, of reversing, of giving some hope that the trajectory that I described, that we are on for Palestinians and also for Israelis in terms of how that centre of gravity has shifted.
We have begun to create the conditions for perhaps being able to reverse and challenge and question that, because unless Israelis see that this is abnormal, that there is not impunity, that there is a question to be addressed here, that there are costs and consequences.
Unless that happens, what we have seen in Gaza, but what we are also seeing in the region, what we're seeing in Lebanon today, will not stop — and it will come to an unpleasant, in whichever direction, ending.
*Excerpts edited for clarity and length.
This episode was produced by Naheed Mustafa.
Download the IDEAS podcast to listen to this episode.
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