Mitzna doesn't get it

I try to avoid posting about internal Israeli politics because, well, I'm not an Israeli and they're the ones who have to live (God willing) with the outcome of the upcoming elections. But the Mitzna platform (and it's his platform, not the platform of his party) misses the mark so completely and continuously that I have to wonder how this man can remain so clueless with all of the evidence staring him in the face. The problem is cystallized in these comments Mitzna made at the end of this Newsweek interview*.

[Question:] With the corruption charges against Sharon, why isn’t the Labor Party gaining in the polls?

[Mitzna:] This is a very interesting question. Most people in polls support my initiative, but when you ask them who they will vote for, they say Likud.

[Question:] Why do you think this is?

[Mitzna:] This is the $1 billion question.

[Question:] So they want to separate but they vote Likud.

[Mitzna:] They agree to separation, they agree to a two-state solution, they agree to the evacuation of settlements, they agree to everything. But they don’t trust that we will do it.

No, you see, it isn't a matter of whether they believe he will do it. The problem is that in poll after poll, Israeli citizens, having an natural instinct for survival, only agree to these things once there is a cessation of violence against them. They absolutely positively do not agree to these things as long as they are under attack. And Mitzna has pledged to unilaterally separate, create a palestinian state and evacuate settlements even while suicide bombers are blowing themselves up in Tel Aviv, even while his "partners" on the other side are refusing to even consider ordering let alone enforcing a halt to such attacks. The fact that Mitzna doesn't even understand the disconnect here ought to raise some very serious questions about his competency for the job he's currently seeking.

For an interesting analysis of "The Problem with Mitzna," see Yossi Klein Halevi's column in last Thursday's Jerusalem Post.

Isn't Mitzna, the former general, aware of the strategic inconsistencies of his plan? Doesn't Mitzna, the decorated war hero, realize the consequences of withdrawal under fire?

To understand how Mitzna became an appeaser, one has to return to the first intifada, in which he served as West Bank commander. Like many of us who served there in those years, Mitzna came to realize that the decades-long warnings of the Left against occupation had been prophetic. When one society is forced to mobilize its resources to suppress the national longings of another, in the end it's the occupier who becomes the occupied.

Along with Mitzna, a majority of Israelis emerged from the first intifada desperate to end the occupation and ready for far-reaching compromise. The result was the empowerment of Arafat and the re-creation of the PLO's terrorist mini-state in southern Lebanon in the 1970s, except this time located minutes away from the center of Israel.

And so the second intifada has taught us that sometimes the cure is worse than the illness.

In the past two years, a new post-ideological majority has emerged that is ready to consider almost any measure to ensure security and also ready, in principle, to make almost any territorial concession for genuine peace. That majority of hard-line pragmatists lives between the insights of the first and second intifadas - that we cannot occupy the Palestinians and we cannot make peace with them.

Most Israelis today would agree that both Greater Israel and Oslo were utopian delusions, wishful ideology imposed on reluctant reality. And they sense that the decades-long debate between Left and Right was in fact an argument between two partial truths: The Left understood the danger of occupation, while the Right understood the danger of appeasement.

Mitzna, though, has learned only the truth of the Left. He remains stuck in the first intifada, and hasn't absorbed the lessons of the second. Like all ideologues, he is capable of holding only one insight at a time.

The core of this argument lies in its equation of the "mistakes" of both the Left and the Right. But even though I have some problems with this underlying premise, Halevi makes a compelling case, especially, I would think, to those (and they are many) who lean only slightly to my left.

*This particular interview is receiving much more attention as a result of an apparent brain fart by Sharon in his part of the interview in which he offhandedly dismissed the "Quartet" as [quote] nothing and its "peace plan" as not to be taken seriously. Whatever one's feelings about the "peace plan," Sharon's remarks were undiplomatic at best, and . . . I'll leave it there, for now.