Ari Shavit, senior correspondent for Haaretz and a member of the newspaper's editorial board, is busy with apologetics for Israeli policy. And he is not alone. 

In the Israeli press, Ari Shavit serves as an updated but certainly not improved version of Dan Margalit from the 1980s. Every regime requires an advocate from the liberal opposition, and the Israeli government is no exception. The fact that these advocates seemingly write from a critical perspective awards even more force for their apologetics of government actions against which they purportedly stand. In the 1980s and 1990s this role was filled by Dan Margalit, but since 2000 he has been replaced by Ari Shavit.

No small part of Israeli public opinion, and that of the entire international community, knows that responsibility for failure of what is dubbed the peace process falls entirely on the shoulders of the various Israeli governments, from Peres through Netanyahu. Even Bill Clinton’s advisor in Camp David, Robert Malley, acknowledged, albeit with a fatal delay, that the “generous offers” of Ehud Barak never existed and that responsibility for failure of the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations is primarily that of Israel. Neither Barak, Sharon or Netanyahu intended to halt Israel’s settlement project and conduct bona fide negotiations for peace with the Palestinians, and they successfully acted to doom all attempts at Israeli-Palestinian peace founded in an end to the Israeli occupation.

To the credit of Benjamin Netanyahu he never concealed, then or now, his disdain for negotiations with the Palestinians and an end to the Israeli occupation. Despite the pleas of Mahmoud Abbas and the requests – ever so polite  - of Barack Obama to extend a hand to the Palestinian president and stop presenting him as an empty vessel, the Israeli position is one of refusal. Everyone knows this, including the American administration. The latest declaration of the Turkish Foreign Minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, worryingly expresses this (Anatolia News Agency, 11 February): “Enough is enough! The longer the Palestinian-Israeli issue remains unresolved, the greater the price peoples of the region, including Turkey, pay. Israelis should decide on they want, {…} The status quo cannot continue, and the Palestinians deserve their own state.”

There were times when Israeli liberals didn’t hesitate to clearly say this. These times, however, have passed, and a recent article by Ari Shavit testifies to this. He writes, without blushing: “After Israel gave (?) the Palestinians the Gaza Strip, a first bus exploded in Dizengoff Center (Tel Aviv). After Israel gave the Palestinians Nablus and Ramallah, buses began exploding in Jerusalem and central Tel Aviv. After Israel offered the Palestinians the establishment of a sovereign state on a majority of the occupied territory – they responded with war and terror {…} After Israel retreated from southern Lebanon, a Shi’ite missile base was established there which threatens every spot in Israel. After Israel left Gush Katif, an armed Hamastan was established in Gaza which attacked (Israel’s) south {…}After we absorbed endless blows,  reasonable and moderate Israelis (such as Ari Shavit) lost their faith in reconciliation (and believe) there is no one to whom we can give the territories.”

This is not journalism or an opinion piece, but the cheapest type of propaganda possible. Like all professional political propagandists, Shavit is willing to sacrifice the truth for the goal, which is justification of Israeli policy. Like every propagandist, Shavit knows the truth – and in the past even wrote about it himself – and he lies with a straight face. We’ve already mentioned the huge lie of Barak concerning his “generous offers”, a lie which will enter history as one of the biggest manipulations of public opinion ever. Prior to the attacks in Jerusalem came Israel’s murder of Yahya Ayyash –which the head of the General Security Services (GSS) had warned Peres would result in a renewal of the attacks which had hitherto ceased completely. (Ten years prior, Israeli bombs in Lebanon put an end to the ceasefire that Palestinians had carefully maintained for 11 months, and thus began the first Lebanon War, which became the biggest fiasco in Israeli army history.It is incredibly difficult to believe this was not intentional). The exploding buses in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, those same buses mentioned by Shavit, began after Israel (and again, Shimon Peres) announced that negotiations were suspended…in order to improve “unity of the people” and following the murder of Rabin. The state of Israel did not conduct any negotiations for its withdrawal from Lebanon, just as it did not do so for its redeployment from Gaza. Israel simply got out, ran, because the other alternative was to pay for its actions. And before the rockets from Gaza, there was not only a cruel siege that was condemned by the entire international community, but murder of the local leadership and bombing of population centres. What does Shavit expect? That the Palestinians would respond to these attacks with flowers? The truth is actually that the “reasonable and moderate” Palestinians are the ones who lost faith that Israel will be a partner to negotiations for a future reconciliation. And Shavit’s final claim insults the intelligence of the reader: “no one to whom we can give the territories”. During the time of Yasser Arafat, people such as Shavit were accustomed to claiming the head of the PLO was a terrorist unwilling to compromise, while Abu Mazen was the cultured man, a compromising moderate. And what did they do with Abu Mazen when he was selected to head the PLO and begged to continue the negotiations? They ignored him, insulted him and said…that he represents no one.

Why do I prefer people such as Yitzhak Shamir over Dan Margalit and Ari Shavit? Because when Shamir said “the Arabs are the same Arabs, the Jews are the same Jews and the sea is the same sea”, he believed this nonsense. Ari Shavit doesn’t believe any of his own claims. He is too busy with propaganda.

Translated from Hebrew by the Alternative Information Center (AIC).