Steven Plaut

For the past fourteen years, Israeli governmental policy has been governing by Adgravophilia. Adgravophilia comes from the Latin root adgravo, which means making things worse. The whole word means the love of making things deteriorate and worsen. For fourteen years, Israeli government policy has been dominated by a passionate desire to make things worse.

Adgravophilia was adopted in what, we now know, was probably the most successful moment in Israel's history, certainly the most successful moment since 1973. By 1989 the pogroms and anti-Jewish atrocities that have become known as the "First Intifada" had largely been suppressed. Violent incidents were declining by the month. Arafat and his creatures were off in distant Tunis. Israel's economy was doing phenomenally well and prosperity was growing. A large wave of Jewish immigration from the ex-Soviet states was boosting Israel economically, morally, and socially. The PLO leadership were persona non grata, not only for Israel but also for the U.S. There was agreement with Washington that the PLO would never be a partner in any future negotiations, and that the most Palestinians would ever get would be fully-demilitarized "limited autonomy". In retrospect, it was among the happiest and most secure times in Israel's history.

But by 1992, into this near idyllic situation came the Adgravophilia of the Israeli Labor party. It insisted that things were just god-awful bad in the Middle East. After all, there were Palestinian guttersnipes throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip and in some parts of the West Bank, and injuring soldiers. Sometimes other acts of violence would occur, knifings and shootings. "Things could not possibly be worse!" it insisted. So children throwing rocks at troops in Gaza were swapped for buses full of Israeli children being blown to bits in Haifa and Jerusalem.

Adgravophilia feeds on human ignorance and on the human weakness that always finds it so difficult to imagine things getting any worse than they already are. But the inability to imagine things far worse than they are is a symptom of the poverty of the human imagination and not a rational way for dealing with the world.

For many years, people have been trying to represent the Middle East conflict as a manifestation of assorted games of strategy, from chess, to "chicken", to Indian wrestling. The Israeli Labor Party decided to deal with the situation via Fifty-Two-Card-Pick-Up. Fifty-Two-Card-Pick-Up is where a player unhappy with his cards simply throws them all on the floor. The problem, of course, is that there is no reason to think that this improves things. In the case of the Oslo version of the Fifty-Two-Card-Pick-Up, it turned a near-idyllic situation having some unpleasant wrinkles into the twenty-first century version of the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Now, in 2004, one thousand five hundred Oslo-murdered Israelis later, and Israel's very existence under greater threat than ever, we sit and rub our eyes in disbelief at the astronomical stupidity of Israeli leaders in 1992, thinking that things could not possibly get worse.

Rabin and Peres tossed all 52 cards onto the floor and launched the greatest round of Adgravophilia in Israeli history, and possibly the worst in all of human history. They turned Arafat and his storm troopers from distant pariahs into legitimized players and holders of an acknowledged claim to statehood. They armed and bankrolled the terrorists and set them up in the suburbs of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. They placed PLO missile crews within shooting distance of Ben-Gurion Airport. They rewarded every atrocity by the PLO and its affiliates with new offers of Israeli generosity.

In part, the Laborites persuaded Israelis to play Fifty-Two-Card-Pick-Up by arguing that it was simply a revocable or reversible experiment. One of the hardest lessons we have all learned over the past 14 years has been that there are no such things in Israel as "experiments". Any "experiment" is in fact an irreversible set of concessions and capitulations, which establishes faits accompli that Israel will be prevented from renouncing.

Adgravophilia invariably produces a ratchet effect, by which things that used to be unthinkable get "tried" in a temporary "experiment" and then can never be recalled. As soon as they are "tested", the United States decrees that no backing off from the "experiment" is permissible. No matter how many times the PLO has violated its Oslo commitments, no matter how many atrocities the PLO rank and file carry out under the direct orders of the PLO leadership, the United States will take the full range of previous Israeli unilateral gestures as the starting point for demands for new Israeli concessions in the next round. And every goodwill measure by Israel, every generous concession or act of Israeli restraint, will immediately trigger European attacks and attempts to delegitimize Israel altogether and undermine Israel's right to exist.

Labor Party Adgravophilia was accompanied by other political innovations as well. Every act of tomfoolery by the Labor leaders was accompanied by massive media manipulation, large billboards springing up all by themselves, bumper stickers flooding the country, and huge ads by non-existent leftist "peace groups" financed by overseas ill-wishers, all proclaiming that there is no just alternative to adopting the proposal on the table that would of course make things worse. Then, as soon as the public was seeing things actually getting worse, the Labor Party would insist that this is because their plan had not been fully implemented skillfully enough yet, or that those murderous anti-Oslo inciters were creating obstacles.

If Adgravophilia was first introduced as a Labor Party innovation in the Oslo game of Fifty-Two-Card-Pick-Up in 1992, the Likud was not far behind in buying into it, with all 52 of its cards. Now, in late 2004, the Likud under Ariel Sharon is advocating and implementing policies that, 16 years earlier, were solely endorsed by the Israeli Arab-dominated communist party, and unambiguously opposed by the Zionist consensus stretching from Right to Left. Every symptom of the Adgravophilic disease has been aggravated, as the Likud has followed the Labor Party lead in making things worse. Resenting this up-staging, the Labor Party and the Left keep trying to come up with newer plans, even more dramatically Adgravophilic, such as the Beilin "Geneva Plan" or the Ayalon-Nusseibah "Plan". Leftists even more Adgravophilic than the Laborites are now touting the "one-state solution", under which a single Arab-dominated state will encompass all of Israel and "Palestine", and the Jews will be invited to experience a second Holocaust.

But the Likud of Ariel Sharon refuses to be left behind. The latest manifestation of the Likud's Adgravophilia is the Sharon plan for unilateral "disengagement" in the Gaza Strip. Now in fact the Sharon plan is identical to the Mitzna Plan, against which Sharon and the Likud ran in the last elections. Sharon and his people were elected by voters precisely because they claimed to oppose the Mitzna plan. But within months of the election, Sharon was announcing that he had always believed that a Palestinian terror state was the way to go, and unilateral eviction of the Jewish population of the Gaza Strip was the only effective way to make peace. Once the Gaza Strip has been made Judenrein, with no Israeli soldiers left behind there, without a doubt the Gaza population will take up quilting and transcendental meditation. Joan Baez disks will be all the rage. And do I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you!

The Sharon round of Adgravophilia was accompanied by all the accoutrements familiar from Labor Party days, the large "spontaneous" ads in the papers endorsing the plan by civilian rank and file, the billboard blitz, the endless repetitions that there is just no alternative, the pie in the sky promises, the denunciation of opponents of the plan as irrational haters of peace, as people driven by fanatical religious prejudice, greed, and blindness.

Like previous rounds, the Sharon Plan chapter in Adgravophilia will make things far worse. The hundreds of rockets already fired into Jewish civilian areas, even while the Israeli army is in control of Gaza, will morph into thousands and then tens of thousands. Sderot will be obliterated and then Ashkelon. The Oslo death toll will jump by an order of magnitude, and maybe by two. Israel’s pre-1967 area within rocket range of Gaza will be emptied of Jews, turned into a no man's zone, hailed as yet another victory by the Palestinians in driving out the Zionist Untermenschen. Bands of suicide bombers will emerge from Gaza in numbers far exceeding what Israel has known.

The tunnels through which weapons were smuggled from Egypt even while the Israeli army controlled the ground will become uninterrupted super-highways of terror. Missiles will be brought in that threaten Israeli air space. The range of rockets will be upgraded until they strike Tel Aviv. All the while, just like in all previous deteriorations following previous rounds of Adgravophilia, the same politicians will pout before the cameras and insist that none of this could have possibly been foreseen, that it was entirely unexpected, that no one at all had predicted this could happen.

No matter how many times Ariel Sharon swears on the heads of his children that the Gaza Plan is in fact a wily tactic by him to allow Israel to retain control of the West Bank indefinitely, no one should believe him. And no matter how many times the Likud apparatchiks insist that the Gaza capitulation is not a precedent for a similar unilateral "disengagement" in the West Bank, they are lying. The demands and pressures for an identical West Bank capitulation will come even before the last Jewish "settler" has been evicted at bayonet point from Gush Katif. Now that his Ugliness Yasser Arafat has been dispatched to the great hijacked airplace of the sky, pressures will build for Israel to show its goodwill to the new Palestinian "moderates" who take Arafat's place. Since the circus of Arafat's funeral, the media are discovering peace-loving moderates behind every cactus bush, and the United States and United Kingdom are escalating demands for Israel to meet these "moderates" more than half way.

But the Sharon Adgravophilia is disastrous for another reason. It is a one-sided population transfer. Sharon's argument is that Jewish settlers in the Gaza Strip need to be moved to another part of their homeland to reduce tensions and remove confrontation. So why is this eviction not balanced and even-handed? Why is it not accompanied by, say, a plan to evict the population of Jenin and move it to the Gaza Strip in order to reduce tensions and remove confrontations? Why aren't these two fully integrated halves of a single plan? Why is it that only Jews need to be shifted and moved to reduce confrontation? This lack of balance establishes a clear precedent that will haunt Israel in all future "negotiations".

One interesting twist in the Sharon round is the clear demonstration of how utterly unpopular Adgravophilia is among Israelis in general. When Sharon tried to provide "his" plan with the Likud party household seal of approval in the party referendum last year, Adgravophilia lost by a huge three-to-two majority, despite intense lobbying for it by the Likud party machine. Sharon has had to fight a long series of battles, accompanied by naked threats against his own cabinet ministers and backbenchers. In fact, every time Israeli voters have actually been allowed to express their opinion over Adgravophilia, they have rejected it. Understanding that they would do so again is what motivated Sharon's people to prohibit any ballot referendum on the plan. This was accompanied by Labor Party-like trotting out of "experts" to lecture the public about how anti-democratic ballot initiatives are. Tell that to Californians.
I have always believed that politics are a lot like medicine, and that the first obligation of all leaders is simply to avoid making things worse, to avoid doing harm. Part of maturity is understanding that not all problems in life have solutions and that not every unpleasantness can be removed and eliminated. Ugliness and discomfort are often an unavoidable part of life. This does not make death the preferred alternative.

For fourteen years, Israeli politicians have been attempting to resolve the complexity of the Middle East conflict by making things worse.

Steven Plaut is Professor of Economics at Haifa University.