Donald Macintyre has an op-ed piece here about the Israeli election campaign. It resembles a host of similar articles that have appeared, and will go on appearing, in the quality press, as the campaign rolls interminably on. Such articles have their individual idiosyncrasies but all share two common features.

1.

The only criterion on which the worth of the candidates for prime minister is assessed is their perceived willingness “to take risks for peace”, or “to trade land for peace” or one of the other standard formulations relating to the achieving a deal with the Palestinians. Implicit here is the view that the road to peace between Israel and the Palestinians is plainly visible and free of any substantial obstacles and all that’s required is a willingness by Israel to walk down it.

2.

The current situation is seen as requiring nothing of the Palestinians. What they do or fail to do is perceived as largely or entirely irrelevant to the achievement of peace or their own achievement of statehood. There’s an excellent example of this tendency in Macintyre’s article when he says,

Instead of sniping at Barak, as she did yesterday, for resisting calls for even more aggressive military action in Gaza, Ms Livni would do well to start differentiating herself ideologically from Netanyahu, to remobilise the Israeli majority who still probably prefer a negotiated peace to a return to war.

He makes not the slightest mention of the rockets being launched from Gaza into southern Israel which are the cause of the dispute between Barak and Livni, nor does he take a second to consider whether halting the barrage might be a good thing for the Palestinians as it would tend to weaken the campaign of Netanyahu, their chief enemy among the Israeli candidates.

Of course Israel, being the stronger party in the conflict and occupying the West Bank, has greater responsibilities in the resolution of the conflict but it’s hard to believe that the only thing standing in the way of peace and a Palestinian state is a failure of will on the part of the leadership of Israel.

Those who believe this are taking a rather Israel-obsessed view of the conflict and see the Palestinians as possessing only a partial political subjectivity, waiting for others, principally Israel, to do the decent thing and vindicate their rights for them. They refuse to enquire into the extent to which the interests of Palestinians are being served by their leaders, leaders whose initiatives and activities are interpreted as reflexive, unconsidered and inevitable reactions to Israeli actions. These people just don’t take the Palestinians as a people seriously.