Like Mottel the son of Peysi the cantor, who evades his responsibilities with the declaration, "Hooray, I am an orphan," Israelis sometimes tell themselves, "Hooray, I am hated," thus rationalizing their refusal to reach an agreement with the Palestinians. The hero of Shalom Aleichem's book exploits his status as an orphan in order to misbehave and create a worldview that allows him to abandon his studies and prayers while avoiding punishment. The Israeli right wing, meanwhile, observes reality through the lenses of someone who has been the object of Arab hatred. This gives the right wing a pretext for clinging to its positions, if not hardening them.
This weekend, Avigdor Lieberman, who announced his resignation from the cabinet, supplied fresh evidence of the sense of victimhood underlying the way the conflict is understood. If Yisrael Beiteinu represented a minority opinion, one could view it as a marginal party with negligible power. But the conceptual underpinning of Lieberman's views are shared by increasingly large segments of Israel's Jewish population, even if they do not belong to his movement.
His faith holds that there is no chance of reaching an arrangement with the Palestinians because their hatred for Israel is infinite. If Israel withdraws from Judea and Samaria, the Palestinians will attack there from Qalqilyah and Nablus. If Israel helps establish a Palestinian state, Israel's Arabs will rise up and demand an end to the state's Zionist identity. If it reaches an agreement with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Israel will find itself facing the ruthlessness of Hamas, which will take over the West Bank. That is how a majority of Israeli Jews think, according to polls conducted in the past few months. The Palestinian response to Israel's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip reinforced their basic fear that "the Arabs" have not really come to terms with the state's existence, and that if the opportunity to get rid of Israel or destroy it fell into their lap they would jump at the chance. That is the fundamental feeling shaping most Israeli Jews' attitude on the conflict, even those on the left.
The Qassam rockets in the South, as has been demonstrated so clearly in the past several days, and the Katyushas and missiles in the North, as was demonstrated so painfully in the Second Lebanon War, confirm to Israeli Jews their fundamental belief that there is no partner on the other side (which in their eyes also includes Israeli Arabs). The left is (to a large extent) distinguished from the right (to a large extent) by its willingness to reach an arrangement based on strict security considerations that will reduce the existential threat posed by the continuing hatreds of "the Arabs" and of the existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/946122.html