The other day, the Wall Street Journal ran an article How the next Middle East War could start, by Ronen Bergman. Unfortunately the article is mostly behind the Journal’s pay wall. A quick summary of the article is that all of the likely flashpoints have some connection to Iran. It would seem to imply, though I don’t know if Dr. Bergman would agree, that dealing with Iran is more important than a few hundred apartments for Jews. But that’s not what I wanted focus on. It was this sentence from the very beginning.
This will have been the safest year in a decade and a half for Israeli civilians–the year with the fewest fatalities in acts of war or terror.
Fifteen years takes us back to May 1995, a little more than a year and a half after the signing of the Oslo Accords. In other words since Arafat was able to create a terror infrastructure – due to the freedom Oslo gave him – until now Israel has been made markedly less safe by the Oslo Accords.
It’s really quite remarkable. Israel signs a peace treaty and the one thing it does not get from it is peace. Israel makes concessions in accord with the peace treaty and Israel is treated as if it has done nothing for peace.
So then why does Israel need the peace treaty? To quote Thomas Friedman:
To put it another way, the collapse of the peace process, combined with the rise of the wall, combined with the rise of the Web, has made peacemaking with Palestinians much less of a necessity for Israel and much more of a hobby. Consciously or unconsciously, a lot more Israelis seem to believe they really can have it all: a Jewish state, a democratic state and a state in all of the Land of Israel, including the West Bank — and peace.
So Israel, to Friedman, needs to make peace in order to maintain its Jewishness and its democracy, without both of which it loses its legitimacy. Never mind about the previous fifteen years in which Israel withdrew from much of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank to Friedman) leaving most of the Palestinians under Palestinian Authority jurisdiction.
Never mind that the Palestinians have used most of the time since the Oslo Accords to create a political culture opposed to Israel’s existence. Never mind that time and again the Palestinians have created a terrorist infrastructure with which to attack Israel and kill civilians. I could point out that Friedman doesn’t chide the Palestinians for wanting to have it all, but that’s an argument that he’s a hypocrite. His biggest sin isn’t hypocrisy though.
Essentially Friedman is telling the Palestinians: don’t make any deal with Israel. You have the ability to deny Israel its legitimacy. Demand everything; give nothing. You have no reason to compromise. Your legitimacy is assured but you can deny Israel its legitimacy. Friedman’s biggest sin is that he’s against peace.
Friedman gives another reason why Israel needs to make a deal with the Palesitnians.
Both Vice President Joe Biden and Gen. David Petraeus have been quoted recently as saying that the festering Israeli-Palestinian conflict foments anti-U.S. sentiments, because of the perception that America usually sides with Israel, and these sentiments are exploited by Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran to generate anti-Americanism that complicates life for our soldiers in the region. I wouldn’t exaggerate this, but I would not dismiss it either.
At most, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a complicating factor. It is not a primary threat to American interests. Friedman and the Obama administration can pretend that Israel makes dealing with Iran even harder, but when the United States is fruitlessly pursuing engagement with Syria, Hezbollah and Iran, is there any reason to assume that making peace between Israel and the Palestinians would really change them into friends? So in the vain hope that it will win the Arab/Muslim world they insist that Israel reach an accomodation with the Palestinians, even as the past 16 years shows that Israeli concessions (the major population centers in Judea and Samaria, Gaza, southern Lebanon) have made them no more loved than they were in 1993.
More generally, we’re told that the Arab/Muslim world is suspicious of the United States because of its support for Israel and its failure to solve the Palestinian problem. Are we really to believe that a region known for denying rights to Copts, Chadeans and Kurds really care about Palestinian self-determination? Are we to believe that nations who treat their own nationals worse than Israel treats Palestinians really care about Palestinians rights?
What they care about is Israel’s existence. Too many in the West – like Friedman – attribute a nobility to the Arab/Muslim support for the Palesitnians. But what the Arab/Muslim world has done is taken Western concepts and used them to cover up their own hatefulness. Don’t like Jews? Don’t deny it, but say it’s based on solidarity with the Palestinians. That makes it respectable. And there are plenty of people who will then excuse it.
But for the most part the argument that Israel ought to make peace so that it will have peace is no longer promoted. There is usually a primary argument that Israel must make peace for some other reason. The idea that Israel should be able to have normal relations with Palestinians or, more generally, with the Arab/Muslim world is assumed to be impossible. In other words, Israel is expected to continue making concessions to people who are never expected to accept Israel’s fundamental right to exist.
Fourteen years ago Charles Krauthammer wrote:
This is peace? “Israelis Unnerved by Peace That Kills,” says a Washington Post headline, March 5. Peace that kills? This is an absurd oxymoron. If peace means anything, it means at its very minimum an absence of violence. After all, “armistice” and “truce” — lesser forms of peace — mean cease-fire. Peace must mean at least that.
This Orwellian conjunction of peace and violence demonstrates the state of hypnosis that Americans and Israelis have placed themselves under since the September 1993 Handshake on the White House lawn. What followed has been called a peace process. It has been nothing of the kind. The Palestinian war on Israel has been unrelenting. More Israeli civilians have been massacred since the handshake than at any time in the entire history of the country.
The “peace process” is in fact nothing more than a unilateral Israeli withdrawal. The Palestinians have gotten Gaza, West Bank autonomy, huge influxes of foreign aid, international recognition, their own police force, their first free elections ever (something their Turkish, British, Egyptian and Jordanian rulers never granted them).
In return Israel has gotten what? Pats on the head from the United States. The occasional trade mission from Tunisia. And, from the Palestinians, death. This is peace?
Thanks to the use of force – Defensive Shield, the Second Lebanon War and Cast Lead – Israelis are no longer being terrorized as they had been. And while the ceasefires may be fragile they are real (except right now from Gaza). But the peace that Israel now enjoys does not derive from any signed agreement, concession made by Israel or commitment from any Arab party.
By now “peace process” ought to be relegated to the dustbin of history until the Arab world decides to accept Israel’s right to exist.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
