Soccer Dad

Instapundit on the Middle East

I was somewhat taken aback by reading Instapundit's recent comments about the Middle East.

THE UNITED STATES SHOULD NOT TRY to play a "neutral arbiter" in the Israeli/Palestinian dispute. We should, in fact, be doing our best to make the Palestinians suffer, because, to put it bluntly, they are our enemies. Just read this post and follow the links to see how they feel about America.

Not that I don't agree with these sentiments, I do.

It's just that his comments on the Middle East, while sympathetic to Israel, haven't betrayed this sort of vehemence in the past. But Reynolds is correct, the Palestinians are the enemies of civilization (certainly of Western civilization) and there's no polite way to say that. Reynolds takes them at their words and doesn't rationalize away the extremism that they promote.

Arafat's major accomplishment has been his successful misdirection by casting Palestinian nationalism as another liberation movement. Many in Israel and the rest of the West have bought into that. Either these people believe in the justice of the Palestinian cause but not its methods (or so they claim) or they believe in some inherent flaw in Zionism - the denial of rights to another nation - that must be corrected or both.

The first belief is contradicted by the 20th article of the Palestinian National Covenant:

Article 20:
The Balfour Declaration, the Mandate for Palestine, and everything that has been based upon them, are deemed null and void. Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history and the true conception of what constitutes statehood. Judaism, being a religion, is not an independent nationality. Nor do Jews constitute a single nation with an identity of its own; they are citizens of the states to which they belong.

Palestinian nationalism denies any historical connection between Jews and the land of Israel and seeks to replace the Jewish state, not live beside it. Nothing that has happened in the past ten years has suggested that this belief has changed. And it is a view held by most Palestinians too. In fact Yasser Arafat shocked President Clinton in 2000 by telling him that no Jewish temple existed on the Temple Mount. Clintos was reportedly startled by this declaration, but no one who is familiar with Palestinian nationalism should have been surprised.

Liberal minded supporters of Palestinian nationalism rationalize this belief away.

The second group has to explain why Ehud Barak was unable to achieve peace in the year 2000 despite offers to Assad and Arafat and a complete pullout from Lebanon (as confirmed by the UN!). People like Henry Siegman and Robert Malley will bring up excuses that Barak wasn't sincere or he didn't offer enough, but it doesn't address the fact that if Assad, Arafat and Lahoud/Hariri were serious about peace they would have counteroffered(the first two) or fulfilled their obligations (the latter two would have sent troops to Southern Lebanon to secure the area against Hezbollah).

Reynolds is also right on with this observation:

I also don't write about it much because the Palestinians, fundamentally, are the cannon fodder of other people who don't like the United States, and the real way to resolve this problem is to deal with those other people. And so it's those other people who get the bulk of my attention.

That is the view of no less than Daniel Pipes who wrote more than twenty years ago:

Recognizing the critical role of Arab help has several implications for Middle East politics. First, it means that the PLO has very little of the political power so often ascribed to it. The PLO may appear to shape the policy of most Arab states, but in fact it reflects their wishes. It brings up the rear, echoing and rephrasing the weighted average of Arab sentiments. This suggests that it will moderate only when its Arab patrons want it to; so long as the Arab consensus needs it to reject Israel, the PLO must do so. Aspiring peacemakers in the Middle East must therefore not make settlement of the Arab-Israeli dispute contingent on PLO concurrence, for this is to give a veto to the organization least prone to compromise.

Second, while Arab rulers make the PLO rich and prominent, they also prevent it from becoming a representative body, an effective one, or a decent one. So long as it exists, the PLO will continue to ill-serve Palestinians by subordinating their interests to those of Qadhdhafi, Fahd, Asad, and Saddam Husayn. Do the Palestinians have an alternative to the PLO? Can they develop their own institutions, independent of the Arab states, which would cast off the PLO's illusory ambitions, discard its autocratic structure, accommodate Israel's existence, and promote practical interests? The "New Palestinian Movement" reportedly organized last fall in South Lebanon, the attempt of Palestinians living in the West to organize politically, or the efforts of West Bank mayors are moves in this direction. But their hopes of success must be slim, for no fledgling refugee organization has much chance against the weight of Arab consensus, which is still vested in the PLO.

(Read the whole article, of course, if you haven't already.)

I think it's wonderful that the world's most prominent blogger has weighed in so forcefully on the issue. I still wouldn't hold my breath waiting for dead tree publishers or State Department to catch on.
Crossposted on Israpundit and Soccer Dad.

Posted by SoccerDad at January 1, 2004 2:49 PM