Soccer Dad

The middle east in static flux

Jim Hoagland in "Is the roadmaps moment gone?" writes:

The United States, its European and Arab allies, and the United Nations have labored for four months to turn Israel's unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip into a catalyst for the creation of an independent, viable Palestinian state. They are visibly failing.

Law and order have disappeared in the Gaza territory since the Israeli withdrawal. Kidnappings and gunfights, not campaign rallies, are the tools of electioneering there. Financial mismanagement by Mahmoud Abbas's Palestinian Authority has forced the World Bank to freeze $60 million in budget support and effectively move the PA toward bankruptcy in a matter of weeks.

How does Hoagland explain this:

The road map, like most formulas for peacemaking, is based on the commendable premise that everyone deserves a second or even third chance. Right now the Palestinians are severely testing that article of faith -- at a moment when they have everything to gain from taking responsibility for their affairs and demonstrating political maturity.

Forcing Egyptian police officers and European Union observers to flee their posts for safety hardly suggests maturity. Neither does the decision by the Palestinian Authority to raise salaries and break its commitment to live within the large aid flows that international donors provide. That act triggered the freeze on budget support by the World Bank.

Maturity? I don't buy it. It goes to the very nature of Palestinian nationalism. As I've written before:

It is necessary for the Palestinians to believe that there's no historical connection between Jews and Israel, and that Jews are Europeans who moved to and conquered their land. These myths give a legitimacy to their cause. It also makes Palestinian nationalism and Zionism mutually exclusive ideologies. One, Zionism, is based on the idea that after 2000 years of exile Jews are returning to their land. The other says that Jews have no ties to the land and therefore the Palestinians can determine what degree of a Jewish presence is legitimate.

Elder of Ziyon covered a different angle of this in "Plastics":

Two groups of people, both with ostensibly the same aims of their own independent country - yet how they went about actually building it could not be more different. One group chooses terror and hate, while the other just quietly builds what has to be built - no excuses, no whining, just results.

Charles Krauthammer also put it nicely (but not perfectly) in "'Munich' the travesty":

Spielberg makes the Holocaust the engine of Zionism and its justification. Which, of course, is the Palestinian narrative. Indeed, it is the classic narrative for anti-Zionists, most recently the president of Iran, who says that Israel should be wiped off the map. And why not? If Israel is nothing more than Europe's guilt trip for the Holocaust, then why should Muslims have to suffer a Jewish state in their midst?

It takes a Hollywood ignoramus to give flesh to the argument of a radical anti-Semitic Iranian. Jewish history did not begin with Kristallnacht. The first Zionist Congress occurred in 1897. The Jews fought for and received recognition for the right to establish a "Jewish national home in Palestine" from Britain in 1917 and from the League of Nations in 1922, two decades before the Holocaust.

But the Jewish claim is far more ancient. If the Jews were just seeking a nice refuge, why did they choose the malarial swamps and barren sand dunes of 19th-century Palestine? Because Israel was their ancestral home, site of the first two Jewish commonwealths for a thousand years -- long before Arabs, long before Islam, long before the Holocaust. The Roman destructions of 70 A.D and 135 A.D. extinguished Jewish independence but never the Jewish claim and vow to return home. The Jews' miraculous return 2,000 years later was tragic because others had settled in the land and had a legitimate competing claim. Which is why Jews have for three generations offered to partition the house. The Arab response in every generation has been rejection, war and terrorism.

Palestinian nationalism has been nurtured by solicitous politicians, diplomats, academics and journalists that its grievance against Israel is legitimate and that until its grievance is satisfactorily resolved Israel's legitimacy is unsecured. But since that grievance isn't about 1967 (despite what some say) but 1948, it can never be settled by anything Israel does. In the meantime the world tsk tsks at Palestinian violence saying "We can't condone it, but we understand it" never demanding that the violence cease as a precondition for peace.

Hoagland wrote that peacemaking "is based on the commendable premise that everyone deserves a second or even third chance." No it's based on the necessary premise that both sides to a conflict wish its solution. In the Arab (not just Palestinian) Israeli conflict; one side hasn't reached that point. Until the Arab world wants a solution to the conflict there is no mechanism: no Oslo, no Wye, no Camp David, no Road Map, that will solve it.

Hoagland, I give credit to, at least he's thinking about the problem before him. I think his answer is to glib but at least he tried. On the other hand, Thomas Friedman, in "Wanted: an Arab Sharon" (NY Times; Jan 11, 2006) simply repackages his long held beliefs rather than do any heavy intellectual lifting.

As mentioned above the reason there's no Arab Sharon (that's Sharon of later than 2003) is because the Arabs haven't been required to accept Israel. Their hostitility towards Israel is explained away not confronted. Most risible is when Friedman writes:

So Ariel Sharon the prime minister had a lot of problems to clean up from Ariel Sharon the defense minister and agriculture minister. Indeed, when Mr. Sharon was asked why he'd reversed himself and uprooted the Jewish settlements in Gaza and a few in the West Bank, he famously referred to the prime minister's chair: ''You see things from here that you don't see from there.'' He could finally see that overbuilding settlements imperiled Israel's Jewish and democratic character. So he promptly destroyed the very right-wing party he'd built -- Likud -- to spread those settlements.

Could PM Sharon see what Friedman sees? It's funny, defense minister Sharon and agriculture minister Sharon clearly differed from Thomas Friedman, but Friedman doesn't acknowledge that Sharon's earlier might have seen things he (Friedman) didn't see. Only when Sharon's actions jibed with Friedman's beliefs did Friedman quote the Prime Minister on seeing things differently. That's not analysis; it's arrogance.

And Friedman doesn't even consider the possibility that PM Sharon would not have attempted disengagement if he hadn't first fought against Hamas and other terrorist organizations. Friedman came only to bury Sharon, not to praise him.

Toward the end Friedman writes:

But Mr. Sharon's change of heart will end this conflict only if there is among Israel's remaining Arab foes an Arab Sharon (another Anwar Sadat or King Hussein) ready to act the same. Yasir Arafat and Hafez al-Assad of Syria were never ready to definitively look their peoples in the eye and tell them the campaign to destroy Israel was over. The old Arafat and the old Assad were just like the young Arafat and the young Assad. No matter how high they rose, they could not see any further for their people.

That is correct. So if the causus belli still exists how does giving the enemy more land going to help matters. He still seems to believe that Hezbollah won't attack Israel because Israel's withdrawn from Lebanon. But he fails to acknowledge that Hezbollah, Syria's and Iran's client, still seeks to perpetuate its grievance against Israel by laying claim to Shebaa farms for Lebanon (with Syria's permission of course).

Nothing Israel does will change the Arab attitudes toward it. Friedman wrote earlier:

Leadership is not what you do to the other side. That's always easy. It is what you say to your own. Looking your own people in the eye and saying, in deeds if not words, ''I was wrong. We have to reverse course'' -- now, that's leadership.

Friedman is not a leader, he's a columnist, so maybe that's why he hasn't had to admit that he's been wrong. His insistence on equating peace with Israeli ceding lands to Arabs hasn't worked, doesn't work and won't work in the future. Until there's a sea change in Arab attitudes toward Israel. Until that happens Israel needs all the strategic depth it has and control the ground as much as possible (so a flow of arms can't reach terrorists in Judea and Samaria as they are now doing in Gaza.)

Even if the lack of change of attitudes in the Arab world prevents peace from being achieved in the Middle East; it's worth asking how much had PM Sharon had changed. Those, like Thomas Friedman believe that the PM fully accepted Peace Now's vision and was going to throw Jews out of their homes in all areas except for few "settlement" blocs close to the center of Israel.

But Dan Diker reports that it isn't all clear what PM Sharon had in mind. Though some of his new-found friends believe that he would have withdrawn from upwards of 90% of Judea and Samaria. Or maybe not:

Raviv Drucker, a political commentator for Israel's Channel 10 television, wrote in Boomerang, his recent book on the Gaza disengagement, that Weisglass was known to have expressed his personal support in closed circles for Yossi Beilin's Geneva Initiative.12 According to Drucker and co-author Ofer Shiloah, Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, another key player in Sharon's inner circle, envisioned a process of unilateral disengagements in the West Bank that would lead to Israel retaining 15 percent of the territory.13 Were these Sharon advisors reflecting his true thinking or were they seeking to use Sharon to advance their own foreign policy agenda?

More recent declarations by leading members of Sharon's new Kadima party have added further to the confusion. For example, in the first publicly released draft of the Kadima platform, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni declared that Israel would retain the settlement blocs, but the document said nothing about the Jordan Valley. "One does not have to be a genius to see that the fence will have implications for the future border," Livni noted.14 After Likud Knesset member Gideon Saar criticized the omission, Sharon issued a clarification that Israel would retain the Jordan Valley as a "security zone."15

So the question remains would PM Sharon have withdrawn Israel from enough of Judea and Samaria to satisfy most pundits? Maybe yes, maybe no. But what was clear - though not to the pundits - was that it wouldn't make peace while making life more dangerous for Israel, because it wouldn't satisfy Arab demands.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Ariel Sharon.

Crossposted on Israpundit and Soccer Dad.