Soccer Dad

An idea that was hackneyed ten years ago

Newsweek columnists Richard Wolffe and Holly Bailey offer A Modest Proposal how "President Bush can help stabilize the entire Middle East." Wouldn't you know it? It's by "...concentrating on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."

The Bush administration's approach to what is left of the Palestinian Authority remains mired in its anti-Hamas stance. The Bush administration considers Hamas a despicable terrorist group that glorifies mass murder. But it isn't rocket science to figure out ways to sidestep the Hamas government—through Fatah (its old rival), the United Nations or nongovernmental groups. It is in nobody's interests—including Israel's—for Gaza to continue its descent into gangland anarchy. It's also in nobody's interests to give up on the plans of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to withdraw from parts of the West Bank.

I can't get over this sentence:

The Bush administration considers Hamas a despicable terrorist group that glorifies mass murder.

Does that mean that Wolffe and Bailey don't consider Hamas a despicable terror group? And bypassing Hamas will accomplish what? Fatah is run by a Holocaust denier and has its very own affiliated terror group. A high commissioner of the UN just visited Israel and refused to meet with the families of the kidnapped soldiers. And NGO's like Human Rights Watch regularly hold Israel to some impossible level of conduct and rarely condemn the terrorists whose attacks precipitated the Israeli response. (This week's condemnation of Hamas using citizens as human shields, is an exception.)

And why is it in anyone interests for Israel to continue withdrawing territory captured in 1967? Israel withdrew from Gaza strengthening Hamas. Israeli withdrew from its longterm but temporary deployment in Lebanon and strengthened Hezbollah.

Bush doesn't need to approach the Palestinian situation alone. He should do so together with Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia—and he could use it as a template for cooperation elsewhere, such as Iraq and Iran. He may not succeed in bringing peace to the Palestinians and Israelis. But the process itself would boost Bush's low standing in the region and his ability to achieve his goals, especially in Iraq. The lesson of Lebanon, and of Bush's second term, is that the United States is far more powerful when it works with its friends on the world's toughest challenges.

Ah but the effort won't be alone. The United States should get help from Saudi Arabia. The Saudis contributed a "peace plan" to the Middle East that makes specific demands of Israel and makes vague promises in return. Egypt has been allowing the smuggling of arms into Gaza. And now they're going to help make peace between Israel and the Palesitnians?

So say the United States solves the Israeli/Palestinian conflict how is that going to stop the Sunni/Shi'ite killings? How is that going to rein in the Iranian designs on the region (if not the world) especially the power of its puppet Hezbollah and ally Syria now attemtping to destabilize Lebanon?

Wolffe and Bailey have the answer: with a template of co-operation.

Historically templates of cooperation have been very effective in bringing peace and order to the world. Wasn't it a template of cooperation that caused the Axis to surrrender in WWII? And wasn't it a template of cooperation that prevented Saddam from obtaining nuclear weapons, ejected him from Kuwait and finally ousted him from power in Baghdad?

This article is so incredibly hackneyed, it wasn't original ten years ago. But ten years ago, maybe you could still argue that solving the Israeli/Palestinian conflict could yield dividends elsewhere. Now the only conclusion you can draw is that pushing for its solution is likely to make matters worse.

Why the focus on Palestinian Israeli peace as a starting point? Because it's the one place where diplomatic pressure works. That's because Israel has an elected government that's accountable to the people and the Israeli people want peace. A government deemed as working against peace won't survive. (Netanyahu did more for peace than Arafat by any measure and yet since the Clinton administration - and many others - deemed Netanyahu obstructionist, his government fell in three years.)

But no matter how much the Israeli government changes either due to pressure or due to its own convictions, Israel will never get peace until the Arab world changes its view of Israel.

Right now Israel has changed politically to the point that the current ruling party, Kadima, is considered centrist. Yet there is little to distinguish Kadima's views on peace from the views of the extreme left in Israel of fifteen years ago. For better or for worse, Israel has changed politically. These changes are dramatic.

On the Arab side the lack of change; the lack of any sense of accomodation is striking. In his column this week Daniel Pipes wrote

Ninety-two percent of respondents in a recent poll of one thousand Egyptians over 18 years of age called Israel an enemy state. In contrast, a meager 2% saw Israel as "a friend to Egypt."

These hostile sentiments express themselves in many ways, including a popular song titled "I Hate Israel," venomously antisemitic political cartoons, bizarre conspiracy theories, and terrorist attacks against visiting Israelis. Egypt's leading democracy movement, Kifaya, recently launched an initiative to collect a million signatures on a petition demanding the annulment of the March 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty.

Also, the Egyptian government has permitted large quantities of weapons to be smuggled into Gaza to use against Israeli border towns. Yuval Steinitz, an Israeli legislator specializing in Egypt-Israel relations, estimates that fully 90% of PLO and Hamas explosives come from Egypt.

Cairo may have no apparent enemies, but the impoverished Egyptian state sinks massive resources into a military build up. According to the Congressional Research Service, it purchased $6.5 billion worth of foreign weapons in the years 2001-04, more than any other state in the Middle East. In contrast, the Israeli government bought only $4.4 billion worth during that period and the Saudi one $3.8 billion.

Keep in mind, Pipes's description isn't of Syria. Or Saudi Arabia. But of Egypt, a country that signed a peace treaty with Israel over a quarter of a century ago. Peace was deemed so important that Egypt was granted $2 billion in aid annually and is considered friendly to the United States even though it votes against American interests over 80% of the time in the UN.

And pay attention to what Pipes wrote about the democracy movement in Egypt. It too is anti-Israel. The democracy movements throughout the Arab world are the same. They're for more open government, but maintain the same antipathy to Israel, but are hailed in the West for the former while the latter sentiment is discretely ignored.

In fact the big problem in the Middle East is that the United States (and the West) has been too tolerant, if not indulgent of Arab/Islamic antisemitism (and its political manisfestation in its opposition to Israel's existence.) It's great to encourage the political opening of the Arab world, but if those agitating for opening are just as closed to Israel's existence as the current elites, there is little hope that any solution will be any more successful than Oslo.

In the United Nations the Bush administration has made of stating clearly that any one-sided resolution condemning Israel will earn an automatic veto in the Security Council. The American ambassadors have successfully implemented this policy and Israel's enemies and critics still cannot find it in themselves to attempt any evenhanded resolutions.

The leadership the Bush administration needs to show, is not what Wolffe and Bailey call for, but a concerted effort to stand up for Israel (and the West). The Saudis who are cited as possible helpers in solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict put an empty "peace proposal" on the table four and a half years ago.

Why not demand that the Saudis implement some real confidence building measures. Ask that the Saudis take the lead in the Arab of pushing for Israel to be included in the same regional group in the UN as the Arab world. Israel's exclusion from the regional group is the reason it has been denied a seat on the Security Council. Ask the Saudis to lead the Arab world in dropping their opposition to accepting the Mogen David as a protected symbol of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

For too long the agitation for Palestinian rights has allowed the despotic Arab world to escape responsibility for the tyranny under which most of its population lives. (And they get "legitimacy" for the cause by citing the democratic voting in the UN; the same mechansim they deny their own people.)

If the Arabs want to change they can. It won't be as easy as pressuring Israel for more concessions. But it will be more effective. It will have to be.

And please don't tell me that Sunnis and Shi'ites will stop killing each other if only the United States solves the Palestinian Israeli conflict.

UPDATE: A featured post at Memeorandum.

UPDATE: A number of comments on this article here. Garry Weinstein's is excellent.

Technorati tags: Israel, Peace Process, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Daniel Pipes.

Posted by SoccerDad at November 23, 2006 2:42 PM