He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors."
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down!"
- Robert Frost, “Mending Wall”
Whatever we may think about the purported security benefits of the Iraq War, does anyone doubt that a lasting peace settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians would make us all instantly feel a whole lot safer, by defusing one of the world’s most prolonged sources of military conflict, political violence, ethnic hatred, anti-Americanism, and global terrorism?
Yet we listened in vain to President Bush’s State of the Union message last week for one single mention of Israel or the Palestinians. We also failed to find any vision on this basic homeland security issue from any of the Democratic Party’s top Presidential candidates in their recent speeches and debates. Instead, this year, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seems to have become a kind of “Third Rail” issue in American politics, best avoided at all costs.
This is certainly not because the problem has gone away. Indeed, quite the contrary. In Israel, the West Bank/ Gaza, and Lebanon the tit-for-tat killings continue, with, for example, eight Palestinians killed on January 28, followed by ten Israelis killed on January 29.
As discussed below, the two sides now appear to be farther apart than ever, with no peace negotiations in sight, the Sharon Government entangled in a messy corruption scandal, the Palestinians about to re-elect the equally duplicitous, embunkered Yasser Arafat as their President, and Israel accelerating the construction of a $3 billion “security barrier” that could turn any future “Palestinian state” into an unworkable archipelago of checkpoint- and bypass-ridden Bantustans.
At the current pace, by the time a new US President takes office in 2005, more than two-thirds of this barrier will already be complete. To the Israelis, who are sick and tired of suicide bombings, the barrier may appear to be a rational defensive measure. To the Palestinians, the barrier is neo-apartheid, and the introduction of defacto political boundaries for their pathetic new "state" that will be very hard to modify once it is in place.
So Israel is become Pharaoh, and the Palestinians have become the world's new Jews -- wretched, despised, stateless, and divided, strangers in a strange land indeed. And the world's most powerful nations are apparently content to sit by idly once again, washing their hands of the situation.
Indeed, it now appears that all these developments are already beginning to induce a slow-motion version of the population transfer that an increasing share of the Israeli public may support, and that many Israeli militants and security strategists have long been seeking as a (...ahem..)"final solution" to the Palestinian problem. But this would hardly be a just solution, or one that is worthy of the best traditions of these two great peoples. Nor is it one that the US and Europe would have any business whatsoeversubsidizing, supporting, or trading with.
This is the first in a series of articles that will examine several aspects of the current Israeli-Palestinian stalemate, including (1) divisions among Palestinian leaders, (2) the “demographic Intifada,” (3) Israel’s security barrier, (4) the negative effects that the prolonged conflict and occupation are having on Israeli and Palestinian values and culture, and (5) the tremendous “upside” potential that Israel and Palestine both have if only peace could be reestablished once and for all.
Obviously these are complex issues, and this is a controversial subject that already has more than its share of professional partisans and "regional experts." But too much is now at stake for us to relegate the debate to such “embedded” observers. After all, it is not as if all the armies of professional partisans and region-watchers have brought us peace.
FOR THIS WE FOUGHT A WAR?
Of course, in the run-up to the US invasion of Iraq, the war was marketed and sold to the people of the US and the UK mainly as a matter of their own national security. But most astute observers -- at least those outside our vaunted "intelligence" agencies -- knew full well that the best case for this adventure had little to do with Saddam’s purported direct threat to the US or the UK, much less ending Saddam’s tyranny, reconstructing Iraq’s entire political system, fomenting Arab democracy in general, or even securing our oil supplies.
The best case for the war – as put by the UK’s Tony Blair -- was that it might actually contribute to overall peace in the Middle East, by removing Saddam as a direct threat to Israel and encouraging Israel’s many other enemies in the region to become less hostile.
The hope was that this, in turn, would make the Palestinians more reasonable about contentious issues like Jerusalem and the “right of return.”
It might also make Israel feel more secure and undermine its own influential minority of religious extremists, many of whom view the Palestinians quite frankly as violent aborigines and the continued occupation of “Judea and Samaria” -- the 22 percent of “Palestine” that Israel did not control prior to 1967 -- as a G-d-given birthright.
From this angle, one of Iraq War’s greatest disappointments is that it has not so far brought an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement any closer. Instead:
- On top of the US Presidential election race, the Iraq War appears to have completely distracted the US media, the public, and our political leaders from the Israeli-Palestinian issue.
- The War has also proved astronomically expensive, squandering at least $166 billion that might have been better spent on other things, including the costs of a Middle East peace settlement.
- The War may have had some salutary effects on Iran, Syria, and Libya. But the Sharon Government has, if anything, recently hardened its stance toward these countries, rejecting Syria’s recent feelers, threatening unilateral strikes against Iran’s alleged nuclear facilities, and making a series of confusing statements about its plans to double the number of Israeli settlers on the Golan Heights.
- The Iraq War has also reinforced American hostility toward Muslims in general, and encouraged the tendency to lump all Palestinian militants together with al-Qaeda and Taliban extremists, Ba’ath loyalists, and Iranian fundamentalists. According to one recent poll, 67 percent of US adults now believe that the Palestinians do not deserve an independent state. A year earlier, before the war, only about 44 percent felt this way. Admittedly, the later poll was sponsored by a right-leaning Israeli organization, and may be exaggerated. But both polls contrast sharply with opinion in Europe as a whole, where almost 60 percent now believe that Israel itself is the "number one threat" to global security, and two-thirds favor an independent Palestinian state. US politicians may simply be following the advice of the cowardly fellow who once remarked, “I am their leader; I will follow them anywhere.”
Overall, these attitudes have discouraged the US from playing the kind of hands-on, “honest broker” role that is necessary for any progress to be made in this seemingly-interminable dispute. And that has only played into the hands of the rejectionists on both sides -- and the continuation of the “global terrorist threat.”
While the conventional wisdom is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can only be settled by voluntary negotiations, if one thing is absolutely clear from the last decade, it is that, left to their own devices, these two particular parties will never reach a final peace settlement on their own.
Now more than ever, they have both become what the Israeli historian Bennie Morris has termed “righteous victims.” Both sides perceive that there is no one on the other side who can be trusted to pursue good-faith negotiations. Given the US' recent passivity, they may also perceive that there is no mediator with the moral authority and independence to guide them toward an enforceable deal. This is a recipe for escalating violence.
So, nine months after the invasion of Iraq, nearly a year after President Bush’s endorsement of the Quartet’s “road map” and a two-state solution, three years after the start of the al-Iqsa Intifada in September 2000, and more than ten years after the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords, it seems that the Bush/Quartet road map is leading nowhere.
This situation cries out for a tough outside mediator – a role that, historically, only the US has been equipped to play. Unfortunately, this is an election year, an inconvenient time. But if President Bush really wants to justify his Iraq invasion, boost homeland security, and show that he can make peace as well as war, he should locate his mislaid “road map” before it is too late. Should he ignore this "intelligence," we will not need to convene a national commission to determine whether it was provided.
***
© James S. Henry, SubmergingMarkets.Com, 2004
Comments