There have been quite a few threads about the Middle East situation in the past few weeks. Most of these have been largely ignored. I am starting another because I think that the Sbarro bombing today represents a watershed event. It is a decision point in Israel/Palestine policy in a number of respects. The Israelis have to decide whether to continue on their current “take out the militants” course of action, in the face of it looking like it is only aggravating a bad situation. The Palestinians actually have to decide to want a state (see below) and to implement a rule of law. The rest of the world has to decide on which side they stand, and if there will be active intervention in the region.
I approach the situation from an Israeli biased view, but this does not mean I dismiss Palestinian needs out of hand. I just have a few issues with the hypocracy that Israel is treated:
[ul][li]A sealing of borders is interpreted as a “blockade” of the whole Palestinian people. In what other part of the world is a sealing of a border with an enemy seen as a civil rights violation?[/li][li]Israel is seen as an aggressor for taking out militants, when this strategy only seeks to minimize a civilian loss on either side of the Green Line.[/li][li]Israel is seen as a racist and oppressive country, when it is the only close-to-democratic country in the region and its citizens, Arab and Jew, enjoy more human rights than all of its neighbors.[/li][/ul]
Anyway, I still think that Israel should swallow its pride, withdraw the settlements and hermetically seal the border. It can recognize a Palestinian government headed by Yasser Arafat. Do not give a choice, do not negotiate for more until the situation is peaceful. Declare a homeland at the borders decided on at Camp David last year. A hermetically sealed border will ensure no attacks in pre-1967 Israel, and no settlements may decrease Palestinian encitement. It also will prevent Israeli soldiers from getting killed in defending settlements filled with a few extremists. It will be a permanent trump card on the stage of world opinion. Everybody benefits.
The reason I think this is necessary is twofold. The first is that Arafat only has received legitimacy through fighting. When the chance came to have a homeland, to start building roads, to start providing health services and education, he turned it down flat. The Israelis at Camp David tried hard to see this situation, but all they got was a kick in the shins. The second reason is that many Israelis believe that the Palestinians do not want just a homeland in the West Bank and Gaza, they want to “push the Jews into the sea.” Having a homeland would reveal their true colors (which IMHO is for peaceful coexistence, I hope). Continued attacks can be met with a military response equal to that of a hostile, independent nation attacking and not that of armed rebellion. Bases can be bombed and leaders can be taken out, without international criticism.
Does anybody have any criticisms? Does anybody have other suggestions for a course of action? Do you think this situation will descend into a local, then regional war? In what ways can the violence be stopped?
Evict everyone, and turn the whole area over to the Six Flags Corp, or to Walt Disney Studios…
Seriously, it’s going to have to get so nasty that all the locals get sick of the blood, and given the history of the area, that’s not going to happen anytime soon. Standby for more low-intensity war.
Although the time frame cannot be known, I’d wager that the Middle East dilemma ultimately will be “resolved” through regional nuclear annihilation, resulting in the effective destruction (and irradiation) of Israel’s largest cities and a flood of refugees seeking asylum primarily in the United States.
A “hermetically sealed border” is meaningless in an era of nuclear warheads, intermediate-range missiles, Mach-2 fighter jets, centuries-old hate, and desperate madmen seeking a place at Allah’s side.
The sticking point will be the holy places, won’t it? As I recall, Israel offered to internationalize them, but the Palestinian Authority won’t accept anything less than total sovereignty over the holy sites. So unless Israel just cedes them outright to the Palestinians, which I can’t see happening, the war will continue even with Palestine formally declared independent.
There is also the sad fact that probably nothing Israel offers Arafat will stop the fighting, because Arafat can’t control his own militants. That was why he walked away from Barak’s amazing peace offer last year; if he’d accepted it, half the street fighters would have gone right on attacking settlers and Israeli troops whatever he told them, so the deal would only have revealed the impotence of his position and the futility of negotiating with him. My favorite columinist, Jonathan Rauch, wrote on this subject with his usual insight).
Not that I have any better ideas than you have. Hamas and Hezbollah want to fight, and they’re going to fight no matter what Israel does. We have to wait until the Palestinians run out of angry young men with blood in the face.
re: the assassination policy, it must be damn effective to get them so riled up. Reminds me of Col. Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, he assassinated the VC leadership first. Cut off the head, and the body will die.
There are rumors of an Israeli plan for total mobilization and a hot war to completely crush Palestinian resistance. I think it’s going to happen. The only thing that could prevent it is some brilliant statesmanship from the US President. Alas, that isn’t going to happen, GW doesn’t have it in him.
Danimal: Small nitpick ( otherwise I agree with the body of your post ) - Hezbollah is a Lebanese, not Palestinian, Shi’ite militia. Though I’m sure their sympathies are with Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the like.
They have this system kind of in place at the Northern border with Lebanon. This hasn’t prevented terror attacks, shellings, missile attacks, and abductions of Israeli soldiers across the borders. In fact, one such abduction was videotaped by a UN crew, and the UN didn’t even acknowledge it had the tape until a few weeks ago, and only let the IDF view it a few days ago.
<<A hermetically sealed border will ensure no attacks in pre-1967 Israel>>
You have a lot of faith in borders. But Israel has many hundreds of thousands of Palestinian and Arab citizens already within its own borders–many of them are citizens. And some of them are going to be pro-Palestine militants.
The Hamas types will still have contacts in Israel.
<<<There are rumors of an Israeli plan for total mobilization and a hot war to completely crush Palestinian resistance.>>>
Absent a campaign of genocide, or something akin to the Russkies in Grozny, this is a militarily impossible task.
Political and economic concerns would quickly overtake any such military campaign and bring it to a sputtering halt, to great embarrassment and shame of Israel, and only after the deaths of thousands. I think the Israeli military knows this, and wants no part of any such campaign.
Low intensity war is better than a high intensity war which cannot be won, and will turn the Israeli army into the murderers their opponents would like them to be percieved as.
The status quo, with 3 million Palestinians still living in hopeless squalor with no means of returning to Israel will not produce a peace, for the simple reason that young Palestinian men have no vested interest in peace.
When all you have is anger, you can’t be expected to give it up easily.
What is needed in Palestine? Massive investment. Economic development. Foreign aid. Real education. A financial system. A cottage industry in software or something. It will take years.
But who’s going to invest capital there? A sticky situation. But nothing Israel does–nothing they can reasonably offer, will produce peace, until Palestinians start to feel they have a vested interest in a future of peace.
“They can hold all the damn talks they want, but there will never be peace in the Middle East. Billions of years from now, when the Earth is about to be engulfed by the sun and microorganisms are the only living things left in the Middle East, those microorganisms will be bitter enemies” - Dave Barry in Dave Barry Turns 50
It’s not often that I quote a humorist in Great Debates, but I think he’s right on target here.
How can the violence be stopped? Shoot, better people than us have been searching for the solution for millenia. At this point, I doubt that anything besides direct intervention by God-with-a-capital-G will work. As long as there are fanatics in every camp who refuse to acknowledge that they’re all human beings and there really isn’t half a shekel’s worth of difference between them, the hostilities will never end.
I don’t like to be a cynic, but I defy anyone to disagree with me here.
It’s curious that one of Mr Bush’s first Foreign Policy decisions was to effectively pull out of the Middle-East peace process on the ground that the parties would better find a solution if left to themselves - contrary to at least 30 years of US Foreign Policy Doctrine. That did later change as he brought in those well-respected diplomatic negotiators, the CIA, into the picture.
The Middle-East – it is generally accepted, I believe – has not been closer to outright war for decades.
Mr Bush’s policy decisions seem even more curious, to me, given that unrest in that region and the world market prices for barrels of oil are so clearly interlinked. One might almost think a little unrest is good for business…
I tell Israel to whip out the nukes and fight the war like Ariel Sharon did 20 years ago. If it’s war they want, then it’s war they get. but make sure you show those uzi’s hot.
Then I’d tell the palestinian militants that the only way you are going to ‘win’ is to flood Israel with 4000000 suicide bombers. Considered your entire country, all of your people as martyrs to the cause. The thing is, after you are all gone, who will be left to fight for you?
You know, you guys should read a bit more history.
The Arab-Israeli conflict started in 1929. 72 years - that’s it. It’s not a “centuries’ old conflict”. In fact, if you look back over the past 1500 years, you’ll see that generally speaking, Jews got along with Muslims and Arabs far better than they did with, say, Christians. The conflict is a product of the political events of the twentieth century. It is not something unique.
Just look at other conflicts. Take the English and the French, for instance, and try to count how many wars these two countries had between the 14th and 19th centuries. I’d say that those two nations were much more “enternal enemies” than anyone in the Middle East, wouldn’t you?
Or how about the Russians and the Germans? The Chinese and the Japanese? The English and the Scots? The Greeks and the Turks? Now those were conflicts. I’d say that each of them seemed “eternal” to the people of their respective periods. Hell, even the Crusades were spread out over 150 years, and you don’t hear people whining about how the French and Syrians will never get along, do you?
Face it, people, what we have now is a conflict - perhaps a war - no more unusual than thousand of other conflicts in the past. Just because we happen to be alive right now doesn’t make our era special.
The Israeli Arabs are citizens of Israel. They have full rights of movement, voting, land ownership, gathering, etc. as any Israeli citizen. Sealing a border hermetically has been done with great success in Israel – look at Syria and Lebanon. Even Jordan until 1992, and Egypt until 1980 were hermetically sealed, with the result of far fewer attacks. I say seal it off until a new status quo is reached. If the Israeli Arabs don’t like it, they can leave. If they are pro-Palestine militants, they will be tried and prosecuted within the Israeli justice system, under Israeli rule of law.
The Palestinians have no right to Israel (pre 1967 borders). Moving 3 million (which is a shaky number which varies plus or minus 2 million depending on who you ask) violently anti-Israeli Palestinians into Israel is untenable. Creating new countries unfortunately causes population fluxes – it is the way of the world. Look at Kosovo or the Balkans in general. Reabsorbing that many Palestinian refugees into Israel (and most can’t prove that they ever owned land in Israel) would destroy Israel. Giving civil rights to one party cannot be done at the expense of another.
As I see it, creation of Palestine need not be a sticky situation, as you termed it. Conventional solutions abound, if both sides are party. The Palestinians have an infrastructure (Israeli built roads), they can negotiate for power and water. They even have a built-in tourist economy (Bethlehem, East Jerusalem, the Dead Sea, Gaza hotels, Hebron, Nablus, Jericho). What they need is a stable government and rule of law, and a little bit of foreign investment. In an ideal situation, with Israel as a peaceful partner, many Palestinians can seek employment at Israeli firms in order to get the foreign investment started.
So why isn’t it this easy? What is needed in Palestine is a government interested in governing and not in fighting. I will repeat: Arafat’s sole claim to legitimacy comes from fighting. In the past 8 years, when faced with opportunities to give up fighting and start governing, he has chosen fighting. He still maintains clauses calling for the destruction of Israel in the Palestinian charter. He doesn’t want to build schools or power grids or roads. He wants to kill Israelis. It is just that simple. He is a dictator. with security forces on hand which he can use to crush dissention if he so chooses – other Middle Eastern states do it all the time. All he would have to do is make some move against Hamas or Islamic Jihad – that is all it would take. Not once in the past 10 months has he arrested militants or spoken to his people to forbid future bombings (most of the announcements of this nature are released by WAFA to international sources but not broadcast within the territories). Until I see any action on his part, I will point my finger squarely at him.
I heartily disagree with Alessan’s characterization of the conflict. Yes, the antecedents of the current conflict probably arise from the Balfour Declaration and perhaps the Zionist movement before that, but the Palestinians themselves…
I have a difficult time being able to name a point in history, any point in history, when Palestine was not militarily occupied and ruled by an outside source. Perhaps somewhere between the height of the Roman Empire and the Crusades? Or maybe prior to that. I will be happy to stand corrected.
Are we to believe that the Palestinians are merely victims of geography? The vile demonstrations celebrating the deaths of innocents which I saw on TV just the other day would indicate otherwise to me.
True, it’s more complex than that, and believe you me - I would have found those demonstrations as vile as you did if I hadn’t been so damn accustomed to them.
You have to bear in mind, though, that this is the first time in a very long time that the actual inhabitants of Palestine/Israel were actually involved in the conflict over their lands. The Persians, Greeks, Egyptians, Syrians, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Mongols, Crusaders, Mameluks, Turks, French and British all invaded, but the usually fought other invaders - the downside of living . The last time inhabitants actually fought for the country was under Bar-Cochva in the mid-2nd Century, and the last time two groups of inhabitants fought each other… it was probably King David versus the Philistines.
The Arab-Israeli conflict is not based on centuries’-old hatred. It’s based on land and money and water and trade and freedom and democracy and religion and ideology and race and pride and history and stupidity - just like every other conflict in the world. I don’t know about the Palestinians, but most Israelis don’t hate Arabs. Sure, you have some racist idiots, but most people are just angry, frustrated and determined. Believe me, there are other people in the world that Jews hate much more than they do any Muslim.
Look, the bottom line is, if I had been born a Palestinian, I would be fighting for the Palestinian cause - although I’d like to believe that I would not accept the methods of some of my comrades. But I was born an Israeli, so I’ll fight for my country. It’s really as simple as that.
Well, with a reply as thoughtful and considerate as that, I’ll not be one to contradict you. It sounds like you have a more reasonable point of view than I do. I wish you the best of luck for the future.
Very well said and probably the most accurate assesment of the current situation. Bravo. But it does not address the OP in that it does not provide a hint as to what the possible (and most realistic) course of action should be in bringing about peace in the region.
A while ago I made a suggestion (in this thread) for a possible course of action for Israel. I’m not sure what happened to that post. I’ll try to summarize:
I suggested that sealing the borders, permanently annexing most of the occupied territories and severing all ties with the Palestinian Authority in the immediate future would probably get Palestinian attention and give Israel’s citizens a much needed respite from the threat of suicide bombings. Then, after some time, extend an invitation of immigration to all Palestinians who want to live peacefully within the state of Israel and uphold the rights and responsibilities associated with said citizenship. Do this in such a manner that the influx of immigrants is a controlled stream rather than a flood. I’m proposing that it need not be done in 2 or 5 years but perhaps over 10 or 20. In this way, Israel’s society and economy won’t be threatened and overwhelmed and can absorb the incomming population with relative ease. Of course the socio-political climate will also begin to change in Israel as Palestinians begin to have an economic, cultural and political influence on the entire state. But by this time, the Palestinians will have a vested interest in maintaining a peaceful and prosperous climate in which both Jews and Arabs can live in safety and mutual respect. The same can be said of the hardline Israeli minority who may be opposed to this kind of solution at first.
I don’t believe that this approach would be without it’s own set of challenges but it would truly be a test of the strength of Israel’s democracy.
