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| Michael Ejercito... |
 Posted: Thu Oct 15, 2009 5:48 am |
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Peace vs. the 'peace process'
by Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
October 14, 2009
http://www.jeffjacoby.com/6418/peace-vs-the-peace-process
"WHOM THE GODS WOULD DESTROY," the late Irving Kristol once observed,
"they first tempt to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict." Maybe
"destroy" was putting it a bit strongly, but there is no denying that
American presidents seem irresistibly drawn to the belief that they
can succeed where others have failed and conjure a lasting peace
between Israel and its Arab enemies. This diplomacy has gone by
various names -- Oslo, the Roadmap, Camp David, and so on -- but time
and again it has led not to the end of the conflict but to its
intensification.
In his memoirs, former President Bill Clinton describes Yasser
Arafat's refusal to accept the extraordinarily generous terms for a
permanent settlement offered by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak at
Camp David in 2000. That refusal led to a Palestinian terror war, the
bloody Second Intifada, and when Arafat called Clinton in January 2001
to tell him what a great man he was, Clinton was bitter. "I am not a
great man," he told Arafat. "I am a failure, and you have made me
one."
Of course, if Clinton was a failure so were the two George Bushes.
Each made it his goal to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict, each
convened a grand international conference for that purpose (Bush 41 in
Madrid, Bush 43 in Annapolis), and each left the situation worse than
he had found it.
In his first nine months as president, Barack Obama has shown every
sign of succumbing to the same temptation. Two days after moving in to
the White House, he named George Mitchell, the former Senate majority
leader, his special envoy to the region. He pressured Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into endorsing a "two-state solution." He
declared that "the moment is now for us to act" to achieve peace in
the Middle East.
Unlike his recent predecessors, Obama has gone out of his way to
signal a distinct coolness toward Israel and its interests. At a White
House meeting with the leaders of American Jewish organizations in
July, he suggested that because there had been "no daylight" between
Israel and the United States when George W. Bush was president, there
had been "no progress" toward peace.
In fact, there had often been "daylight" between Washington and
Jerusalem during the Bush years. There had been plenty of movement
too, from the adoption of the Roadmap to the Israeli "disengagement"
from Gaza to the final-status negotiations that followed the Annapolis
conference.
Still: Obama was right when he said there had been no progress toward
Arab-Israeli peace under Bush. Nor had there been any under Clinton.
Nor, as things stand now, will there be any under Obama.
Why? Because the "peace process" to which all of them, their sharp
differences notwithstanding, have been so committed is not a formula
for ending the decades-long war in the Holy Land, but for prolonging
it.
Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shake hands at the White House in
September 1993, launching the Oslo "peace process." What resulted was
not peace but an intensified war.
In an important article in the current Middle East Quarterly, Daniel
Pipes reviews the terrible failure of the 1993 Oslo accords, and homes
in on the root fallacy of the diplomatic approach it embodied: the
belief that the Arab-Israeli war can "be concluded through goodwill,
conciliation, mediation, flexibility, restraint, generosity, and
compromise, topped off with signatures on official documents." For 16
years, Israeli governments, prodded by Washington, have sought to
quench Palestinian hostility with concessions and gestures of
goodwill. Yet peace today is more elusive than ever.
"Wars end not through goodwill but through victory," Pipes writes,
defining victory as one side compelling the other to give up its war
goals. Since 1948, the Arabs' goal has been the elimination of Israel;
the Israelis', to win their neighbors' acceptance of a Jewish state in
the Middle East. "If the conflict is to end, one side must lose and
one side win," argues Pipes. "Either there will be no more Zionist
state or it will be accepted by its neighbors."
Diplomacy cannot settle the Arab-Israeli conflict until the
Palestinians abandon their anti-Israel rejectionism. US policy should
be focused, therefore, on getting them to abandon it. The Palestinians
must be put "on notice that benefits will flow to them only after they
prove their acceptance of Israel. Until then -- no diplomacy, no
discussion of final status, no recognition as a state, and certainly
no financial aid or weapons."
So long as American and Israeli leaders remain committed to a
fruitless Arab-Israeli "peace process," Arab-Israeli peace will remain
unachievable. Let the newest Nobel peace laureate grasp and act upon
that insight, and he may do more to genuinely hasten the conflict's
end than any of his well-meaning predecessors.
(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.) |
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