What next in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, which
some call the “peace process”?
I shall argue three points: that these negotiations
have been so counterproductive, they could better be called the “war process”;
that their failure results from an Israeli conceptual error fifteen years ago about
the nature of warfare; and that the U.S. government should urge Jerusalem to forego
negotiations and return instead to its earlier policy of deterrence.
Reviewing the “Peace Process”
It is embarrassing to recall the elation and
expectations that accompanied the signing of the Oslo accords in September 1993, when Prime
Minister Yitzhak Rabin shook hands with Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader.
For some years afterward, “The Handshake” (as it was known) served as the
symbol of brilliant diplomacy,
whereby each side achieved what it most wanted: dignity and autonomy for the Palestinians, recognition and
security for the Israelis.
President Bill Clinton lauded the deal as a “great
occasion of history.” Secretary of State Warren Christopher ruminated on how
“the impossible is within our reach.” Yasir Arafat called it an “historic event,
inaugurating a new epoch.” Foreign Minister Shimon Peres of Israel discerned in it “the outline of peace in
the Middle East.” The
press enthused; one columnist, Anthony Lewis of The New York Times, deemed the agreement “ingeniously built” and “stunning.” Time
magazine made the three principals its “men of the year” for 1993.
Figure 1 Yitzhak Rabin and
Yasir Arafat shake hands in September 1993, with President Clinton watching.
These heady expectations were then grievously disappointed.
Before Oslo,
when Palestinians lived under Israeli control, they benefited from the rule of
law and a growing economy, independent of international welfare. They enjoyed functioning
schools and hospitals, they traveled without checkpoints and had free access to
Israeli territory. They even founded universities. Terrorism was declining as acceptance
of Israel
increased. Then came Oslo,
which brought Palestinians not peace but tyranny, failed institutions, poverty,
corruption, a death cult, suicide factories, and Islamist radicalization. Yasir
Arafat early on had promised that the West Bank and Gaza
would evolve into the “Singapore
of the Middle East,” but the reality he shaped became a nightmare
of dependence, inhumanity, and loathing.
To Israelis, Oslo brought
unprecedented terrorism; if the two hands in the Rabin-Arafat handshake
symbolized Oslo’s
early hopes, the two bloody hands of a young Palestinian male who had just
lynched Israeli reservists in Ramallah in October 2000 represented its dismal end. Oslo also provoked deep internal rifts and harming
the country’s standing internationally. Israelis watched helplessly as
Palestinian rage spiraled upwards, spawning such moral perversions as the U.N.
World Conference Against Racism in Durban.
That rage also re-opened among Westerners the issue of their country’s
continued existence, especially on the Left. From Israel’s
perspective, seven years of Oslo
diplomacy largely undid 45 years’ success in warfare.
Palestinians and Israelis agree on little, but they
concur that the Oslo
accords failed.
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Figure
2 A young Palestinian shows
off his bloody hands after lynching two Israeli reservists in October 2000.
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Yitzhak Rabin’s Error
Why did things go so badly wrong? Where lay the flaws
in so promising an agreement?
Of its multiple
errors, the ultimate mistake lay in Yitzhak Rabin’s misunderstanding of how war
ends, as revealed by his catch-phrase, “one does not make peace with
one's friends. One makes peace with one's enemy.” The Israeli prime minister implied
that war is concluded through a mix
of goodwill, conciliation, concessions, mediation, flexibility, restraint,
generosity, and compromise, all topped off with signatures on official
documents. In this spirit, his government initiated an array of concessions, hoping
that Palestinians would reciprocate.
They did
not. Those concessions, in fact, made matters worse. Still in war mode,
Palestinians understood Israeli efforts to “make peace” as signals of
demoralization and weakness. The concessions reduced Palestinian awe of the
country, made it appear vulnerable, and incited irredentist dreams of its annihilation.
Each Oslo-negotiated gesture by Israel
further exhilarated, radicalized, and mobilized the Palestinian body politic. The
quiet hope of 1993 to eliminate Israel
gained traction, becoming a deafening demand by 2000. Venomous speech and
violent actions soared. Polls and votes suggest a mere 20 percent of the Palestinian
population today accepts Israel’s
simple right to exist.
Rabin
made a shattering mistake, which his successors repeated. One does not “make
peace with one’s enemy” but with one’s former
enemy. Peace nearly always requires one side in a conflict to give up its
goals by being defeated. Rather
than vainly trying to close down a war through goodwill, the way to end a war
is by winning it.
“War is an act
of violence to compel the enemy to fulfill our will,” wrote the Prussian
strategist Karl von Clausewitz in 1832, and technological advancement has not altered
this insight. So long as both sides hope to achieve their war ambitions,
fighting either continues or potentially can resume. Victory consists of
imposing one’s will on the enemy by compelling him to give up his war goals. Wars
usually end when one side gives up its hope of winning, when its will to fight has been crushed.
Defeat, one
might think, usually follows on a devastating battlefield loss, as was the case
of the Axis in 1945. But that has rarely occurred during the past sixty years. Battlefield
losses by the Arab states to Israel
in 1948-82, by North Korea
in 1953, by Saddam Hussein in 1991, and by Iraqi Sunnis in 2003 did not
translate into despair and giving up. Morale and will have consistently matter
more. Despite out-manning
and out-gunning their foes, the French gave up in Algeria,
the Americans in Vietnam,
and the Soviets in Afghanistan.
The Cold War ended, notably, without a fatality. Crushing the enemy’s will to
fight, then, does not necessarily mean crushing the enemy.
Preferring to Finesse War
Arabs and Israelis since 1948 have pursued static and
binary goals. Arabs fought to eliminate Israel, Israelis fought to win their
neighbors’ acceptance. The details have varied over the decades, with multiple
ideologies, strategies, and leading actors, but the goals have barely changed. The
goals are also unbridgeable; eventually, one side will lose and one will win. Either
there will be no Jewish state or it will be accepted by its neighbors. Those
are the only two scenarios for ending the conflict. Anything else is unstable
and a form of war.
The Arabs have pursued their war aims with patience, determination,
and purpose; the exceptions to this pattern (e.g., the Egyptian and Jordanian
peace treaties) have been operationally insignificant because they have not
tamped hostility to Israel’s
existence. In response, Israelis sustained a formidable record of strategic
vision and tactical brilliance in the period 1948-93. Over time, however, as Israel developed
into a vibrant, modern, democratic country, its populace grew impatient with
the humiliating, slow, and tedious task of convincing Arabs to accept their political
existence. By now, almost no one in Israel still sees victory as the
goal; no major political figure on the scene today calls for victory in war. Uzi
Landau, who argues that “when you're in a war you want to win the war,” was
rewarded by being ranked so low on the Likud party’s parliamentary list in the
2006 elections that he lost his seat. Since 1993, in brief, the Arabs have
sought victory while Israelis sought compromise.
In this spirit, Israelis have openly proclaimed their
ennui with fighting. Shortly before becoming prime minister, Ehud Olmert said on
behalf of his countrymen: “We are tired of fighting, we are tired of being
courageous, we are tired of winning, we are tired of defeating our enemies.” Yoram
Hazony of the Shalem
Center correctly
characterizes Israelis as “an exhausted people, confused and without
direction.”
In place of victory, Israelis have developed an
imaginative array of approaches to manage the conflict:
·
Unilateralism (build a wall, partially
withdraw): Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert, and the Kadima party.
·
Lease for 99 years the land under Israeli towns
on the West Bank: Amir Peretz and the Labor
Party.
·
Territorial compromise: Yitzhak Rabin (and the Oslo process).
·
Develop the Palestinian economy: Shimon Peres
(and the Oslo
process).
·
Exclude disloyal Palestinians from Israeli
citizenship: Avigdor Lieberman.
·
Push the Palestinians to develop good
government: Natan Sharansky (and President George W. Bush).
·
Territorial retreat: Israel’s left.
·
Insist that Jordan
is Palestine: Israel’s right.
·
Transfer the Palestinians from the West Bank: Israel’s
far right.
Contradictory in spirit and
mutually exclusive as they are, these approaches all aim to finesse war rather
than end it. Not one of them addresses the need to crush the Palestinian will
to fight. Just as the Oslo
negotiations failed, so too every scheme that avoids the hard work of winning.
The Hard Work of Winning
Who does not win, loses. To survive, Israelis
eventually must return to their pre-1993 policy of establishing that Israel
is strong, tough, and permanent. That’s achieved through deterrence – the long,
boring, difficult, bitter, and expensive task of convincing Palestinians and
others that the Jewish state is permanent, and that dreams of eliminating it
are doomed.
This will not be easy or quick. Perceptions of Israel’s weakness due to terrible missteps
during the Oslo years (1993-2000) and even after
(e.g., the Gaza
withdrawal of 2005) have sunk into Palestinian
consciousness and will presumably require decades of effort to reverse. Nor will it be pretty: defeat in war
typically entails experiencing the bitter crucible of deprivation, failure, and despair.
Israel
enjoys one piece of good fortune: That it need only to convince the Palestinians
of this, not the whole Arab or Muslim populations. Moroccans, Iranians, and
Malaysians, for example, take their cues from the Palestinians and will with
time follow their lead.
I look at
this process through a simple prism. Any development that encourages Palestinians
to think they can eliminate Israel
is negative, any that encourages them to give up that goal is positive.
The Palestinians’
defeat will be recognizable when, over a protracted period and with complete
consistency, they prove that they have accepted Israel. This does not mean loving Zion but it does mean permanently
accepting it. They must overhaul their educational
system to take out the demonization of Jews and Israel,
tell the truth about Jewish ties to Jerusalem,
stop inculcating hatred of Jews, and accept normal commercial, cultural, and
human relations with Israelis. Stiff
demarches and letters to the editor will be fine, but not violence.
Symbolically, when the Jews living in Hebron
(on the West Bank) have no more need for security than Arabs living in Nazareth (in Israel),
one can conclude that Palestinians have accepted Israel and the war is over.
Which Side Should Win?
Like all outsiders to the conflict, Americans face a
stark choice: endorse the Palestinian goal of eliminating Israel or endorse the Israeli goal
of winning its neighbors’ acceptance.
To state the choice makes clear that there is no
choice – the first is offensive in intent; the second defensive. No decent
person can endorse the Palestinians’ goal of eliminating their neighbor; along
with every president since Harry S Truman, and every congressional resolution
and vote since then, the 110th Congress must continue to stand with Israel
in its drive to win acceptance.
Not only is this an obvious moral choice, but Israel’s
win is actually the Palestinians’ as well. Israel’s success in crushing the
Palestinians’ will to fight would
actually be the best thing that ever happened to them. Compelling Palestinians finally
to give up on their foul irredentist dream would liberate them to focus on
their own polity, economy, society, and culture. Palestinians need to experience
the certitude of defeat to become a normal people – one where parents stop
celebrating their children becoming suicide terrorists, where something matters
beyond the evil obsession of anti-Zionist rejectionism. There is no shortcut.
U.S.
Policy
Americans especially need to understand Israel’s predicament and help it win its war,
for the U.S.
government has a vital role in this theater. My analysis implies a radically
different approach for the Bush administration and for this congress. On the
negative side, Palestinians must understand that benefits will flow 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.
On the positive side, the administration should work
with Israel, the Arab
states, and others to induce the Palestinians to accept Israel’s existence by convincing
them the gig is up, they have lost. This means impressing on the Israeli government
the need not just to defend itself but to take steps to demonstrate to
Palestinians the hopelessness of their cause. That requires not episodic shows
of force (such as the war against Hizbullah last summer) but a sustained and
systematic effort to alter a bellicose mentality.
Also, given that Israel’s
enemies — the PLO, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran — are also America’s
enemies and that Israel has
a significant role in the U.S.-led “war on terror,” an Israeli victory would
greatly help its U.S.
ally. In smaller ways, too, tougher Israeli tactics would help. Jerusalem should be encouraged not to
engage in prisoner exchanges with terrorist groups,
not to allow Hizbullah to re-arm in southern Lebanon
or Fatah or Hamas in Gaza, and not to withdraw unilaterally
from the West Bank (which would effectively turn over the region to Hamas terrorists and threaten Hashemite rule in Jordan).
Diplomacy aiming to shut down the Arab-Israeli
conflict is premature until Palestinians give up their hideous anti-Zionist obsession.
When that moment arrives, negotiations can re-open with the issues of the 1990s
– borders, resources, armaments, sanctities, residential rights – taken up
anew. But that moment is years or decades away. In the meantime, a war needs to
be won.
