“The Threat To Israel’s Existence”
This was the title of a lecture that I attended last night – the sub-title was “Why it’s back and what it means”. The address was given by the American academic Daniel Pipes, Director of the Middle East Forum and author of 12 books on the region. The event was held at the School of Oriental & African Studies in central London and organised by the Israel Society of SOAS.
Pipes is a high profile and controversial supporter of Israel and there was some concern that he might be barracked but he delivered his talk in quiet, measured and eloquent terms and he was heard in respectful silence, until the last minutes when one person accused him of being “more racist than people in Israel” and another shouted: “You’re talking bollocks”.
Pipes summarized events since the creation of Israel in 1948. He reminded people of the Israeli war victories of 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973 and suggested that, with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the Oslo accords of 1993, the growing tolerance of the existence of Israel by the Palestinian people and the country’s Arab neighbours had reached a peak. However, since then, the threat to Israel’s existence has grown, starting with the failure of the Oso agreement and moving most latterly to the electoral success of Hamas and the unsuccessful invasion of Lebanon.
The central proposition of Pipes’ lecture was that wars end when one side gives up on its goals and that the situation in the Middle East will not be ended by compromise but by one side giving up. Clearly, as an American Jew, he wants to see the Palestinians give up on their attempt to destroy Israel and he wants the USA to do what it can to crush the morale of the Palestinian people. He concluded with the assessment that the Palestinian territory is not functioning and that the Palestinians need to lose totally in the same manner that Germany lost the Second World War.
At one level, this is a terribly brutal analysis that could be seen as callous or realistic or depressing , depending on your point of view. However, there is a kernel of truth here.
All analogies are flawed, but the Northern Ireland experience is one that comes to my mind. The present absence of terrorist violence has only come about because the Provisional IRA and Sinn Fein have accepted that their objective of a united Ireland cannot be achieved by violence. It might be argued that this should have been obvious from the start, but the IRA convinced itself that one more atrocity would result in a collapse in the political will of the British Government and people.
Equally it should be obvious to the Arab states that, after four military defeats at the hands of the Israelis and the continued support of the USA, they are not going destroy Israel. But it took the IRA some three decades to come to the conclusion that it did. How long will it take the Palestinians and the Arab states?
However, if the Northern Ireland situation can teach us anything of value to the Middle East situation, the following points seem to me to be very important:
1) To defeat a threat to a state, the state must not descend to abuse of human rights or inflict suffering on innocent parties. Such action undermines the legitimacy of the state’s moral case and provides fuel to the anger of the aggressor. On many occasions – not least the recent invasion of Lebanon – the Israelis have massively over-reacted and inflicted totally unjustifiable aggression and violence, seriously damaging their support in the international community.
2) One can never give up on diplomatic and political avenues. It may take decades of patient – and often thankless – efforts, but the aggressor has to be given an avenue to talk and act politically. Too often, Israel has slammed the door on diplomacy and given moderate Palestinian forces no avenue except the gun and the bomb.
History also teaches us another vital lesson: it is not a good idea to humiliate your opponent. The Versailles Treaty and the humiliation of Germany at the end of World War One was a major cause of the Second World War. Conversely, the sucessful transition from an apartheid South Africa to a multicultural democracy with relatively little violence owed a great deal to the magnanimity of Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress.
I look foward to visiting Israel for the first time at Easter and discussing these issues with people in the front line of the Middle East conflict. There simply has to be a two-state solution, however long it takes.
January 20th, 2007 at 11:58 am
While on the whole this is an accurate account of Pipes’ talk, and while on the whole I agree with you on most points, let me raise an issue with three of your comments:
1. “Too often, Israel has slammed the door on diplomacy and given moderate Palestinian forces no avenue except the gun and the bomb.” There aren’t many examples I can think of of the Israeli government slamming the door on diplomacy — I’m not exactly sure what you’re referring to. Hamas, for example, is not asking to negotiate a peace with Israel, and still seeks its complete elmination, so there’s no door here to be opened or slammed. Furthermore, which “moderate Palestinian forces” are you referring to which have taken up violence in recent years? The only violent Palestinian groups which I know of are the Islamist ones (Islamic Jihad and Hamas) and extremist elements in Fatah. The moderate Palestinian leadership including President Abbas, to their credit, does not endorse this violence and takes no part in it.
2. “On many occasions … the Israelis have massively over-reacted and inflicted totally unjustifiable aggression and violence.” Many occasions? Let’s see: the 1948, 1967 and 1973 wars were Israeli attempts at self-defense against aggressive invading Arab armies — and did not involve massive attacks on civilian populations (nothing like what the RAF, for example, engaged in during the war against Germany). 1956 and 1982 were more controversial wars, and a case could be made that Israel should not have fought either one of them. Right now Israel is under tremendous international pressure for building a border fence — many consider this to be a “massive over-reaction” and even “aggression”; I do not. Israel has also completely withdrawn its military forces from the Gaza strip, the Sinai peninsula, Lebanon, some Jordanian territories returned following the peace agreement, and even certain parts of the West Bank which have been relatively quiet. It has repeatedly offered (in particlar, Ehud Barak while PM) to withdraw from all of the Golan Heights and nearly all of the West Bank. This idea that somehow Israel is over-reacting, violent and aggressive is the opposite of the case: Israel is usually prepared for compromise and concession, and has given away the vast majority of the territories occupied in the June 1967 war of self-defense.
3. “Clearly, as an American Jew, he wants to see the Palestinians give up on their attempt to destroy Israel and he wants the USA to do what it can to crush the morale of the Palestinian people.” To my recollection, Pipes made no reference to himself being Jewish, though like you I assumed that he is. (If he is, he is clearly not a religious Jew, as we was wearing a yarmulka.) I think he made it clear that he wants the Palestinians to give up on their dream of destroying Israel because it is (a) wrong and (b) in America’s interests. These coincide with Israel’s interests, which is natural in the case of a close alliance. But I don’t recall him making an issue of being Jewish, and the only reference to that came at the end of the talk when one of the (few) hecklers asked him why he didn’t live in Israel. And while the first part of your sentence does reflect what he said, I don’t think Pipes would call for “crushing the morale” of the Palestinians. To the contrary, while he wants to put an end to their desire for the elimination of Israel, this would almost certainly go hand-in-hand with economic progress and the elimination of human suffering among the Palestinian civilian population, a point he alluded to.
What’s important to remember is the asymmetry of this conflict. It’s easy to condemn both sides, to blame both sides, to suggest that with a little Christian love the Muslims and Jews might get along better, but I think that this is not the case. The fact is that the conflict is entirely asymmetrical, as Pipes correctly noted, with the Palestinians’ aim being the destruction of the Jewish state and the Israelis’ aim — survival.