{"id":305,"date":"2007-01-19T13:07:07","date_gmt":"2007-01-19T12:07:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/wordpress\/?p=305"},"modified":"2007-01-19T13:07:07","modified_gmt":"2007-01-19T12:07:07","slug":"the-threat-to-israels-existence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=305","title":{"rendered":"“The Threat To Israel’s Existence”"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>, 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.
\nPipes 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”.<\/p>\n

\nPipes 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.
\nThe 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.
\nAt 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.
\nAll 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.
\nEqually 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?
\nHowever, 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:
\n1) 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.
\n2) 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.
\nHistory 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.
\nI 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"