RAEL JEAN ISAAC

Editor’s note: This talk was given at the AFSI national conference on December 3, 2006. The prediction about the content of the Iraq Study Group recommendations turned out to be correct. As Melanie Phillips has observed, in Baker’s exit-from-Iraq strategy “It’s Israel that will be making the exit.”

There is no political certainty more widely held than that there is nothing that would so contribute to world peace as solving the Arab-Israel conflict. It doesn’t matter where you stand on the conflict. Western democratic leaders and Arab despots, the EU, the UN, Israeli leaders, the average Israeli, Jews of the world – for all of them, solving the Arab-Israel conflict is the Holy Grail.

You only need to breathe life into the hope to garner a Nobel peace prize. No conflict has garnered so many prizes – not surprising since after the prize is handed out, the conflict remains as healthy as ever. The first went to Ralph Bunche in 1950 for working on the Arab-Israel armistice that gave us the green line. In 1978 Sadat and Begin received the prize for Camp David and the supposed peace with Egypt. In 1994 it went to Arafat, Peres and Rabin for bringing peace via Oslo. Those were the ones purely for Arab-Israel peace. But there were a number of others where the Nobel Committee cited contributions to Arab-Israel peace: for example in giving the prize to Canada’s Lester Pearson in 1957 the Nobel committee said that as a result of his efforts “The Palestinian problem was actually put to rest for some time.” UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold, who won the Prize in 1961, was cited for “easing tensions” between Israel and neighboring Arab states. In 1988 the Nobel peace prize went to the UN Peacekeeping Forces – created to keep the peace between Egypt and Israel after the 1956 war. And in 2002 Jimmy Carter got the Nobel. Yes, that was really a reward for being anti-American, but the major achievement the Nobel committee cited was Camp David. That’s seven Nobel peace prizes in whole or part for solving the Arab Israel conflict – and the prospect for real peace is further away than ever.

Why so much emphasis on this one conflict in a world awash with them? The reason is the perception that it is at the root of all the dysfunction in the Middle East. In a way this is a comforting proposition to Western leaders. It’s something to fall back on when your policies collapse. In fact it’s the litmus test of the bankruptcy of your policies when you fall back on the need to solve the Arab-Israel conflict. This is precisely what is happening now. The effort to bring about a stable, unified, democratic Iraq is clearly failing. So the advance word is that the Baker-led Iraq Study Group is going to propose a conference to solve the Arab-Israel conflict, with Israel the fall guy. Tony Blair runs around telling any audience he can find that solving the Israel-Palestinian problem is key to solving all other Middle East problems. He said this to the Iraq Study Group, he told it to a Washington Post interviewer, he even said it on Al Jazeera’s new English language TV channel in an interview with David Frost.

I’m reminded of an old joke. A professor of zoology asked his graduate students, among them several foreigners, to write papers on the elephant. The German student took as his topic “An introduction to the Bibliography for the Study of the Elephant.” The French student wrote: “The Love life of the Elephant.” The English student wrote: “Elephant Hunting“ (you can tell it’s an old story—the English have banned hunting). An American student wrote: “Breeding Bigger and Better Elephants.” There was also a Jewish student in the class. He wrote: “The Elephant and the Jewish Problem.” This of course made fun of the Jewish obsession with relating everything to Jewish concerns, no matter how inappropriate. But it is just as apropos of the obsession of world leaders with the Arab-Israel conflict.

In Iraq, with little fanfare or notice, the Kurds, 20% of the population, have opted out of the state. They have their own army, customs officials, education system, language, flag. A telling incident is reported by Peter Galbraith in his recent book The End of Iraq. To show their friendship for the United States, the Kurds decided to throw a party for the Americans on July 4. American officials said they’d be happy to attend, but only if an Iraqi flag flew over the building. The Kurds refused to budge – the flag of Iraq is anathema throughout Kurdistan. So there was no Fourth of July party. As for the rest of the country, it looks mighty like civil war bubbling up between Shiites and Sunnis with U.S. forces straining to keep the lid halfway on the pot. And of course there’s Syria and Iran stirring the pot to defeat the United States, not to mention the folks from al Qaeda. It’s a bad scene but the elephant is more relevant to the Jewish question than the chaos in Iraq is relevant to the Arab-Israel conflict.

You may say, O.K. It’s clear the Arab-Israel conflict is more likely to produce peace prizes than peace. And pretending that solving it would solve other unrelated problems is indeed a massive cop-out by those who know that pushing Israel around is a lot easier than achieving Western goals in the Moslem world. But why do I say that actually solving the Arab-Israel conflict would be a catastrophe? A catastrophe not only for Israel but for the U.S. and for Judeo-Christian civilization as a whole.

Let’s begin with Israel where it is not hard to see why solving the Arab-Israel conflict spells catastrophe. The only way Israel can achieve peace is to disappear. The Arabs make that clear, no matter how much the rest of the world and indeed the Israelis shut their ears. The Hamas government on Israel’s border makes it crystal clear, without any of the peace-in-English, war-in-Arabic obfuscations of the Arafat era. The conflict is not about territory occupied since 1967, but about all the territory Israel occupies. Professor Moshe Sharon has written eloquently of the religious basis for Islam’s rejection of a Jewish state. For Moslems, the establishment of a Jewish state on Islamic land is an open rebellion against Islamic law; it is in contravention of the law of nature.

What is less obvious is that for Israel even the process of trying to achieve peace is catastrophic. Even those skeptical of such efforts may not recognize this – they may think that by constantly striving to reach a peace agreement, Israel scores brownie points, proving to the world that while Israel is willing to make sacrifices for peace the Arabs refuse all reasonable compromise. But the damage far outweighs what little good those brownie points may do Israel. That is because when elected Israeli leaders hold up the promise that peace can be achieved, they are impelled to act in ways that supposedly will advance it. In 1992 Labor, led by Yitzhak Rabin, defeated the long ascendant Likud with the promise that if elected, it would achieve peace within the year. Labor leaders then felt they had to produce something quickly. The result was the catastrophe of Oslo. Should Israel be destroyed, historians will surely find that a major turning point.

At election time, from then on, leaders of both parties would continue to offer voters the same promise. In his victorious campaign against Shimon Peres in 1996 Netanyahu promised to bring peace. What he delivered was another retreat sealed and delivered at the Wye conference. Barak promised to bring peace. He offered Arafat the territorial store, even including a limited Arab right of return: for his pains he obtained a renewed Arab Intifada, far more lethal than the first. Sharon promised to bring peace. He delivered the so-called “disengagement,” a despicable euphemism for the destruction of Jewish settlements. As a direct result rockets have rained steadily on Israeli communities in the south while the army brass and politicians alike shrug and tell desperate residents, there’s nothing we can do, live with it. Hamas tells the Jews of Sderot, the hardest hit community, that the only solution for them is to evacuate the town. At this moment there’s a truce, but even in the unlikely event it holds up, it’s a form of Arab escalation: Hamas says if Israel hasn’t gone back to the 1949 borders within six months, they’ll embark on all-out war.

In short, the promises of peace have delivered only Israeli retreats, escalating Arab demands, greater Arab self-confidence, declining Israeli morale, greater Israeli vulnerability. We can blame Israeli leaders or blame the public, the chicken or the egg. The guilt of the leaders is clear. They lie to the voters and fail miserably in their responsibility to rally the public for the challenge of confronting unrelenting Arab hostility.

They pander, telling voters what the majority want to hear. For this reason Israeli Nobel Prize winner in Economics Robert Aumann says the average Israeli is equally guilty. Says Aumann: “Jews are so desperate for peace that we run around in a frenzy, we can’t wait, we expel people from their homes in an unprecedented act of barbarism, self-hatred and stupidity. We fall all over ourselves with anxiety and self-hatred.”

Despite the failure, over and over again, of retreat and concessions, Israeli leaders, gripped by a form of obsessive compulsive behavior, come up with more of the same. In the wake of the IDF’s humiliation by Hezbollah in Lebanon, Olmert still talks of his hopes to do to Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria what was done to Jewish communities in Gaza. Other members of the cabinet talk optimistically of relinquishing the Golan to Syria. These seem to be the chief “new ideas” of the Baker Working Group, – dismember Israel for a short-lived Syrian and Iranian promise to limit their participation in the Iraqi mayhem. But can Israeli leaders possibly expect a different outcome this time? More likely they are so bankrupt of ideas, so lacking in fortitude, so devoid of belief in Israel’s historical and religious rights – even in its right to exist at all – that they can think of no alternative but yet more retreats. And so the broken record scratches over and over again on the same groove. In short, I think it is beyond debate that even the search for peace has had catastrophic consequences for Israel.

What about the United States and the Western world? Why should Arab-Israel peace be catastrophic for them? Let’s look for a moment at the analysis and expectations of those who see Arab-Israel peace as the key to solving the myriad problems and conflicts of the Middle East. As they see it, it was the creation of Israel that roiled the slumbering waters of the Middle East, producing the fury, the frustration, the sense of humiliation and injustice that keeps the area seething. In this view the bitterly anti-Western attitudes of the man on the Arab street derive from resentment of the West for forcing a Jewish state upon Arab lands displacing Arab peoples, all this because of the Holocaust, a Western sin. The continuing rage feeds regional instability as Arab masses fasten on a series of bad actors who exploit that rage, a Nasser, a Saddam Hussein, an Osama bin Laden. Now, the highest bidder yet has emerged, Iran’s Ahmadinejad, who promises a nuclear Armageddon. And so, according to this scenario, if the problem of Israel could only be solved to Moslem/Arab satisfaction, all the most intractable problems posed by the region would melt away. The Arab sense of grievance toward the West would dissolve. No more planes into New York towers. No more bombs on London tubes. This view of the situation is reinforced by Arab leaders of all stripes who repeat endlessly to their Western counterparts that the Arab-Israel conflict is the root cause of every Middle Eastern debacle. Jordan’s King Abdullah just appeared on ABC to proclaim yet again that the Arab-Israel conflict is the root cause of all the crises in the Middle East.

How then to solve it? Some Western leaders, and I’m willing to give credit to the idealism of a Tony Blair or President Bush, believe a two state solution can produce peace – that if only the right formula is devised, Palestinian Arabs will live contentedly side by side with Israel and Arab rhetoric to the contrary is just that, rhetoric. However there are plenty of realists out there, Baker surely among them, who realize that peace means the end of Israel and figure that’s a good thing too. As they see it, as long as Israel is there in any borders it’s an irritant and it is only after it is gone that the Middle East will be a new slate on which good relations with the West can be written.

What about this analysis, in either its idealistic or realist version? It’s not entirely wrong. It’s clearly true that the Arab-Israel conflict woke the Arabs up to their impotence. Incredible to the Arab mind, five Arab armies, supremely confident of driving the Jews into the sea, were beaten by what they viewed as a small ragtag community of despised Jews, many of them the beaten down survivors of concentration camps. For the Arab world it was immensely traumatic, and the trouncing of Arab armies two decades later, in 1967, only reinforced the trauma.

But the trouble with the analysis is that for the Arabs, and indeed the broader Moslem world, Israel is a small part of the problem. The core problem is their abject inferiority to the West in both power and cultural influence. They would have woken up to this, admittedly in less dramatic fashion, without Israel. Thus the nature of the Moslem problem with the West goes way beyond Israel. Yes, the Moslem world longs to extirpate the little Satan, but much of that world now feels itself ready to take on the Great Satan, to restore the Caliphate, to embark on a global jihad to win the world for Allah. The Moslem world is in a much stronger position than in 1948, poised today on the threshold of taking over much of Europe demographically, from within. And however stubbornly the realists may balk at recognizing this reality, if the West delivers up the little Satan, it will only increase its own danger and vulnerability. That’s because Israel’s demise would be perceived as a huge victory for the Islamists.

Possessed of a strong sense of religious and cultural superiority, the Arab world for decades looked to one nostrum after another to restore it to glory, to cure its “humiliation” by Western power. Some looked to Soviet Communism; that romance petered out. Then there was pan-Arabism, epitomized by Nasser, involving such short-lived experiments as the union between Syria and Egypt. The enthusiasm for Pan-Arabism faltered when it failed to achieve Arab “glory.” What has replaced pan-Arabism is the notion that Islam is the answer, that a pure Islam is the tool to restore worldwide Moslem preeminence. For the West the worst possible outcome would be if the Islamists, whose goals go way beyond the pan-Arabists, were to prove they had found the path that works.

Bin Laden has repeatedly stated his belief that Islam defeated one of the two great powers in Afghanistan. He is convinced the other is weak and without will, a belief the vigorous U.S. response in the wake of 9/11 only temporarily undermined. To the Moslem world Israel and the U.S. are umbilically tied. Many of us in the West may know that U.S. support for Israel has been wavering and less than full-throated. But that’s not how the Moslem world sees it. The destruction of Israel would be seen as a huge defeat for the U.S. There could be nothing more likely to produce the wreck of U.S. interests and policies throughout the Middle East, no greater boost for the Islamists in encouraging them to pursue their larger war against Judeo-Christian civilization.

If solving the Arab-Israel problem is the path to perdition, what policies can productively be pursued in respect to the Middle East? Deterrence? Exploiting divisions within Islam? Military action? Supporting internal dissidents within individual countries? Sharply curtailing Moslem immigration to the West? A crash program to develop non-mid East energy sources? A combination of these? Other possibilities? We are in for a long struggle against a resurgent Islam and there are no Five Easy Steps to End the Islamic Threat. This said, it is past time for some genuine realism to be brought to bear in thinking about the problems of the Middle East, not the phony kind James Baker represents. Putting the idea of solving the Arab Israel conflict in the diplomatic trash bin should be the first order of business.