HILLEL HALKIN

HILLEL HALKIN GUEST COLUMNIST In this bloody century, with its two world wars and dozens of smaller ones, no two democracies have ever fought one another. Can we guarantee that a Palestinian...

...These are the terms in which Israelis, like people elsewhere, discussed the war in the Gulf...
...Yet the popular perception of Iraq and its conduct in the Persian Gulf as one man's villainy is probably not far from the truth...
...Could they be expected to live by democratic rules when this is something that no Arab country has ever done...
...He is a regular book reviewer for The Jerusalem Report...
...Democratic governments, indeed, do not tend to go to war unless they have to, and even then they often do it too late...
...The excitement of battle and the thrill of conquest may appeal to the atavistic in many of us, but rarely to the point that we would freely choose to risk dying or being maimed or bombed out...
...True, countries are not generally granted the right to dictate the kind of government neighboring states should have, but neither are they requested to surrender territory in which to establish neighboring states...
...The Gulf war, however, suggests that the single most important demand that Israel must make of any Palestinian state is one rarely mentioned until now, namely, a binding and enforceable commitment to being a parliamentary democracy...
...only "he...
...We will have no say in the reconstruction of Iraq...
...In the long run, only a democratic Palestinian polity could guarantee the kind of peaceful, open borders and freedom from aggressive irredentism that is taken for granted between the United States and Canada or within Western Europe...
...What will be the future of the Jewish settlements within them...
...one can hardly conceive of them reelecting one who refused to back out of Kuwait without war in face of overwhelming military might arrayed against them...
...The Caligula of Baghdad could never have led his people from one senseless disaster to another over the last 10 years without a large, loyal and brutal state apparatus at his side (or, for that matter, without a civilized world to arm and abet him), but his policies cannot have represented the will of most Iraqis, who had nothing to gain and everything to lose from his military adventures...
...and Saddam Hussein, with his pit-viper eyes and shoe-brush mustache, played the role to the hilt...
...Arafat, but a Prime Minister Arafat presiding over the parliament of competing parties into which the PLO would quickly splinter is not the same as a Generalissimo Arafat with epaulets on his shoulders...
...One suspects that they could: The Japanese have proven that, when given no choice, societies can adapt even to such draconian measures as having to choose their own leaders...
...3* Hillel Halkin is a writer and translator living in Israel...
...He's torturing Kuwaitis...
...He's flooding the Gulf with oil...
...In any event, the chances of establishing a democratic regime in a country and part of the world that have had no democratic experience are slight...
...Among that sizable portion of the Israeli public that considers some form of Palestinian sovereignty in the West Bank and Gaza Strip an option for bringing peace to this land, there has been an on-going debate about what Israel's preconditions for agreeing to such an entity should be...
...It is the Palestinians^—and here the situation is different...
...It is a condition that probably would be welcomed...
...For us in Israel, this fact has special significance...
...Is this a demand that an Israel prepared to negotiate the conditions for Palestinian sovereignty could legitimately make...
...He shot two missiles at us last night...
...But what about the Palestinians...
...One can perhaps imagine Iraqis voting in free elections for a government that promised to snatch Kuwait free of cost...
...I think so...
...It is never "they," "Iraq" or "the Iraqis...
...Indeed, a Palestinian democracy might well provide Jews and Arabs west of the Jordan with the common denominator they always lacked and might help give them a shared sense of identity...
...It is hard to see how an American president could oppose an Israeli insistence that Palestinians enjoy the same rights and freedoms as Americans...
...Democracies have gone to war with dictatorships...
...What should be its borders...
...totalitarian regimes have fought wars with other totalitarian regimes professing different or similar ideologies...
...Palestinians might vote the first time around for Mr...
...The Palestinians were one of the more Westernized of Arab peoples even before their exposure to Israel, and there is no reason to assume that the average resident of Nablus or Ramallah wants to live under the Saddam Hussein- or Hafez Assad-style dictatorship that the PLO would impose if it could...
...Certainly, it would meet with sympathy in Europe and the United States...
...Can we guarantee that a Palestinian state would be democratic...
...but no democratic government, knowing that it would be answerable for its actions to an electorate, has ordered its army to invade the territory or to open fire on the troops of another democratic government...
...It's worth thinking about...
...Must it be totally demilitarized...
...dictatorships have gone to war with each other...
...But Israel's real problem is not Iraq...
...It helps to be able to personify the enemy as a single hateable figure...
...A democratic Palestine would still be part of the Arab world, but in some important respects it would feel closer to a democratic Israel than to a dictatorial Syria or Jordan...
...It is indeed astonishing that in this entire bloody century, with its two world wars and dozens of large-scale local conflicts, no two democracies have ever fought one another...
...Among themselves, democracies solve problems by negotiation...

Vol. 16 • April 1991 • No. 2


 
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