Land for What?: How the peace process brought Israel to the brink of war
Pipes, Danil
Land For What? How the peace process brought Israel to the brink of war BY DANIEL PIPES The election of Ariel Sharon allows us to look back with amazement at the last eight years. The Israeli...
...Steps intended to calm the Palestinians instead heightened their ambitions, their fury, and their violence...
...If they only had a nice apartment and a late-model car, the thinking went, their ardor for destroying Israel would diminish...
...Israelis had devised an elegant push-pull theory of diplomacy: between Israeli strength and Arab hopes for a better future, they figured the Arabs would find themselves compelled to shut down the long anti-Zionist campaign...
...In the words of philosopherYoram Hazony, Israelis are "an exhausted people, confused and without direction...
...However formidable Israel's strength is in planes and tanks, its enemies are 12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001 developing military strategies that either go lower (to civil unrest and terrorism, as in the recent Palestinian violence against Israel) or higher (to weapons of mass destruction, as in the Iraqi threat...
...The Syrian government has for decades accepted economic paralysis as the price of staying in power...
...To Lebanon, it not only offered but actually carried out a complete and unilateral withdrawal of Israeli forces from the southern part of that country in May 2000...
...No deal...
...As shown by the Arab readiness to accept economic hardship in the pursuit of political aims, politics usually trumps economics...
...The Israel Defense Forces deploy the finest aircraft, What Israelis saw as a far-sighted magnanimity came across as weakness and demoralization...
...But those efforts revived as Arabs watched Israel forsake its security and its religious sanctities, overlook the breaking of solemn promises, and make empty threats...
...all the money in the world...
...To fend off Palestinian claims to territory and buildings abandoned by their ancestors in Israel over fifty years ago, the idea was sometimes bruited of buying them off, in return for giving up of a distant and seemingly impractical aspiration...
...The Israelis offered far more than either of these and ended up with even less...
...nor for Richard Nixon with Brezhnev...
...Loud announcements for all to hear that Israelis are sick of their conflict with the Arabs—how they loath reserve military duty that extends into middle age for men, the high military spending, the deaths of soldiers, and the nagging fear of terrorism—do not inspire fear...
...only they, not the Israelis, can end it...
...Combined with other sources of Arab confidence—especially demographic growth and resurgent faith—this led to a surge in anti-Zionist ambitions and rekindled the hopes of destroying the "Zionist entity...
...The impression was of an Israel desperate to extricate itself from further conflict...
...government had long pressed them to do...
...More dramatic is Palestinian refusal to give up the "right of return...
...The owner of a pharmacy concurred, adding, "Even if Arafat agreed A reporter in a Palestinian camp found no one willing to take cash in return for relinquishing claims to Palestine...
...A reporter in Baqaa, a Palestinian camp in Jordan, recently found no one willing to take cash in return for forgoing claims to Palestine...
...Both assumptions, however sensible sounding, were dead wrong...
...software counts more than hardware...
...the Palestinian police force has rudimentary weapons...
...To the Syrians, it offered full control over the Golan Heights...
...This material strength, it turns out, does not permit Israel to impose its will on the Arabs...
...e and ended up with even less...
...We don't want compensation, we want our homeland" There is little evidence for this expectation...
...When the Oslo process, as that episode of diplomacy is called, began in 1993, Israel was feared and respected by its enemies, who were beginning to recognize Israel as a fact of life and reluctantly giving up their efforts to destroy it...
...What Israelis saw as far-sighted magnanimity came across as weakness and demoralization...
...For all its good will and soul-searching, Israel now faces a higher threat of all-out war than at any time in decades...
...First, the Oslo process assumed that Israel, by virtue of its economic boom and formidable arsenal, is so strong that it can unilaterally choose to close down its century-old conflict with the Arabs...
...Land-for-peace contained a plethora of errors, but the two most fundamental were economic...
...Worse, the jaw-dropping array of Israeli concessions actually increased Arab and Muslim hostility...
...Combined with other sources of Arab confidence this led to a surge in anti-Zionist ambitions...
...in turn, we expect you to have a change of heart, ending your campaign to destroy Israel and instead accepting the permanence of a sovereign Jewish state in the Middle East...
...The key decisions of war and peace have always been made in Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad, not in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv...
...In part, it cannot do this because the Arabs initiated the conflict and have continued it...
...These concessions won Israel in return precisely nothing...
...It did not work for Neville Chamberlain with Hitler...
...We don't want compensation, we want our homeland...
...This policy prompted Israel to take a series of steps which struck some observers as bold and others as foolhardy: to the Palestinians it offered a state, complete with Jerusalem as its capital and sovereignty over the Temple Mount...
...Reaching out a hand of friendship won not Arab acceptance but ever-increasing demands for more Israeli concessions...
...Palestinians and Syrians disdained successive Israeli offers, always demanding more...
...One overestimated Israeli power, the other misunderstood Arab aspirations...
...Finally, a high income or a mighty arsenal are not as important as will and morale...
...As one middle-aged woman put it: "We will not sell our [ancestral] land for to compensation, we as Palestinians can't agree to it...
...How can an "exhausted people" hope to impose its will on enemies...
...In brief, the Israelis offered land for peace, as the U.S...
...In all tracks, the Jewish state pursued a similar approach, which might be paraphrased as follows: "We will be reasonable and will give you what you can legitimately demand...
...Lebanese took everything Israel did and made more demands...
...Israel's per-capita income of $16,000 is slightly higher than Spain's, while the Syrian per-capita income of about $800 compares to that of the Republic of Congo...
...A second assumption behind the Oslo diplomacy was that enhanced economic opportunity would shift Arab attention from war to more constructive pursuits...
...Israel's GDP is nearly $100 billion a year and the Palestinians' is about $3 billion...
...No doubt that is why Sharon was elected by so wide a margin...
...In this, the Oslo process belonged to a tradition of failed diplomacy that THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001 13 relies on granting an opponent some of what he wants in the hope that this will render him less hostile...
...The Israeli government pursued a course without parallel in the annals of diplomacy...
...The logic makes intuitive sense: satisfy reasonable claims so the Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese can look beyond anti-Zionism to improve their standard of living...
...In this respect, Israelis do not impress their opponents...
...tanks, and other materiel that money can buy...
...We are Palestinians and we'll remain Palestinians...
...Thus is Israel's hope to coerce its enemies illusory...
...The best known of its negotiations were with Yasir Arafat and the Palestinians, but these were paralleled by no less important discussions with the Syrians and Lebanese...
Vol. 34 • March 2001 • No. 2
