[lit-ideas] Re: Why Israel Fights - TNR
- From: "Andy Amago" <aamago@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 26 Jul 2006 23:40:50 -0400
Stan, what do you think of someone throwing someone out of their home and
moving into it and leaving the homeowner homeless? Would you consider that
evil? How about you Julie?
----- Original Message -----
From: Stan Spiegel
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx;David Cowen;Margaret Spiegel;Bonnie Spiegel;Alisa
Kay Spiegel;Noah Evan Spiegel;Stan Spiegel
Sent: 7/26/2006 11:22:01 PM
Subject: [lit-ideas] Why Israel Fights - TNR
WHY ISRAEL FIGHTS.
Drawing the Line
by Yossi Klein Halevi
Only at TNR Online
Post date: 07.26.06
hree times in the last century, the Jewish people has found itself on the front
line against totalitarian ideologies with aspirations to rule the world, and
which defined the Jewish people as its primary obstacle in fulfilling that
goal. For Nazism, the Jew was not only the source of racial impurity but
inventor of conscience, crippling humanity's survival instincts in an amoral
world. For Soviet communism, the Jew was the source of capitalism, and Zionism
the front line of imperialism. And now, for fundamentalist Islam, the Jew is
the satanic enemy, and the Jewish state an abomination against God that must be
destroyed.
Though Israeli officials are calling the conflict with Hezbollah and Hamas an
"operation," it is, in fact, a war. Ultimately, the war will transcend its
Iranian proxies and engage Iran itself. One crucial result must be the
destruction of Iran's nuclear capability, which would provide the religious
genocidalists with the ability to turn theology into practice. Imagine Israel
confronting a Hezbollah backed by a nuclear Iran. Would we be able to defend
our northern border knowing that an attack on Hezbollah could provoke an
Iranian nuclear attack against Tel Aviv? That prospect is not inconceivable:
Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad believes that the Muslim messianic age is
about to be inaugurated by the destruction of Israel. Certainly Israel has the
capacity to deliver an overwhelming second strike. But the balance of terror
that worked during the cold war against the Soviet Union may fail against an
enemy that welcomes death as a prelude to eternal life. A nuclear Iran coul
d be the ultimate suicide bomber.
The war of the missiles in Lebanon and in Gaza is actually the second stage of
the war that began six years ago. Erroneously, self-defeatingly, Israelis
accepted the Palestinian terminology, and called the wave of Islamist suicide
bombings that started in September 2000 "the second intifada." Unlike the
intifada of the late 1980s, however, which united Palestinian Christians and
Muslims against the occupation, the war that began in 2000 has been led by
Islamists, after Israel tried to end the occupation. Not coincidentally, there
have been no Christian suicide bombers. The Palestinian cause had shifted from
national struggle to jihad.
Nevertheless, some insist on distinguishing between Hezbollah and Hamas. While
Hezbollah is an operational extension of the Shia Iranian revolution, Hamas,
they argue, represents the national aspirations of the Palestinian people. In
fact, Hamas represents the undoing of Palestinian national aspirations. For
Hamas, a Palestinian state is merely a means to an end: the resurrection of the
medieval Caliphate and the transformation of the Middle East into a single
Islamist state. The rise of Hamas, then, has completed the process, which began
with the suicide bombings, of Islamizing the conflict. The so-called second
intifada has destroyed the achievement of the first intifada, which convinced a
majority of Israelis that former Prime Minister Golda Meir had been wrong to
insist there was no Palestinian people and that a distinct Palestinian identity
had indeed emerged. In rejecting mere nationalism, Hamas is returning the
Palestinians to their pre-national consciousness, when Pal
estinians were part of an amorphous Arab or Muslim identity. The first
casualty of the jihad, then, has been a viable Palestinian national identity,
and, with it, the possibility of a viable Palestinian state.
What unites Shia Hezbollah and Sunni Hamas is the theology of genocide. Both
organizations preach that the Holocaust never happened, even as they actively
plan the next one. According to the Hamas Covenant, every ill in the world,
from the French Revolution to the two world wars, was provoked by the Jews. For
its part, Hezbollah's Al Manar TV station spread the story that the Mossad was
behind September 11 and warned 4,000 Jews who worked in the Twin Towers to stay
home that day--a calumny that was accepted, according to polls, by majorities
throughout the Muslim world.
The grievance of the Islamists isn't only that they were conquered and occupied
but that they have failed, so far, to conquer and occupy. Like Hezbollah, Hamas
won't "moderate" with the responsibility of power. To believe otherwise is to
underestimate the power of religion. For Hamas is not a political movement but
a faith. And for Hamas to abandon its goal of Israel's destruction is to commit
heresy against the core of that faith. Religious change, even among
fundamentalists, is surely possible; but it is a process measured not in months
but in decades, or centuries.
n targeting Lebanon and Gaza, Israel is sending a simultaneous message: It is
time for the Arab world to take responsibility for its actions. What
Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas and Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad
Siniora share is a helplessness--to some extent self-inflicted--against the
terrorists in their midst. In large measure, the Oslo process failed because
the international community allowed Palestinians to continue to act as victims,
rather than as responsible peace partners prepared to exploit the extraordinary
circumstances they enjoyed for creating a state. Those circumstances included
virtually unlimited international political and financial support, and the
willingness of a majority of Israelis--induced, in part, by a justifiable
guilty conscience--to consider previously unthinkable scenarios, like ceding
part of Jerusalem to Yasir Arafat. Imagine what the Tibetans or the Kurds could
have done with that level of political goodwill and foreign aid. Indeed,
billions of dollars in international aid have gone to the Palestinian
Authority. Perhaps the greatest defeat the Palestinians inflicted on themselves
was to lose the patience of at least part of the international community and,
most of all, the Israeli guilty conscience.
Yet many continue to indulge Palestinian rejectionism. Astonishingly, Israel
still needs to prove that it offered a credible and contiguous Palestinian
state at Camp David in July 2000, and not, as Palestinian leaders put it, a
series of "Bantustans." What doubt remained from Camp David should have been
dispelled five months later when Israel accepted President Clinton's
proposals--ceding almost the entirety of the West Bank, all of Gaza, and
three-quarters of the Old City of Jerusalem. The Palestinian counter-offer was
suicide bombings.
The tendency of much of the international community to excuse every Palestinian
failure has helped convince Palestinians that victimization--even when it is
self-willed--affords immunity from responsibility. Many foreign journalists
with whom I've spoken in recent weeks accept the Palestinian argument that the
rocket attacks from the 1967 Gaza border into sovereign Israel are legitimate,
or at least understandable, given that Israel continues to occupy the West
Bank. Yet that argument ignores the historic Palestinian failure to exploit the
Gaza withdrawal, which created the first sovereign Palestinian territory. Had
the Palestinians shown the most minimal effort at statebuilding--for example,
applying foreign aid to rehabilitate refugee camps--the Israeli public would
have supported a return to the negotiating table. Instead, the Palestinian
national movement proved again that it is more keen on subverting the Jewish
state than on creating a Palestinian state. And so one more
opportunity for a negotiated end to the conflict was lost.
In conversations I've had over the years with Palestinians, invariably my
interlocutor would offer a version of the following: You and I, we are little
people. The "big ones" are only interested in themselves. They don't care if we
suffer. I used to find that sentiment moving, an attempt by Palestinians to
create a common humanity with Israelis. But now I see it as an expression of
self-induced helplessness, precisely why the Palestinians and the Lebanese have
allowed our common tragedy to reach this point.
Israel's attack on Lebanon, holding it responsible for what occurs in its
territory, is not a violation of Lebanese sovereignty but an affirmation of it.
And in targeting the democratically elected Hamas government, Israel is telling
the Palestinians that there is a price to pay for empowering the theology of
genocide. If the only alternative to a corrupt Fatah that Palestinian society
can generate is a non-corrupt Hamas, then Palestine will become a pariah.
Israel's policy, then, is to stop patronizing the Lebanese and the Palestinians
and relate to them as adults responsible for their fate.
Some in the Arab world are beginning to understand this. In an article
published in the Kuwaiti newspaper Arab Times, the editor-in-chief, Ahmed Al
Jarallah, wrote:
This war was inevitable as the Lebanese government couldn't bring Hezbollah
within its authority and make it work for the interests of Lebanon. Similarly
leader of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas has been unable to rein in
the Hamas movement. Unfortunately we must admit that in such a war the only way
to get rid of 'these irregular phenomena' is what Israel is doing. The
operations of Israel in Gaza and Lebanon are in the interest of the people of
Arab countries and the international community.
The war, then, is not only inciting Islamists, but may, potentially, embolden
moderates. The extraordinary Saudi--along with Egyptian and
Jordanian--condemnation of Hezbollah marks the first time in any of Israel's
wars that a significant chunk of the Arab world has publicly blamed Arab
aggression for starting hostilities. This could create an opening for a tacit
Israeli alliance with moderate Arabs against the Islamist, and particularly
Iranian, threat. Just as we need to be resolute against the pathologies of the
Middle East, so we need to be open to its changes. The responsibility of the
people of Israel is not only to be on the front line against terror but to be
on the front line for reconciliation. Not only to help stop evil, but to help
empower the good.
o far, Israel enjoys three crucial strategic advantages in this war:
unequivocal American support, a divided Arab world, and, most crucial of all, a
united Israeli people. Arguably not since the 1973 Yom Kippur War has Israel
been as determined in war as it is today. Though some restlessness has
begun--an antiwar rally in Tel Aviv drew 2,500 people--most of the left
supports the invasion. Indeed, Peace Now and other Zionist left-wing groups
stayed away from the Tel Aviv rally. One reason for the absence of serious
left-wing opposition is the fact that Amir Peretz, our most dovish mainstream
politician, happens to be running the war as defense minister. Peretz's
ideological credentials are compensation for his lack of military ones: Just as
Ariel Sharon helped insure broad support for withdrawal from Gaza, so Peretz is
insuring broad support for the reinvasion of Gaza and Lebanon.
Most of the left understands that this is a war, in part, for the viability of
the concept of territorial withdrawal. For years the left assured the Israeli
public that, in the event of withdrawal, Israel would resist any subsequent
aggression with determination, unity, and international legitimacy. In Lebanon
and Gaza, then, two fronts from which Israel has already withdrawn to the green
line (Israel also withdrew to the green line on the Egyptian border in 1982),
that premise is now being tested. If the left defects from the war effort,
triggering international pressure, then the Israeli public will rightly despair
of future withdrawals.
Most of all, this is a war for the viability of Israeli deterrence. After
Israel unilaterally withdrew from Lebanon in May 2000, Hezbollah leader Sayyid
Hassan Nasrallah described the Jewish state as a "spider web": Just as a spider
web seems solid from a distance but disintegrates when swiped, so Israel will
collapse under the pressure of Arab resolve. The "spider web" speech, as it
came to be known, is very much in the mind of Israelis today as we belatedly
try to restore our lost deterrence, without which the Jewish state will not
survive long in the Middle East.
Israel tried to avoid this war, to the point of endangering its most basic
credibility. For months we allowed Palestinian groups to shell Israeli towns on
the Gaza border with virtual immunity. And for six years we turned away as Iran
supplied Hezbollah with thousands of long-range rockets and built a vast
infrastructure literally meters across our border. When three Israeli soldiers
were kidnapped by Hezbollah in October 2000, then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak
didn't massively retaliate, preferring to negotiate a prisoner exchange. Among
some Israeli journalists, Nasrallah was considered a "responsible" leader,
capable of insuring quiet in the north, rather than biding his time and
awaiting instructions from Iran to act.
The Jewish people is once again being forced to act as a brake against evil.
This is not a repetition of the first Lebanon war, but a return to our
consensus wars of survival--not a Vietnam moment but a World War II moment.
That is why Israel fights, and why it will win.
Yossi Klein Halevi is a foreign correspondent for The New Republic and senior
fellow of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem.
" A patriot must always be ready to defend his country
against his government." - Edward Abbey
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