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Israel: The Way Ahead
Last uploaded : Thursday 21st Feb 2002 at 13:06
Contributed by : Avi Harari

 

News Israel: the Way Ahead

Israel has faced many challenges before. Many times, it looked like it was about to be annihilated. It survived. What is particularly devastating about the current crisis is that the danger was underestimated, as was the calibre of the Palestinian leadership. For years, the Arab applied the same full-on, conventional military tactics, only to be thrown back time and again by the superior equipment and prowess of the IDF. That's why the Palestinians adopted the Trojan horse strategy of grabbing what they could by negotiation, and then using those gains as a springboard to sew total mayhem. All of which might well have been straight out of the pages of a manual on revolutionary Marxism. The revolutionary tactics Israel is now faced with are classic: just create as much terrorist violence as possible and the ensuing social and political disruption can only further the revolutionary cause -- in this case, the vanquishing of a technologically superior enemy. Whenever you talk to the enemy or the world at large, lie. Truth is just a commodity to be traded away for the cause: there is no such thing as absolute truth anyway, and distorting reality service to beguile the idealists and the ignorant among the enemy, enlisting them as unwitting allies in the struggle against their own people.

Put it this way: we have now come so far and conflict between Jews and Arabs that it is unlikely that they will ever be able to live together. The bad feeling is so severe that it is almost certainly not even possible at this point for two separate states to coexist west of the River Jordan. Basically, they would just undermine each other. It's a bit like an acrimonious divorce: you really can't do joint custody of the kids if you hate each other. You have to interact too often, so there are too many opportunities for conflict to arise. In that situation, total separation is far better for all involved.

This poses a problem for the person with democratic values. How do you square the circle between believing in democracy and the rights of man and ruling over a captive population? This problem can be resolved in two ways: firstly by realising that it is totally unavoidable, and secondly by being committed to doing it in as humane way as possible: pay compensation, preserve life and property wherever possible, treat the sick. Life is not ideal - just look at all the people who lost land after the Second World War - Germans, Poles, Slovaks, Romanians, etc. in the end, the solution to this problem is likely to come from an unexpected turn of events. There could be some massive Middle East war -- let's say, the US, UK, Turkey, Jordan and Israel vs. Syria, Iraq and Iran - resulting in corresponding territorial upheavals, all of which might make the creation of a Palestinian state possible elsewhere.

If the Jewish people has learned anything since 1945, it is that we have to help ourselves: there's no point standing around waiting for anybody else to rescue us – not even the Americans - because it just ain't going to happen. Ultimately, no one cares about the Jews except the Jews. If - God forbid - the state of Israel were to be destroyed tomorrow, I wonder how many countries would welcome its Jewish population as refugees. Most likely, it would be a replay of the 1930s.

Equally, the struggle between Israel and the Palestinians is massively significant to the world as a whole. It really is a clash between civilisations. While the friction between Jews and Arabs is complex and exhibits many levels of mutual incomprehension, peeling those levels away to reveal a fundamental difference in values is not that hard. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to see that the Palestinian leadership that Israel has naively attempted to deal with over the last few years basically consists of criminal thugs. In territories notionally controlled by the Palestinian Authority, we have no democracy, no dissent, no law, corruption, intimidation, incitement to racial hatred and the rule of the gun. In this, the Palestinians simply reflect the common culture of the Arab world. The question should be asked, in the light of September 11th, what vibrational or long-term repercussions would result if Israel, as a representative of Western civilisation with a unique historical destiny, were to be overrun by a bunch of blood-crazed barbarians. The world just isn't the same after except September 11th, and it's just not ever going to be the same again. That's why this question is no longer academic.

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