Think-Israel

THINK-ISRAEL

PART OF THE PROBLEM? THIS IS THE PROBLEM

So I begin perusing this Washington Post piece by Dennis Ross, and get into the first paragraph:

...and just hit the brakes right there, coming to a smoking, screeching halt. There's simply no point in reading further, because Ross gets his very first point exactly wrong.

No, Dennis, both sides demonstrably, provably do not want to end the war. Both sides do not want to create a period of calm, and both sides do not want to restore "normal life" (whatever that means) to their publics. Only the Israelis do. The proof of that essential truth is the fact that there are still people in existence who refer to themselves as Palestinians at all; Israel possesses the means to destroy every last one of them in an afternoon. The fact that they have not done so despite never-ending assaults on Israeli civilians and serious promises of eventual annihilation for the ones they can't quite reach right now firmly establishes Israel's ethical meliority to anyone paying real attention. The fact that Ross (and way too many others) so greatly desires to project the hopes and ambitions of normal, middle-class American suburbanites onto the Palestinians simply demonstrates that he doesn't have much of a grasp of what's really going on.

The Palestinians - like all the other Islamic terrorists some folks so cheerfully delude themselves into believing are amenable to negotiated settlements and peaceful coexistence - will halt their murderous aggression only after their one overarching goal is achieved: the total destruction and/or subjugation of their enemies, which in the case of the Palestinians means Israel and in the case of the rest of the Islamists means pretty much everybody else (to include Israel, of course). The only other way to stop them is to defeat them so utterly that they are at last forced to abandon their devilish commitment to absolute victory through genocide - a defeat that will come at a price far lower for all involved than the price of continued moral blindness on the part of Western wishful-thinkers.

I had originally thought to provide some quotes from various Palestinians to this effect, combined with some of the mountain of polling data showing their continuing overwhelming support for suicide bombings and the continuation of the intifada, but they've said these things so many times since 1948 that there really seems to be no point at all in doing it. The fact is, if Ross and others haven't heard it by now, it's not because the Palestinians haven't been shouting it loudly enough; the fault is with the people who won't let go of their absolutist, adolescent belief that "underneath, we're all the same."

And another truth being wilfully and childishly overlooked by these same people is the fact that underneath, Islamist terrorists are the same, at least in this one regard. It's simultaneously sad and amusing to see some liberals tying themselves in Gordian knots trying to establish false distinctions between the monsters of al Qaeda and those ordinary Palestinian Joes who are "just like the rest of us," who only want to live free in a nation of their own, liberated at last from the crushing oppression of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, etc - an occupation made necessary by the fact that the Palestinians themselves, having allowed themselves to be misled in 1948 and '49 (and '67 and '73) by other Arab nations promising to imminently come to their rescue and finally drive the hated Jewish interlopers into the sea once and for all, simply won't relinquish their fevered and seemingly eternal hope for another Holocaust. A successfully completed one this time, of course.

And this is the Western dilemma in a nutshell, vis a vis both the Palestinians and the Islamists: we are being invited and even openly challenged to do a thing that none of us very much wants to do, although we are perfectly capable of doing it at least in a technological sense, and the cost of not doing so is continued (relatively) minor assaults - right up until the day the Islamists manage to get their hands on some weapon or other that will guarantee our ultimate surrender. The petard the Islamists wish to hoist us on is our own humanity; indeed, they're explicitly counting on our reluctance to strike them as hard and as cruelly as they themselves would strike us if they possessed the means to do so to stay our hands until they can acquire said means. It's the ugliest of ironies, in a geopolitical situation defined and bounded by one ugly irony after another.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has conflated itself into the war between the Islamists and the rest of the world, aided and abetted by those in the West who firmly believe that there are no problems that can't be solved by talking it all out. Those people betray a fundamental misunderstanding of the ruthlessness, determination, and overall nature of the enemy; in fact, the very idea of having enemies at all so discomfits their notion of civil and human progress as to be unthinkable to them. This conflation was at first preventable, but by refusing to deal honestly with life's harsh realities they instead made it inevitable. And the ziggurat of ugly ironies continues to grow. In the current conflict obtuseness, rationalization, lack of will, and complacency spell defeat and death.

This is not a pleasant thing for someone with a hopeful and tolerant outlook to have to face, and the accommodation with this unpleasantness that liberals seem to have forged for themselves is to simply not face it at all.

Vodkapundit has some good stuff to say on all this. This next is by Stephen Green on the Vodka Pundit website.

Modern wars don't seem to end until one side is well and truly beaten. The exception to the rule is "wars of national liberation" (as the Soviets liked to call the actions of their little terrorist buddies), which end when the evil occupying nation gets sick of the whole mess and leaves. And even then the war doesn't really end, because the victors then turn against each other, like in parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Anyway.

If you think that the West Bank is an occupied nation, then you naturally think that all Israel has to do is to pull out - and peace will suddenly break out like a pimple the day before Senior Prom. The problem is, the Palestinians, by and large, think that Israel isn't just occupying the West Bank, it's occupying, well, all of Israel. So simply pulling back to the Green Line won't end the war.

And that makes this a very modern war, which won't end until one side or the other is burned, occupied, and crying uncle. Fact is, the Palestinians can't do that to the Israelis. Another fact is, the Israelis won't (but could) do it to the Palestinians.

And that is why you almost never see me write anything about the Middle East "peace process." The only process towards peace is the kind of war one side can't commit, and the other side won't.

So stop with the hand-wringing already. It just isn't going to get any better any time soon.

Mike Hendrix runs the Cold Fury website. His article appeared on November 26, 2003 and is archived at (http://www.coldfury.com/archives/001727.php

Stephen Green runs the VodkaPundit website. His article appeared on November 26, 2003 and is archived at http://www.vodkapundit.com/archives/004656.php