Kevin Sullivan

Failure or Extension?

Posted by Kevin Sullivan under Uncategorized

I’m posing this question to all 7.5 of my readers.

Approximately half of the Palestinian population is increasingly open to the idea of targeting and terrorizing Israeli citizens.  Support for suicide bombings is up, particularly in the Gaza Strip.  Ironically enough, support for their own political institutions continues to waver, while their general hatred for the Israeli people remains a constant in their lives.  This is partly understandable, considering the level of propagandizing and revisionist inculcation they’re exposed to from a very young age.  A life of constant warfare and embargo will of course foster intense feelings, too.  We should be extra critical of any polling data that comes from these territories, especially from those living in such conditions.

However, delving into this a bit further, I’m having a hard time understanding this apparent increase in anti-Israeli sentiment.  Gaza, after all, is arguably more autonomous now than it has ever been in its territorial life.  Settlements were dismantled, and although Israel obviously maintained the right to strike when necessary, there was an overall military withdrawal from the territory.  The fact that sentiments are more virulent in Gaza than the West Bank strikes me as counterintuitive.  It tells me that Gazans are smart enough to see the finite agenda of their own political institutions, however they lack the clarity to see how those institutions have crafted and cultivated popular perception of the Jewish state.  

This puts the Israelis in a precarious position, and its different than their tensions with Lebanon, Syria and even Iran.  All of the aforementioned states have a population with higher living standards, higher education, more freedom and some semblance of a middle class.  In the case of the Palestinians, you have an instance of perpetual warfare between two peoples that are seemingly irreconcilable.  Israel has a proven record of land (and relations) for peace, but not the other way around.  See Egypt, see Jordan and see Turkey.  But the overall Israeli policy (and I believe it to be the right one, incidentally) has been “you don’t respect me, I don’t respect you.”  So what we thus get is a cultural enactment of Newton’s first law: two irreconcilable forces that will perhaps only be stopped once they are made to stop (I won’t speculate on the “unbalanced force” is this analogy). 

I know this is a controversial proposal, but keeping two diplomatic ”schools of thought” in mind, I wonder if war is the only “diplomatic” option left for both sides, keeping the psychological conditions, the current tensions and the poor diplomatic relations between both parties in mind.  If you view war as a failure of diplomacy, than you probably fall in the camp that sees such an outcome as disastrous.  However, if you see war as something more linear, or as an extension of exhausted diplomacy, than you might view conflict with a certain degree of inevitability between the two.

My point? Autocrats that wish to maintain power over their own people are likely to be more amiable to diplomatic levers and carrots than a mass of people consumed by an ideology of hate and retribution. This has been the difference in American foreign policy for decades, and it was perhaps no better illustrated than during the Iran-Iraq War. Our favor fell then not on the better party, but on the more controllable. For the Israelis, they have little to no influence with the Palestinian people, especially in Gaza. They can dismantle settlements, withdraw troops and attempt negotiations, but the first instance where they revert back to their priority of national security (something every nation does with far less the scrutiny), those gestures of goodwill and compromise become negated. It’s an impasse that I see no conceivable end to (and no, I don’t see Jimmy Carter’s PR campaign with Hamas as a “positive”).

I think I fall somewhere between the two perspectives, perhaps leaning more heavily on a “Millsian” notion that there are worse things for people than war. Wars generally have resolution, and achieve some kind of a guideline for future relations and behavior. Poverty, oppression and cultural decline are certainly worse for the Palestinians, and war is arguably a more favorable alternative than life under constant stress and threat of attack for the Israelis. I am not, mind you, condoning war, but instead raising a question about its inevitability. And before the further Left calls me a neocon, or a warmonger, or whatever, I’d like them to keep in mind the fact that they’ve seemingly resigned themselves to a civil war in Iraq. So, when it’s Arab-on-Arab, or even Arab-on-Persian, it’s relegated hopelessly to “centuries of conflict” that we have no business mediating or instigating. However, when it becomes Arab-on-Jew, it’s suddenly a matter of humanitarian crisis. War over territory is the business of the Arabs, but when a Jew stakes a claim, it’s time for The International Community to act.

What I’m proposing is that we view the territorial dispute in Palestine much in the way the far Left would have us view Iranian claims to Basra, Bahrain or Azerbaijan. Even Saddam’s imperial interests in Iran and Kuwait were, at least initially, viewed with a degree of passivity. In a region marred by colonialism, post-colonialism and “Great Games,” it’s only the Israelis who must repeatedly justify their claims to the land they possess (not even getting into the more esoteric arguments about America and her indigenous populations). Perhaps the entire region could benefit from a little less Western concern. If people want war, they’ll have their war–whether a bullet is fired or not. All the road maps, accords and armistices in the world may not mitigate that reality.

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