How Israel's Peacemaking Endangers Itself and the Stability of the Region
When Israeli leaders embarked on peace negotiations with the Islamic-Marxist terrorists who called themselves representatives of the ""Palestinian people", they hoped to improve relations with the Muslim world. But not only did Israel not succeed in improving relations with the Muslim world, but its bid for peace has actually destroyed its old relationships which were built on a certain respect for Israel's staying power.
The more Israel has traded land for peace, the more its staying power has diminished. There is no better place to see that shift than in Turkey, formerly Israel's closest ally in the Muslim world. That relationship was built not on mutual friendship, but mutual respect. Today Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu envisions a region in which Israel ceases to exist and is replaced by a Muslim-Jewish protectorate of Turkey. In 1986 that vision would have gotten him laughed off the podium when through war after war, Israel proved that it would not be pushed into the sea. But in 2011, with two Muslim terrorist states under international protection inside its own borders, and an American administration pushing for a handover of half its capital, Davutoglu's vision of the destruction of Israel has become the basis for Turkish policy toward Israel. And the only way that Jerusalem can improve its relations with Ankara is to change that perception of its destructibility.
The so-called Peace Process has dramatically undermined Israel's viability as a state in perception and reality. And American and European pressure on Israel to create a terrorist state within its borders has undermined regional stability and sped up the process of regional Islamization. Israel has gone from a regional power capable of guaranteeing the security of American-allied neighbors such as Jordan, to a state under siege by rockets falling on its own towns and villages. If Turkey's Islamists needed proof that Iran was the future and Israel the past, Hamas has been helpfully supplying it.
A post-Israel region is the brainchild of the same Leftist-Islamist alliance behind the overthrow of Mubarak. Their method for realizing that vision has been the constant stress on Israel's responsibility to create a palestinian state as the only means of bringing peace and stability to the region. Arab leaders were only too happy to echo the call in order to distract attention from their own local tyrannies. Now those same leaders are falling and the region is less stable than ever, despite two decades of misanthropic peacemaking with red-handed terrorists. Will the Saudis reconsider their campaign against Israel now that it stands as the only regional counterweight between the Iran and them. Probably not, because Israel has become too weak to be respected.
By agreeing to the peace initiatives of western powers looking to appease the Muslim world, Israel has destroyed its own relations with them for the same reason. Israel's ties with the American people might be based on religious and cultural values-- but its ties with the United States government have always been based on mutual interest.
The relations of the United States and Israeli governments did not derive from religious values-- but from growing Soviet influence in the area. The Kennedy Administration turned to Israel as a potential ally when the fall of the old colonial backed monarchies and the rise of new Soviet allied regimes endangered American influence in the region. For all the rose colored romanticism and the breathy conspiracy theories about the Jewish lobby that the US-Israel relationship has been cloaked in, it was always one of mutual interest. The JFK and Golda Meir quips or AIPAC's lobbying were frosting on the cake, but they weren't the cake. The cake was that the US needed a stable regional ally as a proxy for American interests and Israel needed to align itself with a world power.
During the Cold War when countries were being labeled in one of two colors in a global game of chess, that alliance stayed strong. But with the fall of the USSR, the Western powers decided to employ Israel in a sacrifice play to the Muslim world. Israel was still a powerful piece, but one that no longer fit in the new game. The new gameboard was no longer a polar match between two global coalitions, but every country for itself. And by sacrificing Israel, Western governments hoped to 'capture' alliances with more valuable Muslim countries. It was a treacherous move, but one that Israel should have been prepared for over the years. Instead Israeli leaders convinced themselves that some arrangement with the terrorist gangs was in their interest. An arrangement that has gone from an autonomous territory to an independent state with its capital in Jerusalem. And even as a new Cold War began forming, with the Muslim world aligned against the free world, Western governments have kept on making the same sacrifice play over and over again. With the same results. Israel is weakened, and the Muslim world remains unappeased.
At a meeting with Jewish leaders, Barack Hussein Obama told them to "search your souls" over whether Israel really wants to make peace. But all those leaders need to search is Israeli cemeteries filled with the graves of thousands of victims of the peace process. Perhaps there they can search the souls of the thousands of men, women and children, blown up in restaurants, gunned down in schools and on roads, tortured to death in the No-Go Zones of the Palestinian Authority. They are, in the memorably gruesome words of Rabin, "Sacrifices for Peace", human sacrifices served up on the burning altar of diplomacy in an endless holocaust of appeasement. Every inch of territory that Israel has given up into the hands of terrorists, has been used as the front line of terrorism. If Israelis are less eager to be served up as human sacrifices to the Muslim Moloch, that should call for soul searching not by them, but by the Western governments who have blindly supported Muslim terrorists leaders Arafat and Abbas, and their murderous campaign against Israeli civilians.
Under Netanyahu, Israel has come to play the role of the reluctant sacrifice. Unwilling to say yes, but unwilling to say no, either. Too polite to object to its own execution. And so by way of momentum, no has become yes. As it always does when the victim is unwilling to take a firm stand and deliver a firm, "NO". The slippery slope of concessions is still sliding. Netanyahu hopes to ride it out long enough till Obama and his "enormous hostility toward Israel" is out of office, but he is more likely to end up buried underneath it. That is what happened in his first term. And even if Obama loses in 2012, it is still no solution. Obama may be going further than anyone has before him, but like Davutoglu he could not do it if the model weren't already there. Whoever succeeds him will almost certainly pick up where he left off.
The model is that Israel makes "Sacrifices for Peace" until either the region is stable or the Jewish state ceases to exist. Since the region becomes more unstable as Israel continues to weaken itself, the appeasement must go on until Israel is destroyed. Or until it finally finds a leader with the courage to say, "NO" and mean it. For two decades Israel has stood at the execution block, trying to negotiate peace by piece. "How about a finger, sir. Or my left big toe, I don't use it much anyway. My right foot then, it's far out there and populated by settlers, and my chest will be more defensible without it. Not good enough? Alright then, both my feet and half the fingers on my left hand. But that's here I draw the line!" But the line is always drawn at the neck. Sooner or later it always gets down to the head of the matter.
A terrorist state was never workable as a means of stabilizing the region. But as a way of whittling down Israel to the point of non-existence, it has performed brilliantly. And by undermining Israel, the road was open to bringing down every marginally Westernized country in the region. The AKP took over Turkey, instituting an EU approved regime of terror against opposition politicians and journalists. The Islamists are on the rise in Tunisia. And without their victory in Gaza, the Muslim Brotherhood might never have succeeded in toppling Mubarak. The fall of Turkey and Egypt's secular governments marks an end to Western influence in the region. And Israel remains alone, a flickering candle in the growing dark. If it goes out, the hour of the Caliphate comes.
But who benefits from this scenario? Western leftists are playing the anarchist to the Muslim bolshevik, tearing down the system with no real concern for what rises in its place. Their wonderland of democracy and civil rights is as real as Utopia and Erehwon. Already the persecution of Christian Copts in Egypt has reached a fevered pitch. And International Women's Day was marked in Tahrir Square with assaults on the few hundred women that dared show up by men shouting that their call for equality was against Islam. Like Lara Logan, they had to be rescued by Egyptian soldiers, who after the removal of Mubarak, represent the only alternative to Muslim mob rule. And as goes Egypt, so goes the region.
When Western governments made their sacrifice play of Israel in the early 90's they were playing from a position of strength. Now they are the weaker players, besieged by oil money and immigrant demographics, with the pointed towers of minarets rising around them, while their own sources of strength falter and fall. The European hand-wringing over multiculturalism and America electing a wartime leader with a Muslim background so he could tour the world and reassure Muslims of our good intentions are signs of drastic weakness. In the nineties Western governments were using Israel for their sacrifice play, now they are reduced to sacrificing their own countries and values in the hopes of appeasing the growing rage of Islam. A growing rage fed to fury by their own concessions.
American influence in the Middle East began to wane under Carter, but it has been completely destroyed in only two years of Obama. Western leaders prattle about imposing a No Fly Zone over Libya, as if that would matter in a conflict that will be decided by fast running gun battles between mercenaries and rebels on pickup trucks, and even the occasional scimitar. The left has gotten what it wanted. The West exists now only exists as a market for Muslim oil and surplus populations. And the Islamists have gotten what they wanted, a chance to seize power through populism. If Israel is going to survive that environment, it will not do so through concessions or by riding the merry go round of Western diplomacy.
The Munich Pact between Chamberlain and Hitler has been characterized as "the nadir of diplomacy-- a personal deal between two men at the expense of a third party." That aptly describes the sacrifice play in which panicked Western countries compel Israel to make sacrifices to appease the Muslim world. Chamberlain described the pact as "the last desperate snatch at the last tuft on the very verge of the precipice." That too describes the present day attitudes of Western leaders snatching at tufts of grass to avoid going down into the precipice of the Jihad. Lord Birkenhead, at the time the pusillanimous Lord Halifax's parliamentary secretary, described Chamberlain's pleading with Hitler for peace as, "effusive in the eagerness to continue the process of surrender."
The French went into the Munich Pact with a proposal for the occupation of portions of Czechoslovakia by German troops. If Hitler agreed to their proposal, they would "demand acceptance from the Czech government. If Czechoslovakia refused, conclusions could be drawn which did not need to be defined more closely." The conclusion being that either Czechoslovakia could cooperate with a French proposal for its own dismantling, or it could be dismantled without the utterly useless 'guarantees' of the French government. Two years later, German troops would be occupying France and the men who had sold out Czechoslovakia would watch German troops march through Paris.
But men have a way of learning nothing from history. Karel Schwarzenberg, the Czech Republic’s foreign minister, has rejected any comparison of Israel and Czechoslovakia, saying that, "Czechoslovakia in 1938 had no friendly neighbors... but Israel has quite an important ally in the US." Much like Czechoslovakia had important allies in England and France. Schwarzenberg also rejected any analogy between the West Bank and the Sudetenland, saying that the West Bank "belongs" to the Palestinians, "They are the main inhabitants. The analogy doesn’t work." But of course it does. Ethnic Germans were the main inhabitants of the Sudetenland. As an ethnic German himself, Schwarzenberg should know that. But the facts of history are ground under as the perfidy of one era melds into the next. Despicable betrayals turn respectable with time. For all of Schwarzenberg's general friendliness to Israel, he does not want Czechoslovakia to be thought of as another Israel. No country does.
That is what the so-called Peace Process has truly accomplished, to turn Israel into a pariah, not for any crimes, but for its weakness. After WW2, no country wanted to be the next Czechoslovakia, today no country wants to be the next Israel or Yugoslavia-- carved up to pacify Muslim demands for "Lebensraum". Israel's own cooperativeness has isolated it. Each generation of compromise, each concession short of annihilation, has only brought it to the international isolation of the impatient, the world waiting for it to be thrown into the volcano of Muslim rage to calm their fury.
The Muslim world's wars against Israel succeeded in making it into an example of resistance to the Jihad. But Western pressure and the weakness of Israeli leaders has turned it into a cautionary example instead. Israel now stands internationally isolated. Its allies in the West and the Muslim world are lining up to turn their backs on it. And in that silence, waits a desperate lesson to be learned. That paradoxically Israel can only have peace, when it refuses it. And that it can only avoid war by being ready and willing to fight it. No romantic notions about its ties to the United States or the goodwill that can come from creating a Palestinian state will save it. They will only destroy it, as they have been destroying it until now. Only by refusing to be Czechoslovakia, but rather Finland, can Israel weather the coming storm. Only by standing tall will it find the room to breathe again. Only by giving up on peace, can it have peace again.
The so-called Peace Process has dramatically undermined Israel's viability as a state in perception and reality. And American and European pressure on Israel to create a terrorist state within its borders has undermined regional stability and sped up the process of regional Islamization. Israel has gone from a regional power capable of guaranteeing the security of American-allied neighbors such as Jordan, to a state under siege by rockets falling on its own towns and villages. If Turkey's Islamists needed proof that Iran was the future and Israel the past, Hamas has been helpfully supplying it.
A post-Israel region is the brainchild of the same Leftist-Islamist alliance behind the overthrow of Mubarak. Their method for realizing that vision has been the constant stress on Israel's responsibility to create a palestinian state as the only means of bringing peace and stability to the region. Arab leaders were only too happy to echo the call in order to distract attention from their own local tyrannies. Now those same leaders are falling and the region is less stable than ever, despite two decades of misanthropic peacemaking with red-handed terrorists. Will the Saudis reconsider their campaign against Israel now that it stands as the only regional counterweight between the Iran and them. Probably not, because Israel has become too weak to be respected.
By agreeing to the peace initiatives of western powers looking to appease the Muslim world, Israel has destroyed its own relations with them for the same reason. Israel's ties with the American people might be based on religious and cultural values-- but its ties with the United States government have always been based on mutual interest.
The relations of the United States and Israeli governments did not derive from religious values-- but from growing Soviet influence in the area. The Kennedy Administration turned to Israel as a potential ally when the fall of the old colonial backed monarchies and the rise of new Soviet allied regimes endangered American influence in the region. For all the rose colored romanticism and the breathy conspiracy theories about the Jewish lobby that the US-Israel relationship has been cloaked in, it was always one of mutual interest. The JFK and Golda Meir quips or AIPAC's lobbying were frosting on the cake, but they weren't the cake. The cake was that the US needed a stable regional ally as a proxy for American interests and Israel needed to align itself with a world power.
During the Cold War when countries were being labeled in one of two colors in a global game of chess, that alliance stayed strong. But with the fall of the USSR, the Western powers decided to employ Israel in a sacrifice play to the Muslim world. Israel was still a powerful piece, but one that no longer fit in the new game. The new gameboard was no longer a polar match between two global coalitions, but every country for itself. And by sacrificing Israel, Western governments hoped to 'capture' alliances with more valuable Muslim countries. It was a treacherous move, but one that Israel should have been prepared for over the years. Instead Israeli leaders convinced themselves that some arrangement with the terrorist gangs was in their interest. An arrangement that has gone from an autonomous territory to an independent state with its capital in Jerusalem. And even as a new Cold War began forming, with the Muslim world aligned against the free world, Western governments have kept on making the same sacrifice play over and over again. With the same results. Israel is weakened, and the Muslim world remains unappeased.
At a meeting with Jewish leaders, Barack Hussein Obama told them to "search your souls" over whether Israel really wants to make peace. But all those leaders need to search is Israeli cemeteries filled with the graves of thousands of victims of the peace process. Perhaps there they can search the souls of the thousands of men, women and children, blown up in restaurants, gunned down in schools and on roads, tortured to death in the No-Go Zones of the Palestinian Authority. They are, in the memorably gruesome words of Rabin, "Sacrifices for Peace", human sacrifices served up on the burning altar of diplomacy in an endless holocaust of appeasement. Every inch of territory that Israel has given up into the hands of terrorists, has been used as the front line of terrorism. If Israelis are less eager to be served up as human sacrifices to the Muslim Moloch, that should call for soul searching not by them, but by the Western governments who have blindly supported Muslim terrorists leaders Arafat and Abbas, and their murderous campaign against Israeli civilians.
Under Netanyahu, Israel has come to play the role of the reluctant sacrifice. Unwilling to say yes, but unwilling to say no, either. Too polite to object to its own execution. And so by way of momentum, no has become yes. As it always does when the victim is unwilling to take a firm stand and deliver a firm, "NO". The slippery slope of concessions is still sliding. Netanyahu hopes to ride it out long enough till Obama and his "enormous hostility toward Israel" is out of office, but he is more likely to end up buried underneath it. That is what happened in his first term. And even if Obama loses in 2012, it is still no solution. Obama may be going further than anyone has before him, but like Davutoglu he could not do it if the model weren't already there. Whoever succeeds him will almost certainly pick up where he left off.
The model is that Israel makes "Sacrifices for Peace" until either the region is stable or the Jewish state ceases to exist. Since the region becomes more unstable as Israel continues to weaken itself, the appeasement must go on until Israel is destroyed. Or until it finally finds a leader with the courage to say, "NO" and mean it. For two decades Israel has stood at the execution block, trying to negotiate peace by piece. "How about a finger, sir. Or my left big toe, I don't use it much anyway. My right foot then, it's far out there and populated by settlers, and my chest will be more defensible without it. Not good enough? Alright then, both my feet and half the fingers on my left hand. But that's here I draw the line!" But the line is always drawn at the neck. Sooner or later it always gets down to the head of the matter.A terrorist state was never workable as a means of stabilizing the region. But as a way of whittling down Israel to the point of non-existence, it has performed brilliantly. And by undermining Israel, the road was open to bringing down every marginally Westernized country in the region. The AKP took over Turkey, instituting an EU approved regime of terror against opposition politicians and journalists. The Islamists are on the rise in Tunisia. And without their victory in Gaza, the Muslim Brotherhood might never have succeeded in toppling Mubarak. The fall of Turkey and Egypt's secular governments marks an end to Western influence in the region. And Israel remains alone, a flickering candle in the growing dark. If it goes out, the hour of the Caliphate comes.
But who benefits from this scenario? Western leftists are playing the anarchist to the Muslim bolshevik, tearing down the system with no real concern for what rises in its place. Their wonderland of democracy and civil rights is as real as Utopia and Erehwon. Already the persecution of Christian Copts in Egypt has reached a fevered pitch. And International Women's Day was marked in Tahrir Square with assaults on the few hundred women that dared show up by men shouting that their call for equality was against Islam. Like Lara Logan, they had to be rescued by Egyptian soldiers, who after the removal of Mubarak, represent the only alternative to Muslim mob rule. And as goes Egypt, so goes the region.
When Western governments made their sacrifice play of Israel in the early 90's they were playing from a position of strength. Now they are the weaker players, besieged by oil money and immigrant demographics, with the pointed towers of minarets rising around them, while their own sources of strength falter and fall. The European hand-wringing over multiculturalism and America electing a wartime leader with a Muslim background so he could tour the world and reassure Muslims of our good intentions are signs of drastic weakness. In the nineties Western governments were using Israel for their sacrifice play, now they are reduced to sacrificing their own countries and values in the hopes of appeasing the growing rage of Islam. A growing rage fed to fury by their own concessions.
American influence in the Middle East began to wane under Carter, but it has been completely destroyed in only two years of Obama. Western leaders prattle about imposing a No Fly Zone over Libya, as if that would matter in a conflict that will be decided by fast running gun battles between mercenaries and rebels on pickup trucks, and even the occasional scimitar. The left has gotten what it wanted. The West exists now only exists as a market for Muslim oil and surplus populations. And the Islamists have gotten what they wanted, a chance to seize power through populism. If Israel is going to survive that environment, it will not do so through concessions or by riding the merry go round of Western diplomacy.
The Munich Pact between Chamberlain and Hitler has been characterized as "the nadir of diplomacy-- a personal deal between two men at the expense of a third party." That aptly describes the sacrifice play in which panicked Western countries compel Israel to make sacrifices to appease the Muslim world. Chamberlain described the pact as "the last desperate snatch at the last tuft on the very verge of the precipice." That too describes the present day attitudes of Western leaders snatching at tufts of grass to avoid going down into the precipice of the Jihad. Lord Birkenhead, at the time the pusillanimous Lord Halifax's parliamentary secretary, described Chamberlain's pleading with Hitler for peace as, "effusive in the eagerness to continue the process of surrender."
The French went into the Munich Pact with a proposal for the occupation of portions of Czechoslovakia by German troops. If Hitler agreed to their proposal, they would "demand acceptance from the Czech government. If Czechoslovakia refused, conclusions could be drawn which did not need to be defined more closely." The conclusion being that either Czechoslovakia could cooperate with a French proposal for its own dismantling, or it could be dismantled without the utterly useless 'guarantees' of the French government. Two years later, German troops would be occupying France and the men who had sold out Czechoslovakia would watch German troops march through Paris.
But men have a way of learning nothing from history. Karel Schwarzenberg, the Czech Republic’s foreign minister, has rejected any comparison of Israel and Czechoslovakia, saying that, "Czechoslovakia in 1938 had no friendly neighbors... but Israel has quite an important ally in the US." Much like Czechoslovakia had important allies in England and France. Schwarzenberg also rejected any analogy between the West Bank and the Sudetenland, saying that the West Bank "belongs" to the Palestinians, "They are the main inhabitants. The analogy doesn’t work." But of course it does. Ethnic Germans were the main inhabitants of the Sudetenland. As an ethnic German himself, Schwarzenberg should know that. But the facts of history are ground under as the perfidy of one era melds into the next. Despicable betrayals turn respectable with time. For all of Schwarzenberg's general friendliness to Israel, he does not want Czechoslovakia to be thought of as another Israel. No country does.
That is what the so-called Peace Process has truly accomplished, to turn Israel into a pariah, not for any crimes, but for its weakness. After WW2, no country wanted to be the next Czechoslovakia, today no country wants to be the next Israel or Yugoslavia-- carved up to pacify Muslim demands for "Lebensraum". Israel's own cooperativeness has isolated it. Each generation of compromise, each concession short of annihilation, has only brought it to the international isolation of the impatient, the world waiting for it to be thrown into the volcano of Muslim rage to calm their fury.
The Muslim world's wars against Israel succeeded in making it into an example of resistance to the Jihad. But Western pressure and the weakness of Israeli leaders has turned it into a cautionary example instead. Israel now stands internationally isolated. Its allies in the West and the Muslim world are lining up to turn their backs on it. And in that silence, waits a desperate lesson to be learned. That paradoxically Israel can only have peace, when it refuses it. And that it can only avoid war by being ready and willing to fight it. No romantic notions about its ties to the United States or the goodwill that can come from creating a Palestinian state will save it. They will only destroy it, as they have been destroying it until now. Only by refusing to be Czechoslovakia, but rather Finland, can Israel weather the coming storm. Only by standing tall will it find the room to breathe again. Only by giving up on peace, can it have peace again.
From NY to Jerusalem,
Daniel Greenfield
Covers the Stories
Behind the News
