TRUE, BUT NOT THE WHOLE STORY

Jews and Anti-Jews (Ruth Wisse, OpinionJournal, 6/16/2003)

Unfortunately, the Arab war against Israel is no more a territorial conflict than was al Qaeda's strike against America, and it can no more be resolved by the "road map" than anti-Americanism could be appeased by ceding part of the U.S. to an Islamist enclave.... Arab rulers did not object to Israel because it rendered the Palestinians homeless. Rather, they ensured that the Palestinians should remain homeless so that they could organize their politics around opposition to Israel....

Rantisi greeted the "road map" by organizing major attacks against Israel, which he calls "our land, not the land of the Jews." America can't hope to win its war against terror while ignoring some of its major perpetrators and propagandists.

Professor Wisse's statements are undeniably correct: the terrorists want to annihilate Israel. But the roadmap is not aimed at making peace with these folk. The roadmap aims at nurturing a Palestinian peace party, at improving Israel's reputation among people of goodwill by publicly offering to satisfy every legitimate Palestinian grievance, and at exposing the terrorists as the true barriers to peace by removing their ability to masquerade as a party of Palestinian independence. The battle with the terrorists must come later, after the ground has been prepared, an alternative created and the world public prepared for the necessity of battle.

It is understandably frustrating for friends of justice and liberty that the U.S., not to mention other nations, does not denounce the terrorists more vigorously. (I do not understand the geopolitical reasons that have prevented U.S. governments from doing so, but they must be weighty because officials of all ideologies have embraced a public diplomacy of equivocation.) It is also understandable that Jews, who have been betrayed so many times in the past, should fear betrayal once again. But it is worthwhile to step back and see that the roadmap is a step forward intellectually and politically; and that such steps must be taken if the situation is to be resolved without horrific loss of life.

MORE: The Secret Plan (Saul Singer, NRO, 6/16/2003)

At first glance, the roadmap now looks like a sick joke, a pathetic attempt to impose order on a conflict that has no end....

In style, the roadmap repeats all the mistakes of Oslo. In structure it makes one critical change: In Oslo, Palestinian statehood was to be the end result; in the roadmap, the state comes in the middle.

Sharon is a disciple of Ben-Gurion and ... the peace Sharon is talking about is not a full "solution" to the conflict, but a form of livable cold war....

The deal Sharon is offering the Palestinians is a partial state in exchange for a partial peace. You don't want to renounce the "right of return" and accept Israel as a Jewish state? Fine, says Sharon, but for that all you get is a truncated state whose borders are controlled by Israel. Why would the Palestinians accept such a deal? Because they know that the only alternatives are the status quo, in which both sides bleed indefinitely, or making a full peace, neither of which they want.

Mr. Singer is one of the first pundits to come around to this view. Time, and the advance of freedom in the Middle East beginning in Iraq, will steadily make the alternative of peace more and more attractive to ordinary Palestinians. By clarifying the problem into stark alternatives of endless destructive warfare and a prosperous peace in a democratic state, and by waiting patiently for Arab minds to change while steadily increasing the benefits of peace, the Bush-Sharon strategy holds out hope for eventual resolution to the conflict without catastrophic loss of live.

Posted by Paul Jaminet at June 16, 2003 12:18 PM