The Evil of Two Lessers
Now 40 years after Israel's stunning victory in the June 1967 Six-Day War, the Israelis are still ringed by enemies but with even more menace. Radical Islamic forces and a global jihadist movement offer no room for compromise. The Arab state media fester with anti-Semitic hate. And looming over all this is a radicalized Iran striving to build nuclear missiles—an Iran that in 1967 was a covert ally of Israel but is now itself the single greatest threat to world peace.
As President Bush considers a new approach to finding peace, it's worth remembering some things that haven't changed. The Palestine Liberation Organization, created three years before the Six-Day War, was dedicated to taking back all of Palestine from the hated Jews. We forget that the PLO carried out terrorist attacks in 1964, 1965, and 1966, when Israel was in possession of no occupied territories whatsoever. We forget that a victorious Israel immediately offered to return Sinai to Egypt and the Golan to Syria, only to be met with the Arab League's famous three "nos": no peace, no recognition, and no negotiation. If the Palestinians had wanted a viable state of their own, they could have had it long ago.
What the world may not remember the Israelis can never forget. How could they forget that unbearable month in 1967 when the entire Arab world was methodically preparing for their extinction—and the rest of the world did nothing?
Right to exist. At the very heart of the impasse, then and now, is the Arab refusal to accept Israel's existence. Peace would not come even if Israel pulled out of every bit of land defensively captured in 1967. Look what happened when Israel turned over Gaza. The world expected the Palestinians to develop a viable state. Instead, they turned Gaza into a launching ground for rockets and suicide terrorists, and then elected those terrorists in the form of Hamas.
Hamas does not want peace, and Mahmoud Abbas, the PLO leader, cannot deliver it. Perhaps the only chance to save his Fatah party is through a Jordanian-Palestinian confederation, so that the Jordanians could help rule the West Bank by the bayonets of the Jordanian Legion. The return of Jordan to the West Bank in some form of confederation seems to be gaining traction on both sides of the Jordan River. Even 30 percent of Palestinians currently support this idea.
The support of the United States for the existence of Israel is long-standing. President John Adams wrote, "I really wish the Jews again in Judea an independent nation." Abraham Lincoln acknowledged, "Restoring the Jews to their national home in Palestine ... is a noble dream and one shared by many Americans." This bipartisan support extends to this day and has been critical to Israel's survival.
The current political chatter in Washington is that President Bush is on the verge of revealing a new initiative to address the Israeli and Palestinian conflict. The shorthand description is that there may be an update of the Clinton proposal from 2000, and it may well include the delineation of possible borders between Palestine and Israel. That sounds fine on paper, but when both the hostile parties are too weak to make any progress—as they are here—"initiatives" can be counterproductive. Israel would be expected to respond positively, while the Palestinians are bound to respond negatively. Just as they did with President Clinton's proposals, they see any move not as an opportunity for compromise but as a base point for further advance. The Palestinians would never accept anything less than what the president proposes. In fact, it would make a future peace negotiation between Israel and Palestine more difficult because it would limit the capacity of the Israelis to offer concessions that might induce counterconcessions from the Palestinians essential to a final agreement. Indeed, such a presentation of a political horizon by the president might very well be contrary to U.S. interests, for it would be interpreted as a victory for the Hamas radicals and promoted by them as the successful outcome of their policies of rejectionism and violence—all at great cost to America's ally Israel. Some in the Bush administration promote this initiative in the belief that the Israeli government is so weak that it would be forced to accept it. But the likelihood is the opposite, for this very weakness might well force the Israeli government to be even more rigid, given the negative consequences of the proposal. Thus, the president may make a speech that improves the U.S. image with the Arabs, while pushing future peace prospects even further back.
The radicalization of the Muslim world and the emergence of Hamas have transformed the conflict from a dispute over territory to one over religion. The deterioration in the region provokes a natural impulse to do something. But the bad can also be made worse. What we are facing is the evil of two lessers.
This story appears in the June 18, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.