IASPS Op-Eds
November 3, 2000
Of The Two Options Remaining to Israel: Option # 4
by Robert J. Loewenberg, IASPS President
A Propaedeutic, Part 1In an OpEd here on August 9 called "The Four Options after Camp David" I explained that whether Israel chose to continue the peace process (Option 1) or to discontinue it (Option 2) the result would be the same. "Options 1 and 2, seeming opposites, are practically the same for the reason that both will result in war." This is now demonstrated by events.
The aim of this commentary is to introduce another, better option as a "propaedeutic" or new and preliminary approach for Israel and the region. First a word about what has changed.
What has changed? Visible in the demonstration that Options 1 and 2 are effectively dead ends is this: strategically the nation-state of Israel has played out a "process" of trading peace, actually armistices. This process is coeval with the state beginning in 1948. Practically this means Israel now faces either perpetual war or a permanent "trade" of what it has all along given up to get its periods of non-war. It is this trade resulting in a near equivalence of the policy of peace and the fact of war that has now been made. But what has Israel traded for peace and war, each time narrowing the time and space between the two?
Israel has traded the terms of national existence for the peace and war it has received. That is to say that in place of borders, representation, economic freedom and control of demographic destiny Israel has received arms, money and the means to exist. In effect Israel has been granted a State as the means to exist as a nation. The price for this uncoupling of nation and State is that war and peace have been bound together; in a process.
A group of people organized in a nation-state cannot continue to swap the elements of national order, trading land or physical space for periods of non-war or physical time, without finding, as Israel now has, that the line (in time and space) between what is peace and what is war is erased. There is nothing complicated in this but it is anomalous. For example, Israel fights wars but does not win them ( it wins only battles.) Having traded winning wars for armistices, lands, arms and money, Israel has no boundaries. But Israel has also built an aid-based political economy in which 10% of the GDP comes from aid and other "free money." Had it grown at 5% per/capita since aid began in 1974 Israel's GDP would now be more than two and one half times its present size. There would have been no peace process but neither could there have been Israel's present "bolshevist polity." One cannot underestimate the meaning of this although money, economics or taxes are prosaic things.
Although the terms "representative" government are in truth redundant, today they mean you pay taxes and the government protects you. In effect Israelis don't pay enough and, accordingly, they are not protected or represented enough. Mr. Rabin once told the people of Shiloh "if you won't accept the peace process I can't protect you." Now the people of Gilo, much nearer are not being protected (I can hear the gun fire from the Institute's office on Chopin Street.) But they pay taxes and, very likely, support aid and also the peace process.
Israel's swollen, really bolshevist, polity, known everywhere however as a second Silicon Valley, is now face to face with a reality no longer entirely camouflaged by the peace process. But people cannot be expected to see the economics of the free money or the failure to put up boundaries. They cannot see what it is about the peace process that now includes war. They suppose the Arabs are the problem. No serious political figure misunderstands things in this way. Certainly Mr. Barak does not. We guess he expects war. After it he will expect the US to continue the peace process and the rest of what we call "the pattern," this time with the risks for peace having been justified in Israel's cutting away from the Arabs and in the survival of Israel. The rewards from abroad and the vindication at home will have been more than worth the sacrifices. This is the view of Mr. Barak and perhaps most Israelis.
As for the Arabs they understand it is the process that matters, not peace. And Mr. Khouri, quoted in my earlier OpEd, sees more. "Zionism has failed," he wrote prior to Oslo, glad of the fact but right about it even so. Khouri read Israel's destiny in its demographic unraveling.
Like the laybrinth that snared first the Trojans and then Aeneas himself, the Jews will also discover the truth of this still camouflaged reality in finding it's easier to get out of disputed grounds than it is to get out of having no borders or of not being represented by the State because 10% of its money comes from non-Israelis. The "irretraceable wanderings" of the Jews have taken them from Hebron to Jerusalem. "We have rocks and you have guns but we are sovereign here." Fiasal Hussieni, pacifist PA head in Jerusalem said this when Mr. Sharon went to the Temple Mount. He was only repeating the slogans of Arab rock throwers over the past years. He sees that the process is the key to sovereignty or to Israel's failure to protect Jews from Shiloh to Gilo or from Hebron to Jerusalem.
But the Jews of Israel understand nothing of this because they believe the Arabs are the problem: they really aren't for peace and so forth. However, the Jews did not realize when they were asked to consider trading land for peace the problem wasn't peace. The Israelis do not in truth have national possession of the land to trade. In this sense, not the one the Arabs meant, it is not only the territories that are "occupied lands." What is camouflaged from the Jews (and from the Arabs and Khouri too although they have no interest or were betrayed or humiliated in the matter) is that the failure of Zionism is the process by which the State has been uncoupled from the nation, from "representation." Strategically, Israel's loss of sovereignty arose in the process of swapping battles for armistices; the tip of the iceberg. Israel's history is in effect the unmaking of a nation and the making of a State. This is why so many, perhaps most, Israelis would accept still today the tragic misjudgment of well-beloved former Mayor Kollek when he said, getting it backwards, that the worst thing about opposition to the peace process was its antagonism to "the State."
Setting no boundaries cost the Jews protection; sovereignty. What the State bought for aid and free money was the forfeit of demographic destiny. In strategic jargon Israel has lost its deterrent.
The loss of Options 1 and 2 means Israel cannot project power. Israel's present situation of war, loss of initiative, daylight murder and celebration of it five miles from Jerusalem is an effect of prior trades of boundaries, economic rationality and strategic common sense in return for demographic withering. What can be done now?
Supposing nothing but the reversal of policies would be required or that nothing more profound was involved in the present crisis than getting a good leader or a new policy, the likelihood of any policy reversals is small. Accordingly the war, conventional or nuclear, Israel will be obliged to wage to deter the Arabs and regain national momentum would, perhaps inevitably, confirm once again that Options 1 and 2 are the same. Israel would end the war if it did not lose it outright with an immediate return to the peace process, trading according to the traditional pattern. In other words Israel would once again confront belligerent Arab mobs and enraged Arab regimes alongside anti-Israel world opinion, all of this reducing still more the "distance" between peace and war. Israel that is to say would not win the war even if they did not lose it. Mr. Barak is prepared to humiliate the Jews because he like most Israelis is sure Israel can survive as a state so long as it continues the pattern, above all getting outside free money. The Israeli right has no different view with the difference, which is of some moral account, that they do not wish to be humiliated. What are the Jews to do?
Option 4 is a confederal relationship with Turkey. Let us be clear to start that this is not a realistic proposal today, nor will Israel take the initiative. This option can suggest itself only as men begin to sense that Israel's sovereignty as a nation-state is slipping away and will not be regained.
And let us say, too, that the peace process, because it was built upon the rubble of far worse policies and though it was a bad, even grotesque policy had one thing right. The problem of the Middle East is instability. What was wrong with the peace process hence its grotesqueness and now its chaos was the strategic premise. This premise is that stability requires "comprehensive peace," to be achieved by pressing the region's already disabled and crippled nation states, some little more than tribes with flags or gangster regimes with captive populations, to abandon a teetering balance of power. The modus vivendi was to weaken, actually to destroy a once potentially viable Jewish state so that a non-viable Arab gangster state could be erected. These sure methods for the murder and chaos now upon us included another ingredient to insure failure or rather the single ingredient for success was left out.
Instead of turning to Syria and the PLO as partners for peace and to the hapless EU and the to the US, anyone seriously concerned about the strategic chaos in the Middle East -which has existed since 1914, must look to the Turks. It is the only authentic nation-state in the region capable of bringing about stability, of dealing with the Arabs and the fundamentalists, and of hoisting its domestic and international fortunes by doing so. Perhaps most telling is the fact that it is only Turkey that has ever pacified this region.
In sum, with all of the reservations anyone might reasonably have about Turkey, it is capable of assuming the role of regional superpower, of doing what must be done at this moment of the region's history. One might make a stronger point in this respect. The explosion of the peace process contains a silver lining - for Turkey but even more for the West. As for the Jews, sure that Israel is a nation state and is not ebbing from this status, they expect the US to sustain it and if need be to guarantee Israel's existence. We have considered this view in a recent site OpEd by Angelo Codevilla who evinces much doubt regarding Israel's expectations. But the other side of the coin, Israel, is that the "pattern" is now both unchangeable and unsustainable. Perhaps it was so from the start.
The advent of the peace process in 1993 was seen by IASPS as the worst but most likely policy option available to Israel for the fact that it is built upon what is now the rubble of much worse policies and indeed upon barely penetrable contradictions in Jewish political representation. In sum, what brought about the peace process in 1993 in the form of demographic and economic decline is what led in the end to a mostly hopeless alternative of war whether the Left chose to continue the peace process or whether the Right chose to stop it.
But if we suppose this to be true, and leaving aside that Mr. Barak leads a country of people who would not even consider such a proposition and therefor this proposal, what interest could Turkey have in it? To begin, the emerging chaos must soon make clear that the time to consider alternatives is at hand and that Turkey must have an interest in them. Option # 4 or the proposal that Turkey is the source of regional stability based in a confederal or a cantonal relationship with Israel (and with other separate and homogeneous bodies of peoples marked-off along ethno-religious lines in cantons --including within Turkey itself), is likely to be rejected at first blush by the Turks. The Arabs would of course deplore such a course for a Muslim state. The international community, the EU and Washington do not think well of Turkey, mostly because it is a Muslim state and not an Arab one. More, it would not have occurred to the Western powers that Turkey could have any use or interest in shoring up Western interests. These views, a jumble of misconceptions and prejudice, would nonetheless be affecting for Turkey.
The focus as distinguished from the impetus of Option # 4 is not Israel or even Turkey but the balance of power in context of Western interests: the root of "grand strategy."
Part 2 picks up from this point