The
Peace Process: Terror as a Way of Life
By Robert E. Heiler,
Executive Director, IASPS - DC
The
New York Times, The Washington Post
and others ran front-page stories Tuesday October 2 that
detail U.S. plans to back the creation of a Palestinian
state before the September 11 attacks. There could be no
clearer indication of the expansion of the Peace Process
coming to America, or of its prospects to entrench
itself successfully.
The parallelism is
so perfect that a decent novelist would reject it as
“too pat.” But truth is often both stranger and more
trite than good fiction. Recall that the last major
event before the current intifada in Israel was a
proposal by then-Prime minister Ehud Barak to relinquish
95 percent of disputed territory and an intimation that
he might be willing to put the disposition of Jerusalem
on the table. His reward for this “sacrifice for
peace” was Yasir Arafat’s release of over 100
extremist terrorists who immediately set about blowing
up Israeli citizens.
Here is the
structure of the Peace Process in Israel: Labor and
Likud parties bicker over the minutiae of dealing with
Arafat and the Palestinians, but neither is willing to
recognize that the goal of their “counterparts”
(read: enemies) is the destruction of Israel. If they do
permit themselves to think of that, they lack the
resolve to kill their enemies to prevent it, at least in
sufficient numbers to be effective. Arial Sharon is the
embodiment of the right, which talks tougher but does
little else; Shimon Peres is the left, which scrambles
to yield Israel’s sovereignty more quickly in the vain
hope of establishing a “comprehensive peace.” Yasir
Arafat, meanwhile, alternates ostensibly reasonable
behavior with thinly veiled threats and open hostility,
all the while maintaining “plausible deniability”
for the most excessive of the violence. And more
Israelis try to explain to their children why Mommy or
Daddy isn’t coming home anymore.
At the current rate,
that paragraph will soon represent the “war on
terrorism,” with the following substitutions:
Bush=Sharon, Powell=Peres, “moderate Arab
states”=Arafat and America=Israel. That the lessons of
the Israel-Palestine conflict have not been absorbed is
clear in the following sentence from The
New York Times story: “Many moderate Arab
states have made clear that a serious American
engagement in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
is a condition for their support of the
administration’s drive to crush terrorism.”
As President Bush
has stated, states have to decide whether they are with
us or with the terrorists. Conditions are not their
prerogative. Any state that seeks a geopolitical quid
pro quo for its support in this struggle is
one that we can fight it without. Unfortunately, while
the President’s words have stated this, he has allowed
Secretary of State Colin Powell to cast the
anti-terrorist coalition net so wide as to attempt
inclusion of states known to sponsor terrorists in the
past and who now want to impose conditions on their
cooperation.
Coalitions are like
committees: their accomplishments tend to proceed at the
pace of the least committed (or most obstructive)
member. Moreover, the elimination of Osama bin Laden and
a hundred others like him will not achieve the goal of
eliminating terrorism. Terrorists function with the
logistical, financial and intelligence support of
states, and these states must be made to re-evaluate the
cost-benefit analysis of such sponsorship. The cost
should be raised to their elimination. The states that
sponsor terrorism are not the deluded, often drugged,
suicidal zealots that fly airplanes into buildings: they
will cease to engage in this activity when it becomes
clear that their alternative is to cease to be.
In order for this to
happen, though, Bush will have to embody the conviction
in his speeches. He will have to do this without the
unanimous support and understanding of even his own
cabinet, let alone the American public. When CNN starts
showing the footage of dying civilians and American
soldiers, a significant percentage of Americans will
lack the stomach for it. This is a prospect that might
even make Al Gore glad he is not in Bush’s position.
The alternative is
the permanent entrenchment of the Peace Process in
America, which is to say the demise of the American way
of life, as expressed in everything from the Fourth
Amendment to easy and open domestic travel. America now
lives, literally, in terror of foreign attack, and she
will continue to live in that fear until her enemies are
crushed. One way to think of the Peace Process is
precisely that: the codification of fear, and the
capitulation to it as permanent and necessary.
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