April
15, 2003, 1:50 p.m.
Road Map for Israel
Tearing
down roadblocks.
here
is commotion on the matter of U.S. affinity for Israel, and it is not
only within the right wing, as would be expected. At left-minded demonstrations
in the weeks before we conquered Iraq, banners and graffiti were displayed
which could be read as betraying hostility a) to Jews, b) to Israel, c)
to the United States, d) to Israel-U.S. friendship/affinity/alliance/dependence,
and e) to all of the above. On the right, the charge made by the so-called
paleoconservatives is here and there reasonably interpreted as anti-Semitic
in inspiration, but it rests reasonably on the simple complaint that United
States policy is askew on account of the bearing, in that policy, of consideration
for Israel.
A poll not greatly
noticed a few weeks ago was to the effect that only 58 percent of U.S.
Jews favored going to war against Iraq. That datum should have been more
widely examined, because it is confounding in its implications. If there
was less than solidarity among Jews in favor of war in the Mideast, how
is it explained that the entire enterprise was said to be a Jewish operation?
Difficult to explain, but so are corollary questions. If Israel did not
exist, and our governors were looking only at threats of terrorism and
of the accumulation of weapons of mass destruction, how would our policies
toward Afghanistan and Iraq have altered? Iraq had not directly threatened
Israel, besides which a move preeminently designed to reassure Israel
would have aimed first at Syria, not Iraq. When Mr. Bush spoke the words
about the axis of evil, he can be said to have been thinking loosely by
singling out Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, but there was no inner-driven
orientation there to suggest that Israel endowed us not only with the
Ten Commandments, but with an explanation of the locus of evil in the
first part of the 21st century.
All this said, what can't be disputed is that Israel is, if not the cause
of perpetual friction in the Mideast, an unimaginative agent of it. In
analyzing the so-called road map, which is an attempt at strategic deciphering
of a plan designed to diminish tension and create a Palestinian state,
one has to begin with an absolute given, which is the survival of the
Israeli state. But, immediately, one founders on the question: What are
the borders of the Israeli state we are determined should survive?
And we bump immediately into the question of the Israeli settlements.
Keen students of the conflict, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times
an example, have said it quite simply: Unless Israel retreats from the
settlements, a coherent Palestinian state cannot evolve to the endurance
of enclave states. There are historical exceptions, Goa in India, Hong
Kong in China, which are now gone, and Gibraltar in Iberia, which time
has stabilized. But the Israeli settlements are a pullulating sore, attracting
terrorists, requiring Israeli security, and seeking always, expansion.
Israeli leaders are always promising to check increases in the settlements,
but only Amram Mitzha, and he was soundly defeated at the last Israeli
election, has spoken of the dissolution of some of the settlements. There
is too much pride invested in those settlements, and 250,000 settlers
directly involved in any proposal to dissolve them.
"But what would the Israelis get in return?" the British historian
Alistair Horne commented when the proposal was ventilated at a forum.
That isn't easy to answer, because although Israel is well protected against
massive military aggression, its fear, today as it was yesterday and will
be tomorrow, is of individual terrorists working havoc on Israeli men,
women, and children, robbing the state of any wholesome security of life.
The new Palestinian prime minister Mahmoud Abbas is struggling to put
together an imaginative cabinet, but suffers from the authority of old
man Arafat to disband that government, lest it jeopardize Arafat's predilection
for terrorism and the implied goal of the elimination of Israel.
But President Bush's road map has to put it this way to Tel Aviv: We cannot
promise that the Palestinians will stop their suicide attacks, but we
can tell you that the settlements are disruptive of any approach to a
strategic arrangement. The settlements are impassable road blocks on the
road map.
Although the liberation of Iraq was not undertaken merely to guarantee
Israel's survival, that liberation removes a potential military aggressor
and so fortifies Israeli security. The time then comes to establish that
the United States government is not a creature of parliamentary coalitions
in Israel, which have given to minority parties unbalanced leverage over
government policies. The sooner Mr. Bush brings up this point, the sooner
we can progress to making policy in that part of the world that earns
the respect of the broader community.
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here
is commotion on the matter of U.S. affinity for Israel, and it is not
only within the right wing, as would be expected. At left-minded demonstrations
in the weeks before we conquered Iraq, banners and graffiti were displayed
which could be read as betraying hostility a) to Jews, b) to Israel, c)
to the United States, d) to Israel-U.S. friendship/affinity/alliance/dependence,
and e) to all of the above. On the right, the charge made by the so-called
paleoconservatives is here and there reasonably interpreted as anti-Semitic
in inspiration, but it rests reasonably on the simple complaint that United
States policy is askew on account of the bearing, in that policy, of consideration
for Israel. 
