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Arab Grievances and Israel: The Unstoppable Force and the Immovable Object | ||
Pamela Olson July 27, 2006 | ||
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Israel will not be intimidated by attacks on soldiers and civilians within its own borders. But, not surprisingly, Palestinians and Lebanese have similarly low thresholds of tolerance for attacks against their civilians and infrastructure, and similarly have not been and will not be subdued by them. Such attacks only provide leverage for militants who are skilled at manipulating Arabs’ sense of injustice.
The only effective way to pull the rug out from under extremists and achieve sustainable regional security is to undertake comprehensive multilateral negotiations based on international law. The majority of Arabs would accept guerrilla disarmament in return for a fair solution to regional disputes along the lines of UN resolutions, with certain agreed-upon revisions to reflect new realities. In the course of negotiations, Israel would necessarily lose some of the land it occupies and some of the prisoners it holds, and not under the unilateral terms its government desires. But the alternative is untold decades of mounting rage, innocent blood, financial ruin, and senseless destruction in a region awash in beauty, history, hospitality, and potential. In the short-term, Israel is unlikely to retrieve her soldiers by military means. Experience shows that this is the most likely way to get them killed. In the longer-term, in order to neutralize Hamas and Hezbollah, Israel would have to employ tactics so extreme as to be self-defeating. Such tactics would further weaken moderate Arab regimes, increasingly radicalize peacefully-inclined Arabs, provoke suicidally vicious assaults on Israeli cities, and kill far more soldiers than what Hamas or Hezbollah could reach if the soldiers remained on Israeli soil. For example: As punishment for Hamas and Hezbollah militants kidnapping three Israeli soldiers and killing ten more, Israel has already killed over 600 Palestinians and Lebanese (mostly civilians), bombed Beirut, destroyed Lebanon’s transportation infrastructure, buzzed the summer home of the president of Syria, and blockaded and cut power to hundreds of thousands of Gazans. Yet Israel is no closer to retrieving her soldiers; nineteen Israeli civilians have been killed by Hezbollah reprisal bombings; Islamic Jihad still fires home-made rockets from Gaza at will; and the government of Lebanon has been weakened, probably in favor of Hezbollah. Why is Israel averse to negotiations? Israel is the hegemonic nuclear and military power in the region and enjoys strong American financial and political support. Yet Israelis feel vulnerable to irregular attacks by their neighbors, and the Israeli government feels compelled to respond decisively to any attack in order to maintain credible deterrence. Negotiations are regarded by Israel as a sign of weakness that will only lead to further attacks. But Israel fails to understand that the rage it provokes with its disproportionate responses and suppression of legitimate legal grievances cannot be bombed away. Occupied Palestinians, who continue to lose vital land to settlement expansion, and whose economy and independence are smothered by Israeli closures, also feel like victims. So do the Lebanese, whose country was devastated by Israel in 1982 and occupied in the south for 18 years, and who still have citizens in Israeli jails. And they have no conventional power to bring Israel to the table. When Israel destroyed the PLO in Lebanon, it got Hezbollah. When Israel refused to deal with Fatah in Palestine, it got Hamas. It is unclear what will arise from the ashes of Lebanon this time. But it is likely to make it even more clear that there is no brute-force military solution to this conflict. Only a comprehensive peace summit, such as the one attempted in Madrid in 1991 but cut short by the secretly-negotiated Oslo Accords, can break the impasse. Genuine multi-party negotiations between moderates on all sides based on international law hold the best hope of weakening extremists and providing long-term security and permanent, defensible, universally-recognized borders for Israel. | ||