Amid the surging violence in the Middle East, more and more voices on the left are calling on the Bush administration to take a more active role in mediating a workable détente. Israel and the Palestinians must return to the negotiating table, we are told, and only America can make them sit down and talk instead of fighting.
Moreover, a regional calm is in America’s vital interest, since the current dynamics are heading toward a new Israeli-Arab war, which would undermine a potential anti-Iraqi coalition; or so the argument goes.
There is something almost sad about the way today’s Left is so resolutely out of contact with reality. The tireless calls to “return to the negotiating table” is premised on the now bankrupt notion that there is something to negotiate.
In the Taba talks in December 2000, Ehud Barak — then Israel’s prime minister — offered Palestinian Authority chairman Yassir Arafat a Palestinian state on the equivalent of 97-100% (accounts vary on the exact figure) of the occupied territories, with the eastern half of Jerusalem as its capital. Arafat rejected the offer, however, because it didn’t provide for the right of Palestinian refugees and their descendents to return to homes they were (probably) forced to leave in 1948 — the so-called Right of Return, the acceptance of which would effectively spell the annihilation of the Jewish state as such.
In short, in the Taba talks, Israel offered everything it can possibly offer, short of its own dismantling, but its offer was dismissed. Against this background, it is hard to understand the various attempts to have the two sides “sit down and talk.” Talk about what?
There is nothing to talk about. This is a sad outcome indeed for the long and laborious peace process. We would all rather the outcome be different. But there is no point in pretending that the Taba talks never happened. There is no point in pretending there is something to negotiate. What exactly is Israel supposed to negotiate? The terms of its assisted suicide?
Moreover, the worry about a conflagration issuing in an all-out war between Israel and the Palestinians, which would indeed be contrary to American interest, is misguided. It is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the Palestinians’ modern strategy.
On 14 May 1948, the U.N. voted to recognize the Jewish state. The next morning, five Arab states simultaneously invaded the nascent country, then counting little more than 600,000 citizens. Against the odds, Israel won that war.
What ensued was a series of wars in which the Arab world attempted to get rid of Israel by the power of force. Needless to say, that didn’t work. But Israel’s ever growing military domination of its neighbors, while cutting short the dream of booting the Jews out of the Middle East by the power of force, gave birth to a new strategy: if the Jews cannot be booted out by the power of force, they shall be boot out by the power of weakness.
The power of weakness is of course something we are well acquainted with in America. There is a whole segment of American society — which we may dub the Jesse Jackson Americana — that made weakness its chief resource. (It is unsurprising, then, that among the numerous dogmas of the academic left, there is that list of the Officially Oppressed, which always counts as its first members the Palestinians and Jesse Jackson Americans.)
The obvious corollary of the new strategy is the politics of victimization. The idea is to devise an endless list of grievances; forsake any positive initiative in favor of a permanent posture of indignation; and routinely rehash a thoughtless mantra of mistreatment, injustice, and Allah.
(For an example of this thoughtless mantra, one need only consult the opinion piece recently published under Arafat’s name in the February 3 New York Times. There is no way Arafat actually penned those grammatical sentences; but the important thing is that he signed at the bottom. By the way, on February 20, the Jerusalem Post reported that the piece was authored by former US consul general in Jerusalem Edward Abingdon, who now heads a lobbying firm.)
Given Arafat’s strategy of weakness, we can rest assured that no war is precipitating in the Middle East. Appearing the defenseless victim, assaulted and overpowered, is essential to Arafat’s strategy. To embark on an all-out war, in which the Palestinians might come across as a forceful threat, would be contrary to that strategy. It would require an overall evaluation of the current strategy and a reversion to the previous hope to deal with the Jewish state by the power of force.
Since such a strategic development is unlikely in the foreseeable future, the Bush administration is right in its hands-off approach to the Middle East. Israel and the Palestinians are locked in a cycle of violence, which has unfortunately become a routine. But nothing fundamentally new is going to splinter out of that routine any time soon.
