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Israel at 60

By most measures, the Jewish state is a great success story. The modern Middle East is the misbegotten progeny of the British and French colonial map-makers of 1922. All the nation states in that neck of the woods date back a mere 60 or 70 years — Iraq to the Thirties, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel to the Forties. The only difference is that Israel has made a go of it. Would I rather there were more countries like Israel, or more like Syria? I don’t find that a hard question to answer. Israel is the only liberal democracy in the Middle East (Iraq may yet prove a second) and its Arab citizens enjoy more rights than they would living under any of the kleptocrat kings and psychotic dictators who otherwise infest the region. On a tiny strip of land narrower at its narrowest point than many American townships, Israel has built a modern economy with a GDP per capita just shy of $30,000 — and within striking distance of the European Union average. If you object that that’s because it’s uniquely blessed by Uncle Sam, well, for the past 30 years the second largest recipient of U.S. aid has been Egypt: Their GDP per capita is $5,000, and America has nothing to show for its investment other than one-time pilot Mohammed Atta coming at you through the office window.

Jewish success against the odds is nothing new. “Aaron Lazarus the Jew,” wrote Anthony Hope in his all but unknown prequel to The Prisoner Of Zenda, “had made a great business of it, and had spent his savings in buying up the better part of the street; but” — and for Jews there’s always a ‘but’ — “since Jews then might hold no property…”

Ah, right. Like the Jewish merchants in old Europe who were tolerated as leaseholders but could never be full property owners, the Israelis are regarded as operating a uniquely conditional sovereignty. Jimmy Carter, just returned from his squalid suck-up junket to Hamas, is merely the latest Western sophisticate to pronounce triumphantly that he has secured the usual (off-the-record, highly qualified, never to be translated into Arabic, and instantly denied) commitment from the Jews’ enemies acknowledging Israel’s “right to exist.” Well, whoop-de-doo. Would you enter negotiations on such a basis?

Since Israel marked its half-century, the “right to exist” is now routinely denied not just in Gaza and Ramallah and the region’s presidential palaces but on every European and Canadian college campus.

The most crucial mistake Israel has made since the 1967 war was to unilaterally withdraw from southern Lebanon. Israel was worn out with south Lebanon - the expense, the slow bleed in lives lost, the world condemnation over Israel’s presence (with nary a peep about Syria’s much larger presence in the rest of Lebanon) - so Israel bugged out, no questions asked. For the Islamists who had been sniping at the Israeli effort, the lesson was well learned - just keep up a grinding pressure on Israel and eventually she would quit. This is why in spite of all Israel has done to fight Hamas, the fight continues - because Hamas is convinced that Israel was forced out of Lebanon by Hezbollah, and thus can be forced out of Israel, itself, by Hamas. This is the sort of situation one gets when there is a “peace process”.

The ultimate solution to the problem of Israel vs Islam is for Islam to finally accept that Israel isn’t going away - from first to last and without exception, the key to peace lies in the acceptance of the Arab leadership that they cannot and will not ever be able to remove Israel. As long as the Arab leadership keeps preaching the destruction of Israel and as long as the terrorists of Hamas, etc are fed on the concept that eventually Israel will be forced out, so the war will continue. This will require some rather strenuous economic, political, diplomatic and military efforts - key to which will be to sustain the democracy in Iraq and to force not just Syria but Syrian and Iranian backed groups out of Lebanon. Israel made an effort at this is 2006 and unfortunately made a complete hash out of it - the IDF not being built to slug it out in the mountains with a well-entrenched foe. This effort will have to be revisited - especially as a re-occupation of south Lebanon by Israeli forces which are in the process of destroying/driving out Hezbollah will recover for Israel the sense of invincibility once shared not just by Israelis, but also by the Arabs.

Hamas will also have to be taken out; and Syria brought permanently to heel; and Egypt will have to tone down the anti-Israel rhetoric or lose US aid. By use of power (military, economic, diplomatic, etc) we must force the leadership of the Arab world to admit Israel’s permanence, and that will lead to a drying up of revanchist feeling amongst the broader Arab population. Don’t be fooled by siren songs of how we can talk our way out of this - or that as long as the current leadership of the Arabs is in place that we’ll have anything better than a temporary truce. This will have to be fought out, and hard measures will have to be taken by the US and Israel, working in tandem.