Peace in our time

Sunday, 13th January 2008

Rarely has a moral compass been so completely and publicly destroyed by its owner. George W Bush’s presidency has been defined by the moral position he took, under the impetus of 9/11, to repudiate the amoral realpolitik of his predecessors in appeasing and rewarding aggression while ignoring or even punishing its victims. Instead he would hold the aggressor’s feet to the fire and support and promote those who stood for freedom and democracy. Controversial as this doctrine undoubtedly was in the eyes of many in the US and around the world, it was at least consistent — with one niggling exception. On the Israel Arab impasse, Bush veered between making extraordinarily impressive speeches which correctly identified Arab aggression and incitement to hatred of Israel as the core problem to be addressed, and the imposition of the ‘Road Map’ which, by detailing the steps both Israel and the Palestinians had to take, descended into the kind of moral equivalence — and thus negation of the centrality of Arab aggression — which has kept this conflict alive for the past sixty years. At the time, however, it seemed that the Road Map was no more or less than a sop to Tony Blair — who has always failed grievously to grasp that the Palestinians don’t want a state, they want the Jewish state — as a gesture of thanks for his support over Iraq.

With Bush’s visit to the Middle East this week, however, any such residual excuse is blown away along with the last shreds of his claim to moral integrity. Peace between Israel and the Palestinians, he said blithely, was eminently possible this year. But everything he then said was about pushing Israel to make ‘painful concessions’ rather than the Palestinians. Since the sole obstacle to peace in the Middle East is the Arab rejection of the Jews’ right to their own ancestral home — the fact that Mahmoud Abbas not only has consistently refused to halt the continuing violence against Israel by both Hamas and his own Fatah affiliates, not only has refused to halt the incitement to hatred of Israel perpetrated daily by his own education system and PA controlled media, but has also repeatedly and consistently demanded the right of mass Palestinian immigration to Israel, thus showing his ‘aspiration’ for a Palestinian homeland existing peacefully alongside Israel to be totally bogus as was underlined by his chief negotiator’s recent declaration that the Palestinians would never recognised Israel as a Jewish state — Bush’s position is tantamount to pushing Israel to surrender to an enemy still hell-bent upon Israel’s annihilation.

In this context, some of what Bush said in Israel was deeply shocking and, in the implications of such moral and intellectual obtuseness, very frightening. Here, for example, although he nodded towards the Arab need to

reach out to Israel, a step that is long overdue

and also to

ensure that Israel has secure, recognized, and defensible borders,

he said this:

The point of departure for permanent status negotiations to realize this vision seems clear: There should be an end to the occupation that began in 1967. The agreement must establish Palestine as a homeland for the Palestinian people, just as Israel is a homeland for the Jewish people. These negotiations must ensure that Israel has secure, recognized, and defensible borders. And they must ensure that the state of Palestine is viable, contiguous, sovereign, and independent.

Well no, actually: the point of departure is not the ‘occupation that began in 1967’ (not least because Sinai and Gaza have now been relinquished by Israel, in return for… er, what, exactly, from Egypt and the Palestinians? Why, the uninterrupted importation of arms by the Palestinians from Egypt into Gaza for further attacks on Israeli civilians; and from the Palestinians themselves, merely more and more attacks upon Israel). The point of departure for peace has to be the point of departure for the war — the Palestinians’ refusal to allow Israel to survive. And that is not even mentioned by Bush. Instead:

The establishment of the state of Palestine is long overdue. The Palestinian people deserve it.

Why? Which other body of people whose identity is formed from their aspiration to ethnically cleanse a nation from its historic homeland, and who have never stopped trying to do so for almost a century, ‘deserve’ to be rewarded with a state of their own?

And it will enhance the stability of the region, and it will contribute to the security of the people of Israel.

Run that by me again?? As things stand, these are precisely what such a state will not do. Without Israel’s presence, it will quickly fall entirely to Hamas and directly threaten not merely

Israel

but the entire region, which it will help Islamise, and thus the free world.

There was, however, one good point about the wretched Road Map, which was that at least it stated that the very first condition had to be the Palestinians’ dismantling of their infrastructure of terror. But now just look at what Condoleezza Rice blurted out aboard Air Force One during the President’s Israel trip:

The ‘road map’ for peace, conceived in 2002 by Mr. Bush, had become a hindrance to the peace process, because the first requirement was that the Palestinians stop terrorist attacks. As a result, every time there was a terrorist bombing, the peace process fell apart and went back to square one. Neither side ever began discussing the ‘core issues’: the freezing of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, the rights of Palestinian refugees to return, the outline of Israel's border and the future of Jerusalem.

The reason that we haven't really been able to move forward on the peace process for a number of years is that we were stuck in the sequentiality of the road map. So you had to do the first phase of the road map before you moved on to the third phase of the road map, which was the actual negotiations of final status,’ Miss Rice said. Miss Rice said that what the U.S.-hosted November peace summit in Annapolis did was ‘break that tight sequentiality ... to say, you can do these in parallel, you can do road-map obligations and negotiation for the final status in parallel.’

But the core issue is nothing other than never-ending Palestinian aggression against Israel, which not only continues but increases with every concession Israel makes. Indeed, while one can think of many ‘painful concessions’ made by Israel — relinquishing Sinai and Gaza, getting out of Lebanon, offering to give up the whole of the West Bank (after the 1967 war), more than 90 per cent of the West Bank (in 2000), releasing scores of Palestinian prisoners in order to ‘shore up’ Mahmoud Abbas — one is hard put to think of any ‘painful concessions’ by the Palestinians at all. Nevertheless, Rice is a worshipper in the T Blair church of diplomacy whose cardinal doctrine is that nothing must ever, ever jeopardise a peace process, including the fact that the aggressor is still continuing to murder its victims and to incite others to do so. Since the ‘peace process’ is inviolable and sacrosanct, it follows that any attempt to stop aggression is totally unhelpful since it brings the peace process to a grinding halt. So the one plus point in the Road Map, that it acknowledged that the Palestinians had to stop making war before there could be peace — a universal precept — has had to be ditched.

This powerful signal threatens to bring about the peace of the grave as Israel is delivered to its enemies. So why is Bush doing this? Almost certainly because he himself and/or the advisers who have effectively imprisoned him within his own waning power believe that they can make a deal with the devil: offering the bound and inert body of the Jewish state in exchange for a Saudi-led Sunni alliance against Iran. If this is so, American amorality is outdone only by its stupidity, since Saudi — which was banking on the US bombing Iran into regime change — has now concluded that the US has lost its bottle and is busy making nice with Iran as the next best alternative.

As for Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert who appears to be going along with all of this, and whose Israeli critics ascribe to him every dubious motive under the sun ranging from a venal attempt to evade corruption charges to a desire to suck up to fashionable Israeli lefties, he appears to be actually motivated by two things which contradict each other: the belief that Israel must divest itself of the West Bank in order to retain its Jewish identity; and the belief that he can enter into his own Faustian pact with America by trading 'peace in our time' with Mahmoud Abbas for American support for an attack on Iran, on the assumption that such a deal with the Palestinians will never be struck because the last thing their leadership and their backers actually want is peace with Israel.

Such speculation, however, can only be just that. We cannot know for sure what motivates any of these players at this time. What we do know, because history tells us this over and over again, is that appeasement invariably brings not peace but war; and that when the world favours aggressors and further victimises their victims, countless more foot-soldiers are recruited to the cause of violence.

In that known context, the damage done by Bush’s visit to Israel is incalculable as a signal of surrender to the whole Arab and Muslim world, which understands what it means better than the Americans do themselves; and just off-stage, Iran is waiting, watching and preparing.