Peace in the Middle East?

The debate on Israel's Gaza campaign continues this morning with Charles Krauthammer's excellent piece at the Washington Post, "Moral Clarity in Gaza." Carl in Jerusalem responds with "Krauthammer on Moral Clarity," adding this:

Krauthammer succinctly states the moral clarity that emerges from examining Israel's conduct of the current war in Gaza and comparing it to the conduct of the 'Palestinians' ....

Krauthammer goes on to state the obvious: Israel wants peace. Hamas wants perpetual war. He's right about that.But Krauthammer wrongly describes the mistake Israel committed three years ago by leaving Gaza, and because of that, he risks encouraging decision makers in Jerusalem and Washington to make the same mistake again.

Israel's only response is to try to do what it failed to do after the Gaza withdrawal. The unpardonable strategic error of its architect, Ariel Sharon, was not the withdrawal itself but the failure to immediately establish a deterrence regime under which no violence would be tolerated after the removal of any and all Israeli presence - the ostensible justification for previous Palestinian attacks. Instead, Israel allowed unceasing rocket fire, implicitly acquiescing to a state of active war and indiscriminate terror.

That's nonsense. Israel should never have withdrawn from Gaza in the first place. Every security assessment - without exception - in the summer of 2005 said that once Israel withdrew from Gaza, the rocket fire on Israel's Negev would increase. You see, the 'Palestinians' started firing rockets on the Negev from Gaza when they started the Oslo War in 2000. And they have never stopped.

Thursday night, Charles Johnson presented a couple of graphs of rocket and mortar fire from Gaza into the Negev and noted the sharp increase in those rockets since Hamas threw out Fatah in the summer of 2007. But not all of those rockets and mortar shells in 2007 were fired after Fatah was thrown out. And there were actually more rockets fired in 2006 - the year after Israel left Gaza when Fatah was nominally in control - than there were in 2007.

Israel's mistake was leaving Gaza in the first place. Once Israel left, it could not enforce a no-tolerance policy on 'Palestinian' rockets and mortars. The launchers are too mobile. The terrorists - as Krauthammer notes - hide among the civilians and are more than happy to take them along to the 72 virgins. The only reason that Israel doesn't also have rockets and mortars raining down on the center of the country is that when the IDF went into Judea and Samaria's cities during 2002's Operation Defensive Shield, it stayed there. That's the lesson that should have been learned long before the expulsion from Gaza.

Krauthammer - like all of us - wants a 'sustainable and enduring cease fire.' Without IDF troops stationed in Gaza, that won't happen. Because it's not just Hamas that wants a perpetual war against Israel until the Jewish state no longer exists. It's the entire Arab and Muslim world.

I'm inclined to think that perpetual war is the most likely future prospects for Israel and the Middle East, although I'm intrigued by the history of diplomacy in the region. Egypt and Israel have been at peace since 1978. Jordan joined the coalitions of Arab states fighting the Jewish state, but has been a partner for peace since 1994.

Last night I read Hussein Agha and Robert Malley's review of recent books on the peace process at the New York Review. The authors are partisan, and unfair to the Bush administration's Middle East diplomacy, and the New York Review is leftist. Nevertheless, some of the conclusions are interesting and worth consideration:

In Israel, endemic governmental weakness and instability and deepening social fragmentation, combined with the spoiling capacity of small yet increasingly powerful settler constituencies, call into question the state's ability to achieve, let alone carry out, an agreement that would entail the uprooting of tens of thousands of West Bank settlers. The generation of Israeli founding fathers, perhaps, might have succeeded in carrying off such a withdrawal, though it says something that even they didn't try. Their successors, more factional chiefs than national leaders, are not so well equipped.

The graver problem today is on the Palestinian side. If one strips away the institutional veneer—Fatah, the Palestine Liberation Organization, various secular political groupings, the Palestinian Authority—what is left is largely empty shells with neither an agreed-upon program nor recognized leadership. The national movement, once embodied by Fatah and Arafat, is adrift. From its vestiges, the Islamist movement Hamas has flourished and, amid the flurry of negotiations between Abbas and Olmert over a putative albeit wholly theoretical deal, it cannot have escaped notice that the more practical and meaningful negotiations have been between Israel and Hamas—over a cease-fire, for example. Still, the Islamist movement cannot, any more than Fatah, claim to represent the Palestinian people or to be empowered to negotiate on their behalf. The rift between the two organizations, most visibly manifested in the increasingly deep split between the West Bank and Gaza, makes a two-state solution harder to achieve. Israel long complained it had no Palestinian partner and, at the outset, the complaint had the feel of a pretext. Increasingly, it has the ring of truth.

Among Palestinians, moreover, the prize of statehood is losing its luster. The two-state solution today matters most to those who matter least, the political and economic elite whose positions, attained thanks to the malpractices of the Palestinian Authority, would be enhanced by acquiring a state. To many others, the dividends of such a solution—a state in Gaza and much of the West Bank—risk being outweighed by the sacrifices: forsaking any self-defense capacity, tolerating Israeli security intrusion, renouncing the refugees' right of return, and compromising on Jerusalem.

Arafat embraced the two-state solution and sold it to his people. It took him fifteen years—from 1973 to 1988—to turn it from an act of betrayal and high treason to what most of his people saw as the culmination of the Palestinian national movement. He did so with a militancy his successors lack and which seemed to both defy and negate the concessions such a solution entailed. He exhibited perpetual defiance, which was one of the many reasons why the US and Israel distrusted him even in the best of times, and why Palestinians continued to be drawn to him even at the worst of them. With his passing, it is hard to see who among his heirs can acquiesce in the necessary compromises and still pull off a solution.

When word recently leaked of a deal purportedly proposed by Olmert to Abbas in their one-on-one negotiations, the world got a glimpse of how little Israelis and Palestinians have begun to care. The proposal—a Palestinian state based on the 1967 lines with one-to-one territorial exchanges; a limited number of refugees coming into Israel; a Palestinian capital comprising the Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem; a special regime for the holy sites—was not ideal for either side. It was probably better for Palestinians than what was suggested at Camp David; arguably better for Israelis than what has been mooted in a series of unofficial agreements over the ensuing eight years. In earlier days such a plan would have generated immense interest and large political waves. It provoked neither. Familiarity has bred indifference. The two-state solution, it turns out, is endangered, not rescued, by being endlessly discussed.

Such changes in Israeli and Palestinian realities have taken place against the backdrop of deep alterations in the regional balance of power. Where traditional US allies such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia once set both the agenda and tone of Middle East diplomacy, they appear worn out and bereft of a cause other than preventing their own decline. Their energy seems to have been sapped and their regional authority diminished. On issue after issue—Iraq, Lebanon, Iran, Israel-Palestine—they have proved passive or, when active, feckless, unable to influence events or buttress their allies. Their close ties to Washington damage their credibility without being of much help to the US.

They are progressively upstaged by more dynamic players: those leading the charge against America's allies—Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas—and those—Qatar and Turkey—seeking to mediate between the two. All these developments challenge a US strategy that relies exclusively on so-called "moderate" Arab states and leaders, which are losing steam, in order to counter "radical" Islamist states and movements, which are gaining it.

The image of President Obama unveiling his vision of an Israeli–Palestinian settlement to overjoyed Arab leaders and universal endorsement may not, under the circumstances, be quite so alluring. A peace plan that has grown tedious by virtue of repetition is unlikely to generate popular enthusiasm; its backing by fading Arab leaders is unlikely to give it a boost.

The new president enjoys an enormous, perhaps unprecedented reservoir of regional goodwill. Yet it is goodwill based on hope that Obama can break from past American conduct and style, not reinforce them. The surest way to diminish Obama's appeal to the region would be for him to present a plan with no real future in the company of leaders burdened by their past.

There's more at the link, and I'll have more in upcoming essays.

Hat Tip: Memeorandum.