by Gerald A. Honigman
I don't know.
Maybe it was just an exercise in
rallying support among millions of key Evangelical
Christian voters and winning over some Jews in what promises to be
a very close election come November 2004. Dubya, after all,
won last time around in a highly controversial election by, literally,
just a few handfuls of votes in Florida. But maybe--just maybe--while
it undoubtedly involved this, perhaps there was something
else astir as well.
I've gotten ahead of myself, so
let's backtrack a bit.
Israel's Prime Minister, Ariel
Sharon, made a very hard decision last April. After decades of
supporting the construction of Israeli settlements in disputed
territories Israel wound up with as a result of having to fight a
defensive war for its life in June 1967, the Old
Warrior decided that the costs outweighed the gains of keeping
Jews in Gaza.
While it is true that, while their
numbers drastically fluctuated, Jews had lived in Gaza for millennia;
that, since the days of the Pharaohs, Gaza had been used as an invasion
route into Israel proper by those aiming to destroy or subjugate it;
that Gaza had become a hotbed for terrorists aiming to destroy Israel;
that Jewish communities set up in Gaza were not on Arab-owned land;
etc. and so forth; it is also true that many--if not most--Israelis
were looking for a way out of Gaza if the proper conditions presented
themselves.
Israel had long been under pressure
to take some steps to revive the all-but-dead, so-called roadmap
for peace with Palestinian Arabs. While the latter was seen, at
least in a few circles, to exist in such a moribund state due to the
unwillingness and/or inability of the Arabs to control their own
disembowelers of Jews, this key factor did not matter nearly
as much as it should have. So the squeeze was put on the Jews. While
such hypocrisy was by now expected from Europe and much of the rest of
the world, the folks at Foggy Bottom also habitually indulge in
this sort of behavior, coming up with absurd, alleged "moral
equivalencies" and the like.
Lacking any Anwar Sadat or King
Hussein-type to deal with among Palestinian Arabs (i.e. Arab leaders
willing to allow for a viable Israel still existing on the
morrow after a peace treaty is signed), Arik decided to make a
unilateral move to break the stalemate while also supposedly enhancing
Israel's overall security position. The latter assertion is hotly
debated given certain "facts of life."
In April 2004, Sharon thus came up
with his Gaza withdrawal plan. In addition to the removal of Gaza's
8,000 Jews, some settlements in Samaria, the northern West Bank, were
also placed on the eviction notice.
The world had been clamoring for
such Israeli moves for decades.
Those who had conquered territories
sometimes hundreds or thousands of miles away from home in the name of
their own nations' security somehow couldn't figure out the
life-threatening problems Israel was constantly faced with due to the
armistice lines imposed upon it in 1949 by the United Nations. As is
well known by now, those lines made Israel a mere 9-miles wide at
its strategic waist, where most of the nation's population and
industry are located.
One needn't be Napoleon to figure
out what this all meant to a nation grossly out-manned and
out-gunned, surrounded by enemies sworn to its demise. And, as
would become the norm, the UN had only stepped in after
the Jews turned the tide of the Arab invasion in 1948 to snuff out
both their own lives and the life of their sole, miniscule, reborn
nation.
Israel was never meant to be a
9-mile wide rump state...but that's how it was left when the lines were
drawn in '49 marking the point where the Jews finally turned back the
invasion of a half dozen Arab armies supplied to the teeth with
weaponry left over by the Allies from World War II and led, in
Transjordan, by British officers. The UN stepped in to limit Arab
losses, not to prevent their blatant aggression. This behavior would be
repeated in subsequent decades as well.
Arab settlers
from elsewhere then, once again, poured into these disputed
territories. As leading international legal scholars like
Eugene Rostow have pointed out, the latter had largely been unapportioned
state lands belonging to the original Mandate, open to
settlement by Arabs, Jews, and others as well. After 1949, however,
only Arabs were able to move here with Transjordan's internationally unrecognized
land grab.
Purely Arab Transjordan, comprising
all the land on the east bank of the River, had
already been created by the British in 1922 from almost 80% of the
original 1920 borders of the Mandate of Palestine, and Jewish
communities in Judea and Samaria--the "West Bank"--had been massacred
by the Arabs in the 1920s. During this same time period, the League of
Nations Permanent Mandates Commission documented massive waves of Arabs
(scores of thousands in just a few months alone) pouring into the
Mandate from Syria, Egypt, North Africa, and elsewhere as well. Many
more Arabs entered under cover of darkness and were simply never
recorded--more "native Palestinians." Thanks to the Jews, the Mandate
was economically booming, drawing Arabs in from the entire region.
While this has been repeated ad
nauseam, it must be stated yet again. The architects of famed UN
Security Council Resolution 242 (Rostow included), carefully worded the
final, accepted draft so that Israel would not be expected to
have to return to its pre-'67, suicidal armistice lines. Indeed, the
resolution called for the creation of "secure and recognized borders"
to replace those lines. The bulk of Israel's settlements have been
placed with such a strategic territorial compromise in mind. While some
will have to go as a trade off for a real peace agreement, others will
have to stay.
The area under discussion is tiny
to begin with. When Egypt held Gaza and Jordan (name changed after it
came to hold both banks of the River) held the West Bank for almost two
decades, no one called for the creation of an additional
Arab State...their second, not first, one in
"Palestine." But, after 1967, the world demanded the latter of the
Jews, expecting them to bare their necks to bring this about (while
ignoring the plight of 30 million stateless Kurds, millions of Black
African Sudanese, and others as well being slaughtered in the name
of Arab nationalism). And the American Foggy Folks
constantly make the point that the additional Arab state must not be a bantustan.
Guess what? Justice does
not demand that the boundaries and such of any 22nd or 23rd Arab
state--that there really is no room for--come at the expense of
security for the sole state of the Jews.
Despite all of this, Sharon sought
to break the log jam with his April 2004 unilateral withdrawal
proposals.
So, the hypocrites should have
applauded Arik's decision, correct? Guess again...
The Arabs, of course, viewed it
simply as another victory in their destruction in phases scenario.
Terrorism works, Lebanon again, and so forth. That's
the message, unfortunately, they got from Arik. And rather than feeling
compelled to come up with some real conciliatory moves of their own,
they simply made more demands for additional, unilateral Israeli
concessions.
Since the failure of their "one
fell swoop" plan for Israel's destruction in June 1967, they adopted a
strategy to politically force a return to the indefensible armistice
lines of 1949. Given new technologies, massive buildups of Arab
armed forces, the continuing Arab birth rate, and the like, the return
of Israel to its pre-'67 lines, coupled with a demand for a "return" of
millions of Arabs to the Jews' rump state, would be the beginning of
the end. The Arabs openly acknowledged all of this. Even their
"moderates" called Oslo and other so-called plans for "peace"
merely a Trojan Horse, designed to bring about Arafat's so-called
"Peace of the Quraysh," the temporary hudna designed to buy
time while weakening the Jews for the same final blow Muhammad dealt to
his pagan enemies almost fourteen centuries earlier.
That Arabs have responded this way
was no shock. But they have been supported in this behavior by most of
the world as well.
And then there was the magic of
April...
There had been talk before Sharon
came up with his withdrawal plan that he would get some backing from
Washington on some other key matters.
There is an indisputable set of
facts regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict. If there will ever be peace
between Arab and Jew, Arabs will have to give up their eternal plans
for Israel's destruction. Had they done this, Arabs could have had
their second state in Palestine decades ago. Fair and just
plans were presented and rejected over the decades by the Arabs
themselves--certainly far more than Arabs had ever offered to any of
their own national competitors. The reality is that they still want
that additional state to exist in place of, not along side of, the
Jewish one.
Enter George W. Bush...
Standing near Sharon, in a news
conference being watched on television all over the world, an American
President--the first since Truman in 1948--finally took a political
stance that might yet lead to peace. Dubya stated, before
millions watching him, the two key ingredients for such a recipe:
Israel should not be expected to return to the indefensible armistice
lines of 1949 (and he called them just that, not "borders"), and
real and fudged Arab refugees would have to go to the proposed new Arab
state, not overwhelm the Jews in Israel. Half of Israel's Jews were
refugees from Arab/Muslim lands.
Einstein was not needed to figure
this recipe out.
But Arabs had long been given
reason, via the world's actions, to hope that Israel would yet
become an updated Czechoslovakia with the West Bank as its Sudetenland.
All that was missing was a proper Chamberlain and conditions allowing
for another Munich sellout to achieve "peace."
President Bush's words, as simple
as they were, are the magic ingredients necessary if there is ever to
be peace between Arab and Jew in the Middle East.
Unfortunately, they proved to be
fleeting. No sooner than they were spoken, the Foggy Folks began to
water them down. Again, no surprise here. They fought Truman over the
very rebirth of Israel a half century earlier.
But, to make matters worse,
something even more disturbing next transpired. America's
Iraq prison scandal erupted. This, added to an already increased
overall level of Arab animosity surfacing regarding Iraq, the
Arab-Israeli conflict, etc., led the State Department to quickly search
for additional ways to appease the Arabs.
Puff...
Gone, apparently in an instant, was
the magic of April.
Both
the State Department
and the President himself soon made statements which
basically retracted much of what Dubya had said earlier.
What does this say to Israel?
At the first sign of problems, its
best friend, America, is willing to retract its support of what
all other nations would naturally expect...the right to protect
itself from an alleged "peace" that is really designed to bring about
its very destruction.
President Bush still has time to
make this right.
Perhaps he really was, after all, testing
the waters with his April magic.
One thing is certain, regardless of
what's at play. If Arabs ever expect to get anything meaningful
regarding that additional state, they will have to come to terms with
reality and understand that others, besides themselves, also have
a right to a bit of justice in the region. When they do this, they
will find an Israel forthcoming in its willingness to meet them more
than half way.