http://www.suntimes.com/news/huntley/139615,CST-EDT-HUNT17.article
A vital lesson from Israel-Palestine conflict November 17, 2006 BY STEVE HUNTLEY The election results and the rethinking about Iraq now going on in Washington are coming together to focus on one of the great foreign policy myths: that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the source of our troubles in the Middle East. British Prime Minister Tony Blair expressed the conventional wisdom in his annual foreign policy speech Monday when he said resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was at "the core" of achieving a broader Middle East peace. On Thursday, France, Italy and Spain announced they were working on a peace plan that had the usual components of a cease-fire, national unity government for the Palestinians and negotiations but no explicit call for recognition of the right of Israel to exist. What nobody comes out and says in those kind of pronouncements, but what they mean, is that Israel and the United States must do more -- do something, even if that something is never articulated beyond returning to negotiations -- to bring an end to that bloody conflict. If only it were that simple. But the simple truth is that the warfare will end when the Palestinians and their Arab and Islamic allies accept the existence of the Jewish state, call off the terrorist campaign against it and come to a negotiated resolution of borders based on a viable two-state solution. It is not Israel, or its American ally, who stand in the way of peace. The implacable terrorist enemies of Israel would like for the world to forget -- and, unfortunately, to a large extent much of Europe as well as Arab and Islamic nations have come to ignore -- the events of 2000 when Israel offered territorial concessions unimaginable only days before in a bold gamble to achieve peace. President Bill Clinton threw the full weight of American influence and prestige behind the Camp David initiative. The gamble failed because Yasser Arafat had no interest in peace. Another thing that few people, including many Americans, want to acknowledge is that Israel's struggle actually constitutes another front in the war against Islamist jihadism. For years, Israel was the focus of the radical Islamic war on the West while terror attacks on American targets such as U.S. embassies in Africa, the World Trade Center in 1993 and the USS Cole in 2000 were sideshows. That changed on Sept. 11, 2001. By tucking away the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in its own pigeonhole and finding a way to extricate ourselves from Iraq, many Americans wrap themselves in the comfortable fiction that neither is related to the war on terror. It got little notice at the time, but the day after American voters swept Democrats into power in Congress in a show of rejection of President Bush's Iraq policy, the terrorist organization Hamas issued what could be called a declaration of war against the United States. After Israeli retaliation to Gaza rocket attacks that unfortunately killed civilians, Hamas' ''military wing'' said American should be taught ''hard lessons'' for supporting Israel. The gravest threat to peace is the potential development of nuclear weapons by Iran. Does anyone doubt that Iran is as much a foe of the United States as it is of Israel? Despite the state of denial about the nature of the conflict, focusing on Israel's plight at least holds the possibility of confronting some unpleasant possibilities of the phased withdrawal from Iraq that so many Democratic leaders are promoting now. Israel tried withdrawing from its enemies twice. First, in 2000, the Israelis pulled out of Lebanon. It turned out that that only encouraged Arafat, Hamas and other terrorists to conclude that the Israelis had been run out of Lebanon by Hezbollah. Afterward, the Oslo peace process was torpedoed by Arafat despite the remarkable Israeli concessions at Camp David, and a wave of terrorist bombings engulfed Israel, killing and maiming thousands of noncombatant men, women and children. Last year, the Israelis unilaterally pulled out of the Gaza Strip, uprooting long-established settlements and their residents. Rather than seizing the opportunity to show the world they were capable of responsible self-government, the Palestinians permitted Gaza to become a daily launching pad for rockets aimed at Israeli communities. Then Hezbollah joined in with its missile barrages from Lebanon aimed at indiscriminately killing Israeli civilians, plunging Lebanon into a war that saw much more destruction and death visited on it than Israel. In pulling out of Lebanon in 2000 and from Gaza last year, the Israelis were trying to make moves toward peace, but both instances were trumpeted by their enemies as defeats, as evidence that the Israelis could be made to run -- encouraging terrorist fantasies that they could run the Jews out of Israel. The way we leave Iraq will matter. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, [EMAIL PROTECTED] -------------------------- Brooks Isoldi, editor [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.intellnet.org Post message: [email protected] Subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. 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