The grim news coming from the Mideast is about the racheting up of violence. Israel invades Gaza to liberate an Israeli soldier kidnapped by the increasingly autonomous military wing of Hamas which is located in Syria and opposes any movement towards recognizing Israel. Besides asserting its independence from the Hamas government the kidnappers want to use their captive as a bargaining chip to swap for their own comrades in Israeli prisons.
The world has seen all this before and probably will again in this seemingly unending struggle. But while the U.S. media focuses on the military drama--- explosions and frightened civilians--- a possibly critical political context which preceded the current escalation has been ignored:the peace scare.
We are all familiar with the concept of a war scare, the anxiety and even panic when war is coming to one's nation (e.g., Iraq just before the U.S. invasion). But, what is a peace scare? Why would a people, or a segment of its population, be worried about the prospect of peace? Only if peace brought with it some potentially undesired consequence. For example, we are accustomed to thinking of the 1938 Munich accord between Neville Chamberlain and Adolph Hitler as the latter's triumph and the former's shame. But the event was far more complex and, in fact, Hitler apparently viewed it as a terrible failure. He wanted war then and ended up having to wait until September 1939 to get his wish by making sure his "demands" could never be met by his new target, Poland.
Another more recent example took place during the Vietnam war when Henry Kissinger, President Nixon's Secretary of State, successfully negotiated a peace agreement with the North Vietnamese before the 1972 elections. Nixon was not elated. He was obsessed by the fate of Winston Churchill, Britain's wartime Prime Minister, who was voted out of office once the Nazis had been defeated because the British people now wanted a Labor government.
Nixon worried that peace with the Vietnamese might jeopardize his own re-election because his domestic policies and personality might be unpopular. His believed his electability depended on the perception that he was especially qualified to be President when foreign policy issues trumped all others. He instructed Kissinger to scuttle the diplomatic breakthrough by falsely proclaiming the North Vietnamese were reneging on their agreement. As a consequence, while Nixon was re-elected, the war dragged on for three more bloody years and, in the end, the U.S. did no better than it would have achieved had Nixon endorsed Kissinger's efforts.
The most recent, example, of course, of the peace scare involved the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. The Bush Administration clearly decided that nothing would stand in the way of war and viewed Saddam Hussein's admission of U.N. weapons inspectors to search for what turned out to be (and likely was known to be) non-existent WMD as a grave threat to their plans. They ultimately went in before inspections were concluded to prevent the possibility that their public rationale for pre-emptive war would be exposed is hollow.
What does this have to do with the current situation in the Mideast? Possibly nothing, but there are intriguing possibilties that a peace scare might have played a role in scuttling a critical waystation to a resumption of serious negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.
The background is simple. Israeli governments for a long time have wanted to have their cake and eat it: peace without having to return to the 1967 borders mandated by international law which prohibits building permanent settlements on territory occupied as a resuilt of war.
Israel has avoided this issue by maintaining that both groups currently contending for Palestinian leadership, Fatah and Hamas, have never been willing to accept the existence of the State of Israel. The settlements were presented as security outposts when, in reality, they were also meant to mark permanent boundaries of a geographically enlarged state.
Israel has long argued that negotiating with the Palestinians could not achieve peace since the latter wanted to destroy Israel not truly compromise with it. One can debate whether this perception was true in the past, but just before the recent resumption of intense hostilities strong evidence existed that both Fatah and Hamas were implicitly willing to recognize an Israel which would return to its pre-1967 boundaries.
On June 28, 2006 Ian Fisher and Steven Erlanger (The New York Times , Section A, page 1) reported as follows on a draft agreement between the two major rivals for Palestinian governmental leadership:"The draft agreement between the Fatah faction of Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, and the Hamas faction of prime Minister Ismail Haniya is based on a document outlined by Palestinian prisoners. It is described as containing an implicit recognition of israel's right to exist, because it calls for the creation of a Palestinian state within pre-1967 borders, presumably next to Israel."
It is true that the draft was hammered out rapidly after months of futile negotiations partly because of the pressure from Israel's incursion into Gaza to free Israeli soldier, Corporal Gilad Shalit. Another critical factor in the Hamas government's evolution was no doubt its inability to obtain Western aid without at least tacitly renouncing its long-held non-recognition of Israel's right to exist at all. Whether Hamas would fundamentally change its behavior even if its rhetoric changed is open to question, but history is filled with examples of once non-negotiable demands that political organizations eventually modified when they had to.
The Times article also suggests not all members of the Hamas government agreed on the implications of the accord and it awaited final review by Fatah's Abbas as well. Nevertheless, the development was potentially of great significance, but was summarily dismissed by an Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman as being irrelevent to the more critical issue:finding and liberating a lone Israeli soldier.
Does this Israeli version of Saving Private Ryan make sense in terms of the nation's priorities or should Israel have entered into negotiations for the Corporal Shalit's release with his captors while encouraging the final ratification of the Fatah-Hamas concessions? The latter approach makes far more sense in terms of the larger objective of long-term peace and security for Israel, particularly since appparently neither Fatah nor Hamas' political leadership endorsed the kidnapping and claimed they were aggressively trying to locate Shalit themselves. (It should be noted that there is conflicting evidence on Hamas' position on the kidnapping, as reports have also suggested that the organization was concerned its lack of militancy---a ceasefire for a year without it leading to western financial aid or Israeli concessions---was losing it support among Palestinians).
Some might say that Israel had to strike back hard to free Shalit and/or punish such tactics. But, if peace is the goal, military overkill, which is what is happening, invariably creates more animosity, and miltants willing to engage in terrorist acts, in its wake.
Another claim is that Israel must maintain its principle of not negotiating with terrorists, but the reality is that they have done so on many occasions. They have traded large numbers of Palestinians they have imprisoned for attacks on Israel in exchange for small numbers of Israelis held captive. Ariel Sharon even released many prisoners to re-patriate the body of a dead Israeli. These swaps, apart from liberating Israelis, were designed to symbolically show how Israel considered even one Israeli more valuable than many Palestinians, but made little sense from a practical point of view in a prolonged guerrilla war. Nevertheless they did occur and there is no reason why they could not again.
So, one is left wondering whether the real purpose, or at least an additional goal, of the ever-escalating Israeli military action in Gaza is to obscure the tentative actions taken by Hamas' government officials towards recognizing Israel which might have produced a new effort to negotiate a political settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. Perhaps Israel's government prefers the long familiar extreme irredentist Hamas to come back so it can argue for the necessity to maintain the post-1967 borders and settlements. Eliminating the peace scare would then be of utmost importance. (Note: The expansion of the military front to include Lebanon after Hezbollah conducted a raid and captured additional Israeli soldiers, also for the purpose of swapping prioners, but perhaps for other reasons as well, cannot be understood using the "peace scare" concept as military hostilties between Israel and Hezbollah had not existed for some time. It certainly has had the consequence,however, of further removing the Hamas-Fatah draft agreement from public consciousness).
One would be naive to think that any negotiation between Palestinian government officials and their Israeli counterparts would go smoothly. Moreover, there are extremists among both Israelis and Palestinians who would readily resort to violence if peace threatened to dismember their image of what Israel or Palestine should be. Nevertheless, polls taken among both warring peoples have long shown a majority of each population would accept a trade of land for enduring peace. It is for this reason that they shouldn't let their respective governments forget what was transpiring before the planes, tanks and rockets took center stage.
Nor should the U.S. government remain in its recent passive mode, which essentially allows, if not encourages, Israel to do what it wishes. Economic sanctions seem to have worked to make Hamas more amenable to compromise. The same could be true if the immense economic support the U.S. gives Israel were jeopardized by the carnage wreaked by Israeli military actions.
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