Uzi Arad, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s
national security adviser, appears to be having second thoughts
about the so-called “peace process.”
“Have you failed to notice,” he
asked a Jewish Agency audience in
Jerusalem this week, “that the more we lend legitimacy to a
Palestinian state, the more it comes at the expense of our
own?”
Well, yes, some observers actually have noticed this. We’ve
also noticed how the goals of the peace process have evolved over
the years. It was launched by Israel back in 1993 in the
expectation of actually achieving peace with the Palestinians.
But it soon became evident that Yasir Arafat and his gang of
cutthroats had a different idea. They sought to use their newly
established (courtesy of Israel) strongholds in the West Bank and
Gaza as springboards from which to “liberate” the rest of
“occupied Palestine.” The Palestinian leadership called this a
“strategy of stages,” and they launched a new and terrible wave
of terrorist attacks to implement it.
Did Israeli leaders, seeing that they had dug Israel
into a deep and dark hole with their peace process, decide at
least to put down the shovel? Hardly. Since the United
States and the European Union strongly favored the peace process,
successive Israeli governments felt that they couldn’t simply
abandon it; instead, they re-defined it. Now the principle goal
of the peace process became winning over “international opinion.”
By releasing convicted terrorists, withdrawing unilaterally from
the Gaza Strip, offering to withdraw from virtually the entire
West Bank, freezing settlement construction, and using every
possible occasion to reiterate its unwavering commitment to
a “two-state solution,” Israel sought to convince American and
European opinion-makers that it was truly and genuinely devoted
to peace, thereby taking the sails out of the increasingly
successful anti-Israel propaganda campaign being waged by
the Left and the Arabs.
But as the international hysteria over Israel’s
interception of the pro-Hamas Turkish flotilla demonstrated, this
strategy hasn’t worked out too well, either. Today, Israel is
more isolated than ever — so much so, in fact, that when the
British rock star, Elton John, decided to perform in Tel Aviv
last week (thereby administering a stern rebuke to the
Pixies and Elvis Costello, who had canceled their
performances), Israelis heaved a collective sigh of relief. Arad
called Israel’s Palestinian peace-partners “major actors” in the
on-going de-legitimization of Israel campaign, and raised a
provocative question: “Maybe we should have acted somewhat
differently, less zealous to champion the Palestinians, and more
eager to defend our own ranks?”
Duh, ya think?
But even while expressing reservations about past Israeli
support for the peace process, Arad seemed to come up with yet
another rationale for pursuing it:
“I also took notice — all of us did take notice — that
the United States [has] changed the definition of its policy on
Iran, from one that said a nuclear Iran would be ‘unacceptable’
to one in which it said that the United States ‘is determined to
prevent Iran from becoming nuclear.’ There is determination
there. There is activism.”
Translation: With the Obama administration supposedly
demonstrating “determination” and “activism” toward Iran, it
would be foolish for Israel to pick a fight with Washington by
abandoning the peace process.
On such delusions and false hopes does Israel’s national
security strategy appear to rest.
