Surrounded by enemies, small in size and population, Israel has also been blessed with numerous advantages: Billions of dollars in aid annually from the government of the United States. Access to the latest in American military technology. Moral and financial support from the Jewish diaspora. The reputation of being the only democracy in a region of corrupt despots. But its two biggest assets have always been the claim to the moral high ground and the nature of its chief opponent.
In the Palestinians, Israelis have the best enemy a country could ever want. You couldn't invent a less telegenic foe than Yasser Arafat -- perpetually ill-shaven, clad in paramilitary garb, licking his blubbery lips, looking as if he fears that at any moment he will be called into the dentist's office for a root-canal, guiltily aware that he has sold the Novocaine on the black market to support his on-line pornography addiction. And his followers! The Palestinians, to quote Abba Eban, have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Every time they build up international support they squander it with some vicious act of bravado. Their notion of clever public relations is to clothe a three-year old in a toy suicide belt or to flood the streets in jubilation at the news of September 11.
Such political maladroitness has given Israel an easy time in portraying itself as a victim of madmen and fanatics and allowed it to get away with its own acts of self-defeating machismo -- the invasion and occupation of Lebanon and Ariel Sharon's ill-advised photo-op at the Al-Aqsa mosque. As long as the only choices were supporting Israel or backing the PLO of Yasser Arafat, the Jewish state had little to fear from North Americans of real political influence. (I fear I must exclude Svend Robinson and Noam Chomsky from that category.)
Now along comes the newest "road-map." With the leverage provided by the victory in Iraq, President Bush hopes to push Sharon and PLO prime minister Mahmoud Abbas down a path of concessions that will lead, over three years, to an independent Palestine and peace in the Middle East. At the moment the PLO is occupying the moral high ground. Abbas has committed the Palestinians to negotiations without preconditions, has named moderates to key cabinet positions and condemned terrorism. Sharon, on the other hand, has refused to halt rogue settlements, continues to fight terrorism with terrorism and seems content to drag his feet. What can he be hoping for? Either for the Palestinians to self-destruct yet again, which will let Israel off the hook, or for the 2004 election to draw so close that Bush will do nothing to imperil the Republicans' new-found popularity among American Jewish voters.
In the long run, however, the West Bank settlements will be the ruin of Israel. It cannot survive as a Jewish state encompassing an indigestible, hostile, under-class of Palestinians who have one of the highest birth-rates in the world. Faced with this demographic time bomb it must either withdraw from most of the West Bank and Gaza or resort to ethnic cleansing, which even the most pro-Israel American government could not stomach. What does Sharon have to gain from delay?
Posted by at May 15, 2003 10:39 PM