Leon Trotsky once supposedly observed, “You may not be
interested in war, but war is interested in you.” To President
Joe Biden I’d
say today, “You may not be interested in Middle East peacemaking, but Middle
East peacemaking is interested in you.”
اضافة اعلان
Here’s why: All three key players in the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict have been dealt some huge painful shocks over the past year. They
know, deep down, that another round of fighting like the one we saw in the past
two weeks could unleash disastrous consequences for each of them. Henry
Kissinger forged the first real peace breakthrough between Israelis and Arabs
after they were all reeling, vulnerable, and in pain as a result of the 1973
October War. They each knew that something had to change.
Today, if you look and listen closely, you can sense a
similar moment shaping up in the wake of the latest Israeli war on Gaza.
The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, led by Abu
Mazen, was dealt a significant blow when president
Donald Trump last year
managed to get the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan to each
normalize relations with Israel — without waiting for a Palestinian-Israeli
peace deal. The message to the West Bank Palestinian leadership was crystal
clear: You are utterly messed up, corrupt and ineffectual, and we Arab states
are no longer going to let you have a veto over our relations with Israel. Have
a nice life.
And by the way, despite Israel’s relentless pounding of
Gaza, none of those four states renounced their normalization with Israel.
But Israel also got a shock: It was surprised that Hamas
chose to fire rockets at Jerusalem — in effect inviting this war. It was
surprised by some of the long-range rockets that Hamas was able to build in its
underground factories and deploy and keep deploying — despite heavy bombing by
the Israeli air force.
But most of all, Israel was stunned by this fact: Hamas, by
its actions, was able to embroil Israel into a simultaneous five-front conflict
with different Arab populations. That was scary.
On several days last week, Israeli forces were confronting
violent Palestinian protesters in the West Bank; enraged East Jerusalem
Palestinians on the Temple Mount; rockets fired, most likely by Palestinian
militants, from southern Lebanon; rockets fired by Hamas from Gaza; and, most
dangerously, mob violence in mixed Israeli towns between Israeli Arabs and
Israeli Jews.
Israel managed to keep a lid on all of it. But it is not
hard to imagine, had it continued or if it flares up again, that this would
severely stress the Israeli forces and economy. Israel has not faced that kind
of multi-front threat since its founding in 1948.
This time around, Israel still found a lot of world public opinion
and sympathy on its side — but for how long? This war with Hamas exposed and
exacerbated Israel’s vulnerability in public opinion.
Israel’s use of sophisticated air power, no matter how
justified and precise, triggered a set of images and video, in the age of
social networks, that inflamed and energized Israel’s critics around the world
and exposed just how much the rising progressive left, and even some young
Jews, have grown alienated from Bibi Netanyahu’s right-wing government and its
willingness to abandon democratic norms to ensure perpetual Israeli control
over the West Bank.
As the Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland put it last
week, a new connected generation of progressive left-wing activists in America
and in Europe are reframing the Israeli-Palestinian struggle not as a conflict
between two national movements, “but as a straightforward matter of racial
justice. Note the placards at last weekend’s demonstration in London: Palestine
Can’t Breathe and Palestinian Lives Matter.”
Many American Jewish college students are either unwilling,
unable, or too afraid today to stand up in their class or dorm and defend
Israel. Democratic lawmakers tell me that they are being savaged on Twitter and
Facebook for even remotely suggesting Israel had a right to defend itself
against Hamas rockets. A dam has burst.
Which is why I was not the least bit surprised to read that
Netanyahu’s longtime ambassador to DC, Ron Dermer, (now retired) bluntly told a
conference a few weeks ago that “Israel should spend more of its energy
reaching out to ‘passionate’ American Evangelicals than Jews, who are
‘disproportionately among our critics,’" Haaretz reported.
Let me know how that works out for you. If Israel loses the
next generation of liberal Americans, including liberal Jews, it is in for a
world of political hurt that no amount of Evangelical support will be able to
blunt.
And then there is Hamas. As usual — indeed right on cue —
the morning after the Gaza ceasefire took effect, Hamas’ leaders declared
another glorious victory. I guarantee you, though, the morning after the
morning after, another set of conversations started in Gaza. It was the Gazan
shopkeeper, widow, doctor, and mourner, surveying the damage to their homes and
offices and families, quietly saying to Hamas, “What the hell were you
thinking? Who starts a war with the Jews and their air force in the middle of a
pandemic? Who is going to rebuild my home and business? We can’t take this any
longer.”
So if I were Hamas, I would not just bask in the new voices
criticizing Israel on the left. I would also worry that virtually no Arab
governments came to its defense, and that the Biden administration and the
European Union and Russia and China basically gave Israel the time it needed to
deliver a heavy blow to Hamas.
For all of these reasons, my friend Victor J. Friedman, an
academic activist who has worked extensively in Jewish-Palestinian and
Israeli-Arab dialogues in Israel, emailed me from Israel to say:
“Maybe this is another ‘Kissinger moment.’ Like the 1973
war, this situation is a wake-up call for Israel. Despite the spin, people know
that there was no real victory here. More than ever there is a feeling that
something has to change. Hamas, like the Egyptians in 1973, surprised Israel
and did real damage. Bibi wanted to do enough damage to humiliate Hamas as much
as possible, without going in on the ground. But Biden stopped us before we
could totally humiliate Hamas.”
So, Victor added, “There is a potential opening here for
some creative diplomacy, just like after the 1973 war.”
I think he is right, but with one huge caveat. Kissinger’s
negotiating partners were all strong national leaders: Egyptian President Anwar
Sadat, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, and Syrian President Hafez al-Assad —
and they were resolving an interstate conflict between sovereign nations.
Indeed, what Kissinger began in 1973 and President Jimmy
Carter completed at Camp David was only possible because all these leaders
actually agreed to ignore the core problem — the intrastate problem, the
problem of two people wanting a state on the same land. In other words, the
Israeli-Palestinian problem.
What Bibi Netanyahu, Mahmoud Abbas, and the various leaders
of Hamas all have in common is that they have never, ever, ever been willing to
risk their political careers or lives to forge the kind of hard compromise
needed for a peace breakthrough in their war over the same piece of land.
So I am dubious, to say the least, about the prospects for
peace. What I am not dubious about, though, is this: The pain on all the actors
in this drama — from more accurate rockets to more global boycotts to more
homes destroyed that no foreigners want to pay to rebuild to unemployment to
more inflammatory social networks to more anti-Semitism — is only going to
intensify.
So, my message to Biden would be this: You may be interested
in China, but the Middle East is still interested in you. You deftly helped to
engineer the ceasefire from the sidelines. Do you want to, do you dare to, dive
into the middle of this new Kissingerian moment?
I won’t blame you if you don’t. I’d just warn you that it is
not going to get better on its own.
Read more opinions
.jpg)
.jpg)
