Intimidation

Tony Blankley,washingtontimes.com, 5/19/09, commenting on a Pew poll of Palestinians that showed they did not believe they could live side by side with a Jewish Israel, 77% to 16%:

Keep in mind, also, that after Egyptian President Anwar Sadat signed a Sinai peace treaty with Israel, in October 1981 he was assassinated during a military parade in Cairo. A fatwa authorizing the assassination had been issued by Omar Abdel-Rahman, a cleric later convicted in the United States for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

It would take an unusually courageous leader to sign a peace treaty and his own death warrant in one document.

The same poll showed the Israeli population did believe they could live side by side with a Muslim Palestinian state, 61% to 31%.

I can think of two reasons why the poll came out as it did. One is the unique position Jews hold in Islamic law. There is a deep current of Jew hatred in Islam.

The second is intimidation. That is a nice word for politics by murder. This kind of intimidation has been used by both sides. But Israel reacted differently to it than the Palestinians did. After the murder of Rabin in 1995, Israel did not see a continuing rash of murders leading to civil war.

Politics by murder has become standard among the Palestinians. The larger point of Blankley’s article is that the two state solution is doomed on both sides. The right of return provision in the Arab plan dooms Israel to a Muslim majority. The Palestinian leader who signs a peace treaty with a Jewish Israel would have to be very confident in his bodyguards. The two state solution that would actually work, Jewish Israel and Muslim Jordan, is not seriously considered, and could not be implemented without American aid.

But most Americans and Israelis see their interests diverging because of the following assumptions:
• Americans need to repair their image with the Muslim world which is angry because of American support of Israel.
• Israelis need to protect themselves from an overt Iranian threat but cannot do so without disrupting the American image building program.

But in fact, America and Israel are facing identical problems. America is trying to assure no further attacks from the forces of traditional Islam, Israel is doing the same. Both countries are trying to find some way to security without full scale war against an Islamic ideology with global ambitions.

No one wants full scale war, but how to avoid it? Our two previous struggles against ideologies with global ambitions are instructive.

In World War II, it is probable that global conflict was inevitable. Too many people became convinced that the war machine of Germany was unstoppable. The Germans built a façade of invincibility and the Italians and Japanese were convinced. Many more countries were convinced enough to sit the conflict out, not taking sides.

In the Cold War, unlimited warfare was avoided by the bankruptcy of the Soviet Union caused by the arms race.

The WWII solution remains the final resort for America and Israel. The Cold War solution will not work. The forces of traditional Islam are too well funded to go broke with the war model they are using. There is one remaining approach that might avoid unlimited warfare. It is the identification of the ideology of traditional Islam as the marker of our enemy and a determined attack on that ideology.

The political will does not exist in either America or Israel to implement an ideological attack on traditional Islam. That political will is not likely to appear until more Americans and Israelis die at the hands of jihadists. Our short term future is more politics by murder.

Originally posted on 5/20/09