Peres the appeaser

Unfair to Chamberlain
The Jerusalem Post
November 9, 2000
ANOTHER TACK by Sarah Honig

After the Axis gang began misbehaving with increasing impudence in the late Thirties, Britain's Lord Halifax finally started realizing that this wasn't quite cricket.

Until then, Neville Chamberlain's foreign minister and one of the leading advocates of appeasing the Nazis stolidly kept professing unwavering faith in Hitler's promises of peace. Old attitudes die hard. Once reputations are staked on policies, no matter how misconstrued, it's not easy to admit error.

But Halifax agonized and drew some extremely cogent conclusions. "I often think how much easier the world would have been to manage," he mused, "if Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini had been at Oxford."

Indubitably. Our little bit of the world would have likewise been so much easier to manage had Arafat enrolled at Beit Berl. Not that the comparison is fully valid. Arafat is only a poor Arab wanna-be Hitler, though his heart may be in the same place as the Fuehrer's, and though, like Hitler, he's aided and abetted by the decency of the democracy which deals with him so civilly.

Neither are comparisons between Chamberlain and Ehud Barak fair (not to Chamberlain). The British prime minister never surrendered a single inch of Britain -- nor even a forgotten corner of its then vast empire. Chamberlain sold out someone's else's country. Our prime minister compromises the narrow waistline of his own vulnerable state.

Big difference, regardless of the fact that both autocratic, intolerant and haughty premiers -- ours now and Britain's then -- practiced appeasement and that in both cases their conceptions collapsed calamitously. In the aftermath, though let down by their respective peace partners, both prime ministers conducted themselves with admirable aplomb in face of conflagrations they failed to foresee.

For the first eight months of World War II, Chamberlain continued to lead Britain. He conducted the war reluctantly, as one who wished it would go away. His passivity and incompetence aroused unprecedented public outrage.

In our neighborhood's mini-conflict, Ehud Barak too conducts things reluctantly, as one who wishes the troubles would just go away. He is passive and incompetent. But here public outrage is deemed unpatriotic. Proposing no-confidence during a national emergency is akin to treason. Here the opposition is expected to unite behind the leader (his abilities and record notwithstanding) and prolong his term of office (disastrous though it may be) on his terms (including ongoing appeasement).

Barak hasn't ceased making conciliatory overtures toward Arafat. His goal isn't victory but returning to the process which bred the national emergency in the first place. Here the prime minister's failure doesn't mandate changing course but pigheaded adherence to the same dead-end track. His critics are invariably asked: "what's the alternative?" His boosters, recovering from their initial shock, invariably contend that appeasement wasn't wrong, but that there just wasn't enough of it.

This precisely is what we now hear from the Four Mothers, who helped precipitate the unilateral fiasco that was the flight from Lebanon. Not only haven't they gone into hiding, but one of the ringleaders, Zehava Antebi recently got lots of ITV airtime to argue that Palestinian violence is "unavoidable so long as occupation continues. We need negotiations, not power, or we'll have to wage a war against the whole world." Unrepentant, she vowed to do for Judea and Samaria precisely what she accomplished in Lebanon.

At the rally marking the fifth anniversary of Rabin's assassination, Shimon Peres declared that Oslo isn't dead, that there are no regrets and that efforts to attain Oslo's goals will proceed unrelentingly.

The event was nothing like American memorials for JFK. Its organizers annually orchestrate a cross between pagan idolatry and Communist personality cults, accompanied by an undisguised political agenda in which half the nation is blamed for the crime and its views are delegitimized.

This year the expectation was that a distinction will now be drawn between sorrow about the slaying and support for Rabin's political positions, especially considering that Oslo was just revealed as colossal a chimera as Chamberlain's "peace for our time."

But Oslo's tarnished legacy didn't have much sobering effect. Schools, surrealistically divorced from reality, were still decked with the doves of peace, pupils attended memorial pageants and recited paeons of praise to pretend harmony, nonexistent coexistence and policies kids can't begin to evaluate. Parents were still forced to pay for these extravaganzas and a teacher, Yisrael Shiran, who dared voice dissent was barred from the school system.

Nothing was to mar the elaborate production. Everything was meticulously organized in advance. Bumper stickers for the occasion arrived with the morning papers. Billboards and radio commercials bombarded us with solemn exhortations to "gather at Rabin Square. This year it's more important than ever to continue in his path," regardless, apparently, of where it led us.

Much money and effort were invested to forestall the sort of massive change of heart which occurred in wartime Britain, where even Lord Halifax eventually repudiated his previous policy, advocating instead a vigorous pursuit of war. It's improbable we'll hear Shlomo Ben-Ami do the same. We better not hold our breath for Yossi Beilin's mea culpa.

Least of all should we expect Peres to return his Nobel Peace Prize. After all, he has vowed to redouble his efforts to vindicate his policy of appeasement. Already Barak dispatched him to implore Arafat to hold his fire. There's no way Chamberlain would have obsequiously sent Halifax to Hitler after the outbreak of war to plead for a cessation of hostilities.

This is yet another reason why the comparison to Barak is unfair to Chamberlain. There are more. An uncontrite Barak, for instance, will resort to any ploy to stay in power - be it national unity or a flimsy Shas safety net to protect him from no-confidence motions. Barak must enlist any allies because he doesn't have a parliamentary majority.
Chamberlain had a large one.

Indeed on May 9, 1940, Chamberlain survived a no-confidence motion (which was submitted despite the state of emergency). Nevertheless, because his majority had been reduced, he felt honor-bound to resign and recommend that Winston Churchill succeed him. But Barak is no honorable British gentleman.

Peres: gasping for air

The Washington Post
October 11, 2000
by George F. Will

Although weary from 52 years of nationhood without peace, realistic Israelis understand the causation behind this correlation: Today Israel has the most accommodating diplomacy in its history, and is in the most perilous position in its history.

Israel's position is worse than in 1973, when it was attacked by concerted Arab armies, worse than when Egypt mobilized in 1967, worse than in 1948, when Arabs rejected the U.N. partition of Palestine that Israel accepted, and sent armies to kill Israel. Israel's position is worse today because then the threats were military, manageable by an Israel confident of the legitimacy of its positions. Now just 17 months of Prime Minister Ehud Barak's diplomacy have demoralized Israel by delegitimizing all its previous principles, and destroying the absolute prerequisite for successful negotiations -- the insistence that something is nonnegotiable.

Even a Barak ultimatum is, inevitably, penultimate.

Barak may be the most calamitous leader any democracy has had. He risks forfeiting his nation's existence. Bad leadership during the 1930s caused France to suffer swift defeat and four years of humiliation, but not annihilation. Barak has made territorial concessions no previous government contemplated, including the sparsely populated and strategically vital Jordan valley. He has thrown away longstanding U.S. support for an undivided Jerusalem. Under Barak, Israel's rights in its own capital are negotiable. And what has Barak's policy bought? Only Arafat's promise to reject violence, which is akin to Hitler's promise, after Munich, to make no more territorial claims in Europe.

Barak's attempt to satiate Arafat with a feast of Israeli retreats has even produced the idea of giving the United Nations, that nest of anti-Israeli regimes, control of the Temple Mount. The consequence of all this may be fulfillment of the undisguised aim of Israel's "partner in peace," the Palestinian Authority, whose maps, textbooks, television broadcasts, and public places, treat Israel as nonexistent. Israel's multiplying problems include the Western media. For example, a Los Angeles Times story on a Palestinian officer engaged in the fighting carried this headline: "A militia commander in Nablus, though obedient to Arafat, sees armed struggle as crucial." The word "though" conveys the media's permanent presumption that Arafat eschews violence and desires peace. Yet he constantly promises a jihad against Jerusalem.

At Camp David, Arafat reportedly told President Clinton that he, Arafat, speaks for a billion Muslims. This inaccurate claim accurately casts the issue: This is not a dispute between Israelis and Palestinians about land, it is a clash of civilizations and is not solvable by splitting differences.

The mentality of those Israelis who believe all differences are splittable was displayed on Sunday when former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for the peace currently convulsing Israel, spoke to ABC's "This Week." He said the peace process cannot be dead. Why? "Nobody can kill the peace process because we need it like air." So Arafat can punctuate the "peace process" as often as he likes with as much war as he likes, and Israelis who think as Peres does will always return, gasping gratefully for air.

Besides, Peres explained, Arafat no longer runs "a terroristic organization." Rather, he "is responsible for an administration which is 120,000 people strong . . .

It is one thing to be a head of a revolution, and it is another thing to be a head of a state in being." But what if it is a revolutionary state devoted to devouring Israel?

Peres is puzzled. If Arafat had behaved like a bourgeois politician, Palestinians "could have escaped the poverty" they still suffer, and could have built "a modern life." But Peres is hopeful: "If somebody would tell you in 1944 that within one year you can have a different Europe, that you can have peace, I think everyone would be laughing. But look what happened."

Yes, look. What happened one year after the worst year in Jewish history was the defeat of those vowing to eradicate the Jews.

As the 52-year (so far) war for the destruction of Israel continued last week, a cleric leading prayers in al-Aqsa mosque enjoined the faithful to "eradicate the Jews from Palestine." When Israeli soldiers pulled a wounded policeman away from St. Stephen's Gate in Jerusalem, Palestinians, taught from Holocaust-denying and antisemitic textbooks, publications and broadcasts that the Palestinian Authority falsely promised to eliminate, chanted "Slaughter the Jews." Thousands of Jordanians marched in Amman chanting "Death to the Jews." When Hitler threatened "the destruction of European Jewry," sophisticates, searching, as sophisticates do, for nuances, wondered, What do you suppose he meant?

A former Oslo sympathizer repents

Jaffa Diarist
The New Republic
June 26, 2000
by Martin Peretz

We are ending our three-and-a-half-month stay in Israel, and it is only now that I have the confidence to admit that I think the Oslo agreements were a mistake. Looking out from my rooftop apartment, I see the Mediterranean immediately to the west and the hills of Samaria not at all so remotely to the east. Tel Aviv, at its farthest, is 15 visible miles from the old frontier with the West Bank, and it is somewhere near this old border that the new one with nascent Palestine will be set. Some day soon, I fear and I expect, mortar and missiles will target old Israel from new Palestine, from those hills to here.

Only an idiot can believe that Israel has strategic depth anywhere but on its frontier with Egypt -- and that exception owes to the unique vastness of the Sinai.

The fatal flaw of the Oslo process is process. Israel committed itself to an extended sequence of negotiation and concession, whereby it would make a series of permanent and palpable sacrifices, while what was expected of the Palestinians was mostly that they show up and mutter the empty formulas of reassurance. If they didn't like what and how much Israel was prepared to relinquish, the Palestinian Authority would simply leave the table and go home. Then, to get Arafat's men back to the table and to accommodate pressure from the United States, the Israelis would give away something more -- all without even knowing what the outcome of all these leavings and takings would look like.

What is being expected of Israel is magnanimity in the dark. Surely the friendship of the United States cannot make up for the blindfold that it is asking Israel to wear on the road to peace.

Now we learn that the Israeli government is prepared to relinquish even the Jordan Valley, which until yesterday was considered off-limits by all but the most reckless peace processors. This must send shivers down the spines not only of many Israelis but also of the moderate, friendly (and pro-American) royals in Amman, who know that without an Israeli presence there, the river Jordan will blow chilly and cold, and the Palestinians may begin to feel their old craving for the Hashemite kingdom. Iraq and Syria, too, have ambitions toward Jordan; and Israel can defend the Hashemites (and, of course, itself) only if its forces are strategically positioned to move directly and without interference from Arafat's legions.

The father of this "what's yours is yours and what's mine is yours" process is Shimon Peres, the French intellectual who long ago bought into the great contemporary cliché that territory is no longer important in warfare. The preposterousness of this idea (which has its devotees in Washington, too) has been demonstrated in every modern war, from Vietnam to Iraq to the Balkans. The only certain consequence of the dependence upon air power has been disillusionment with the dependence upon air power. Neither bombs nor missiles will dislodge or disarm the adversary if his forces hold land.

Early in June I heard Peres pronounce on just about everything important to Israel in a muddle of an after-dinner talk in Jerusalem. We will turn bullets into ballots. We will turn terrorists into tourists. Frontiers are of no importance. Science knows no borders. Science knows no language. The science of knowledge and the knowledge of science. One thing we do know is that Peres himself knows no science. If he did, he would know that science by itself makes neither people nor government virtuous.

Science is neutral. In wicked hands, it is wicked. But the pundits now discern an inclination toward peace in Bashar al-Assad because he is an ophthalmologist.

Edward Said may have fabricated his life as a Palestinian refugee, but he was telling God's honest truth when he asserted in a recent column (reprinted in The Jerusalem Post!) that there is no "new peace between old enemies." The opposite proposition, he writes, "has been disproved by the examples of Egypt, Jordan and the PLO, whose leaders have gone all the way toward Israel without persuading their populations to follow suit.... Resistance to its presence is still strenuously displayed ... the conventional wisdom about peacemaking in the Middle East has essentially been disproved." Said knows whereof he speaks: he is the most prestigious of all tenured rejectionists. But Israelis, mostly eager for peace, have begun to grasp that their neighbors do not reciprocate the eagerness. Whatever happens to Ehud Barak's government, the popular enthusiasm for the Oslo process is fast unraveling. Indeed, it was a stroke of luck for Barak that Hafez Assad stiffed Bill Clinton in Geneva: had the bloody tyrant (now widely treated as a prudent statesman by, among others, the American president and secretary of state) agreed to take back the Golan Heights, leaving only a few symbolic yards on the eastern bank of the Sea of Galilee in Israel's hands, the Israeli electorate would almost certainly have rejected the deal.

Syrian participation in the negotiations over the Golan is not part of the Oslo drama, but it shares with Oslo two salient characteristics. The first is Syria's maximalist presumptions. Neither the Palestinians nor the Syrians are contemplating real compromise: they want nothing less than everything they lost in 1967. The second is the American role. In the negotiations over the Golan there was hardly even a pretense that the parties in conflict were talking to each other. (In Shepherdstown, remember, the Syrian foreign minister refused to shake the Israeli prime minister's hand.) But the legacy-addled American president was frantic for an agreement; and so the only real negotiating was between Washington and Jerusalem. To be sure, teams of Palestinians and Israelis talk to each other endlessly; but the real bargaining took place between the United States and Israel, with the United States always pushing Israel to give more and more and more.

Maybe there will be an agreement with the Palestinians. But it won't cover Jerusalem, and it won't cover the Palestinian refugees (by the third and fourth generation, are they still refugees?). Still, Israel will have turned over to the emerging Palestinian state some 80 to 90 percent of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Then what? Every question left unresolved will become yet another cause for violence. In the eyes of many Palestinians, the imperfections of the deal will justify riot or terror or both.

And what happens when an illegal missile is illegally launched from Palestine? I once asked a dovish Israeli friend what would happen if a post-peace Syria suddenly diverted the waters of the Golan from the Jordan to its own uses. He said that Israel would urgently seek a meeting of the Security Council. Urgently! From my sun-drenched roof I behold the Israeli miracle along the coast and I think: It was not the Security Council that secured this; it was self-reliance. Even people who are not friendless must establish their safety and their felicity for themselves.