Ken Pirsig’s book, ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ taught the 60s and 70s generation that most problems are solved by breaking them down into manageable pieces. Condolezza Rice and her State Department seem to have forgotten that lesson as they convene their “if only” parley this week in Annapolis Maryland. The world would be a neat and tidy place for them “if only” it would do what they say. Not able to deal with the world as it is, “if only” grand plans, like Annapolis, seek comprehensive agreements.
Pre-eminent historian Bernard Lewis looks at the problem differently.
Basically, he says, there is one of two possible issues up for discussion: One concerning the size of Israel or one concerning its existence.
If the issue is about the size, then we have a straightforward border problem. Not an easy problem to deal with, but one that is possible to solve in the long run and to live with in the meantime.
If, on the other hand, the issue is the existence of Israel, then clearly it is insoluble by negotiation. There is no compromise position between existing and not existing.
A State Department fixated on the big picture continually preoccupies itself with process instead of purpose. It is so invested in that process it can’t afford to recognize the reality of Arab rejection of Israel. As Lewis describes, they are looking for compromise “between existing and not existing.” As such, Annapolis continues a fruitless search for common ground that neither existed during Oslo nor exists now. Forcing yet another comprehensive agreement on this region will create failure, crises and eventually war.
Nothing new here.
What makes Annapolis dangerous, however, is the extent to which Israel is being pressured not just by those who vowed and failed to “push her into the sea,” but by those who are her friends. Friends who now believe they have ëinterests’ that take precedence over Israel’s survival.
Israel and the world have seen this before. Annapolis is to Israel today what Munich was to Czechoslovakia in 1938: “If only” the Czechs could understand the need for peace and dismember themselves, the conflict would go away. It didn’t work. The United Kingdom bought the peace using the Czechs as down payment, but the butcher’s bill for the balance was more than anyone imagined and the peace lasted only a year.
Diplomats now come to Annapolis with that same Munich template: “If only” Israel would give in, the Arabs will change.
If only Israel would give up the Golan.
If only Israel would divide Jerusalem.
If only Israel would leave the Jordan Valley.
If only Israel would uproot and relocate 250,000 of its citizens.
If only Israel would absorb four million new Arab citizens.
If only Israel would disappear.
The way to peace, clamors a majority of the world, is for Israel to “compromise.”
In effect, the world denies Israel the right that every people and every nation enjoys: the right to defend herself. An Israel without the Golan and the Jordan Valley squeezed behind “suicide borders” will be as defenseless as the Czechs were without the strategically significant Sudetenland that Germany claimed on the basis of the German ancestry of many of its people. An Israel diluted by four million additional Arabs n or any part thereof n and ripped apart by the uprooting of a large portion of its own people will have less strength. An Israel without her holy capital of Jerusalem will have no soul.
The surest way to war is for Israel to accede and allow herself to be dismembered. Backed into a corner, with no alternative but to fight, Israel will fight. It will be a costly war and possibly nuclear. But the State Department will have its comprehensive settlement and a Middle East without Israel will be a neat and tidy placeÖexcept for the rest of the butcher’s bill that will be the world’s to pay.

-nrg

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