"All parties to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict must be equally willing to work for peace. This necessitates difficult concessions by both sides and ending religious fanaticism. It can be done - but the enmity must end and everyone must stop teaching their children to hate. There are Palestinians and there are Israelis who are working for peace and I remain an optimist. I think peace is possible as long as there is a will and there is hope to make it happen....." Hank Roth - (TheGolem)

Hank, there are material realities independent of religious fanaticism and chauvinistic nationalism that make a negotiated bipartite peace impossible.

The fact that Palestinians have a higher natality and will outnumber Jews in a multiethnic Jewish state is just one of those factors. It forces Israel to import Jews, putting even more pressure on the limited resources of the tiny country. This in turn causes Israel to be even more intransigeant over the Golan, the hill aquifer in the West Bank, and the Jordan River itself. Not content with these, Israel even steals water from the Litani. With every passing year, as the Israeli economy and population grows, a land-for-peace agreement becomes increasingly more intractable and antagonisms with currently non-belligerent neighbors steadily build up.

As the risk of conflict and Palestinian resistance increases, so does Israel's military expenditure, forcing it to beg for more money from the US Congress and, if the current Kirkuk-Haifa pipeline project goes through, to steal Iraqi oil, thereby giving credence to the widespread suspicion that the invasion of Iraq was a US proxy war for Israel. The bottom line is that Israel is an abnormally small country with a failing economy and mounting needs that has very little land or other resources to barter for peace. Moreover, it is highly doubtful that any agreement obtained at this time will be honored by either side.

These hard facts hold true even if Menahem Begin had perished on the Altalena and had never had the chance to suffuse Israeli politics with his Biblical demagoguery. Begin's mentor Vladimir Jabotinsky put it in far more lucid terms than his fanatical student did:

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Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population - an iron wall which the native population cannot breakthrough. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy.

Vladimir Jabotinsky; The Iron Wall (We and the Arabs) 1923

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Even were a peace agreement to be signed now, it would only constitute a ceasefire. The Arabs won't forget or forgive the past half-century in which Israel has grown steadily stronger and themselves steadily weaker simply with through the signing of a treaty. Hosni Mubarak's ruthless dictatorship is nothing but the US-financed dam holding back the seething resentment and shame at Anwar Sadat's signature on just such a treaty. The Palestinans' torment at the hands of Israel will remain inscribed in their memory as deeply as the Holocaust is in that of the Jews. If the US and Israel were to cease their military, covert, economic, and diplomatic actions against the Arabs, allowing them to use their oil wealth to increase their prosperity and power, no peace treaty on earth could prevent them from seeking to dominate, isolate, destabilize, and eventually to eliminate Israel.

Jabotinsky concludes that an agreement with the Arabs is possible, but only on condition of their total defeat. Only then, he says, would "extreme groups lose their sway, and influence transfer to moderate groups. Only then would these moderate groups come to us with proposals for mutual concessions." In more topical terms, the only way to make peace is to bring about "regime change" in the Arab world through armed intervention. This is what the US did in Germany and Japan, levelling them to the ground (or in the case of Germany, waiting until the Soviets did it) and then bringing pro-US elements to power and financing their reconstruction. This is also what it says it is attempting in Iraq.

This is the path being followed by Likud's secular Zionists like Sharon. The commander of the "Grapes of Wrath" invasion of Lebanon and former defence minister Mordechai Gur is one of the few to have openly expressed Israel's goals and what it was prepared to do to achieve them:

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Q. Is it true [during the March 1978 Israeli invasion of Lebanon] that you bombarded agglomerations [of people] without distinction? A. I am not one of those people who have a selective memory. Do you think that I pretend not to know what we have done all these years? What did we do the entire length of the Suez Canal? A million and a half refugees! Really: where do you live? We bombarded Ismailia, Suez, Port Said, Port Fuad. A million and a half refugees. Since when has the population of South Lebanon become so sacred? They knew perfectly well what the terrorists were doing. After the massacre at Avivim, I had four villages in South Lebanon bombed without authorization.

Q. Without making distinction between civilians and noncivilians?

A. What distinction? What had the inhabitants of Irbid [a large town in northern Jordan, principally Palestinian in population] done to deserve bombing by us?

Q. But military communiques always spoke of returning fire and of counter strikes against terrorist objectives.

A. Please be serious. Did you not know that the entire valley of the Jordan had been emptied of its inhabitants as a result of the war of attrition [1969-70]?

Q. Then you claim that the population ought to be punished?

A. Of course, and I have never had any doubts about that. When I authorized Yanouch [diminutive name of the commander of the northern front, responsible for the Lebanese operation] to use aviation, artillery and tanks [in the invasion], I knew exactly what I was doing. It has now been thirty years, from the time of our Independence War until now, that we have been fighting against the civilian [Arab] population which inhabited the villages and towns, and every time that we do it, the same question gets asked: should we or should we not strike at civilians?

Interview with Motta Gur, Independence Day supplement to Al Hamishar, 10 May 1978

http://www.mediamonitors.net/mosaddeq24.html

http://www.mideastfacts.com/bomb_civilians.html

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Is it necessary to stress the damage that such carnage does to the international order, or the danger posed by the precedent of unbridled colonialist aggression? Won't others be tempted to secure their own Lebensraum in the same way?

There is, of course, another way: The way of international trusteeship as seen in Bosnia and Kosovo. Unless they are willing to wait out the Arab-Israeli conflict to its bloody and dangerous conclusion, the Western powers that created the Arab-Israeli conflict with their antisemitism, leaving European Jews no option but to settle in Palestine, can provide a peace of sorts. A true peace can only prevail after a very long period - several decades - of impartial international trusteeship over the entire region, which will have to be disarmed and protected by an international force. A simple glance at Israel's strategic ally Turkey and its still troubled relations with its post-Ottoman neighbor states can be an indicator of how long competing nationalisms take to cease to be a security concern.

The trustee authority must ensure the segregation of the conflicting parties, with transfers of population and compensation payments for those forced to emigrate. It must also provide equitable solutions for resource utilization, financing projects like the "water for peace" project proposed by former Turkish President Turgut Ozal if necessary.

Such a solution cannot be imposed by force and must be consented to by all parties. This is particularly true for Israel, whose military and political power is sufficient to resist any outside interference.

Those like ourselves who oppose war should strive to tell the whole hard truth about the Arab-Israeli conflict as I have rather than express vain hopes for peace and brotherhood. Demonizing Sharon is counterproductive. Sharon's killer instincts are not what matters, but his function as a rational Zionist who does whatever is necessary for imposing the Jewish will on the Arabs, knowing that peace before victory is not a realistic option. Indeed, if left to themselves, Jews and Arabs have no choice but to be each others' Sharons or Arafats.

Only the realization of the inevitable catastrophe that awaits them will bring the Israeli Jews to restrain themselves and accept arbitration, since they are too powerful to be restrained by others. It serves no purpose to deny or to evade the ruthlessness of the nationalist struggle being waged by both sides, or to take sides. The truth of the matter - namely that Israel and the Arabs are still pitted against each other in a cruel zero-sum war just as they were in 1948 - will allow everyone to see the extreme danger that this conflict creates for the entire planet.

Zionists must be forced to face the fact that reforming or democratizing the Arab world by armed intervention are not realistic goals and that their only real option, absent international arbitration and trusteeship, is to subjugate the entire Arab nation. We know that there are plans for turning the Middle East into an enhanced version of South African apartheid, breaking down nation-states into tribal bantustans, as is now being done in Iraq. In order for Israel to achieve this goal, it must neutralize the UN and other international bodies upholding the international order based on non-agression and human rights. We have seen that the Bush junta has taken upon itself to accomplish this destructive mission. The Jews in Israel and the rest of the world must ask themselves if this is really what they want, and if it is, to be made aware of the enormous risk to themselves when - not if - their planned hegemony one day fails: Namely that of another holocaust.

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