Israel: The Bankrupty of 'Realism'

"Is Abu Mazen Finished?" (Foreign Policy)

As the Israeli military was hitting the Hamas-led Gaza Strip with unprecedented “shock and awe”-style airstrikes two days after Christmas, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was flying to private meetings with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.

He has been largely relegated to the sidelines ever since. With Israel and Hamas locked in a decisive military showdown, Abbas has basically been shunted aside while the battle deepens in Gaza. But the unfolding war is unlikely to change the fundamental dynamic that has stymied the latest efforts to broker a promising Israeli-Palestinian peace deal: Abbas’s political fortunes are inextricably tied to Hamas.

Abbas is in a bind. He can’t realistically negotiate a long-term deal with Israel without regaining control of the Gaza Strip. But he can’t regain control of Gaza unless Hamas capitulates to Israeli pressure.

Even if Hamas ceded control of Gaza, however, the hard-line Islamist movement is unlikely to abandon its long-standing commitment to destroying Israel. And, unless Hamas does so, Israel and the United States are certain to rebuff any reformulated Palestinian unity government that includes what they say is a terrorist organization.

And that leaves the 73-year-old Abbas in a surreal kind of diplomatic stasis. When he succeeded Yasir Arafat four years ago as president of the Palestinian Authority, Abbas was viewed in the West as a potential game-changer. He had criticized the senseless violence of the second Palestinian intifada as counterproductive. As prime minister, Abbas repeatedly bumped heads with Arafat over the Palestinian president’s dictatorial style and eventually resigned in 2003 after just seven months in the post.

So when Arafat died in 2005, Israel and the United States looked to Abbas to transform the Palestinian Authority into a corruption-free, compromising new partner in the peace process. But Abbas was understandably reluctant to succeed Arafat. Abu Mazen (as he is commonly known in the Arab world) has always been more diplomat than strongman, something that endeared him to the West, but cost him credibility with the rival Palestinian militant factions.
Abbas was never able to successfully mediate between the discredited Arafat loyalists (such as Jibril Rajoub, the veteran Arafat security advisor) who had led the secular Fatah party leaders back from exile, and the younger Palestinian reformists, who saw the older generation as corrupt and power-hungry. Those internal divisions doomed Fatah’s chances of retaining control of the Palestinian Authority when Hamas jumped into the political ring to challenge Abbas for political power in 2006.

Abbas has been presiding over an ever shrinking quasi government ever since. A broad international boycott of the new Hamas government gave way to a shaky Hamas-Fatah coalition in March 2007. The unity government failed to assuage Israel or the United States, which refused to accept a cabinet filled with Hamas members committed to destroying Israel.
Then, U.S-backed efforts to arm and train Palestinian forces loyal to Abbas backfired in June 2007 when Hamas militants seized control of the Gaza Strip in another humiliating setback for the Palestinian president. Left with two thirds of a country, Abbas created a questionable caretaker government dominated by pro-Western politicians who have been running the Palestinian Authority by executive decree.

Ironically, the decisive fissure proved to be something of a boon for Abu Mazen...  While Abbas’s popularity rebounded, Gaza always loomed in the background. Hamas’s refusal to abandon its stated pledge to destroy Israel made it impossible for Abbas to create a new unity government because that would have led to another breakdown in peace talks with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s government.

Then came Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s ongoing military campaign to destabilize, if not topple, Hamas in Gaza.  Abbas’s contempt for Hamas became clear when he first spoke out and blamed the Islamist hard-liners for bringing the Israeli assault upon the Gaza Strip by not agreeing to extend a shaky six-month cease-fire with Israel that expired in mid-December.

Last week was supposed to mark the end of Abbas’s four-year term. In some alternative universe, Abbas might have followed through with his long-forgotten pledge not to run for a second term. Instead, Abbas and his legal team have crafted a creative and questionable interpretation of ill-defined Palestinian laws to argue that the Palestinian president’s term does not end for another year.

Hamas challenged that decision and warned that Abbas could no longer be considered the legitimate Palestinian president as of Jan. 10, when his four-year term should have come to an end. But Hamas is a little busy these days trying to retain its hold on Gaza, so the political dispute has been pushed to the side for the foreseeable future.

Israel is the world's leading practitioner of "realism," the amoral foreign policy long advocated by the likes of Pat Buchanan and which has recently become a buzzword for those looking for an alternative to Bush's "freedom agenda."  Why is Israel invading Hamas now?  Harry Reid, justifying US Senate support for the Gaza incursion, says:

Noting that Israel was bent on halting Hamas rocket fire into its southern towns, Reid said: "I ask any of my colleagues to imagine that happening here in the United States. Rockets and mortars coming from Toronto in Canada, into Buffalo New York. How would we as a country react?"

That's true as far as it goes.  But Hamas has been firing rockets at Israel for over a year now.  The US would hardly tolerate missile attacks for a year.  Israel has, in the meantime, been trying to enforce an economic blockade against Hamas.  What would the United States do if the British Navy was blockading our ports?  Firing rockets at them, maybe?

The Israelis fight wars carefully, trying not to kill civilians.  They don't get enough credit for that, and it does put them on a different moral plane from the suicide bombers of Hamas.  Israel, too, is ultimately fighting for its survival, a more fundamental motive than that of virtually any American war.  But Israeli policy is not guided by overarching principles of justice.  Thus, the Israelis tried to negotiate peace with Yasir Arafat, a monster who had ordered the murder of thousands.  Abu Mazen is no Arafat, but the fact that Israel's preferred leader of the Palestinians is violating the constitution and his campaign pledges to stay in power is symptomatic.

Israel must be both more generous and more hard-line.  On the one hand, all settlers should be withdrawn from the occupied territories unilaterally, not as a concession to anyone, because until Palestine is a stable democracy no one has a legitimate right to speak for the Palestinian people, and no concession by an illegitimate leader is morally binding on them.  Israel must deal justly with the Palestinians, with no quid pro quos.  On the other hand, once the lines of a just settlement have been drawn-- and a just settlement certainly would not involve erasing Israel from the map: after 50 years, two generations in the land, the Israelis have at least as much of a claim on it as the Palestinians, and the Palestinians have further forfeited their rights by supporting terror-- Israel should defend that settlement the way other democracies do.  "Proportionality" is exactly what a state must not do in external relations.  On the contrary, there should be an on-off switch between war and peace.  When a settlement has been imposed, Israel should respond to any violation thereof as to an act of war, but at the same time should do its utmost to keep Palestinian civilians from suffering for the sins of their terrorist compatriots.  

Israel has the misfortune, though it is partly her own fault too, of living next to neighbors who have perverted their religion into a cult of murder, and life may never be easy for her.  But she will never secure her survival until she lives by justice, not 'realism.'

Comments

[Nato]

It seems to me that Israel had fifteen years without serious terrorism in which to go about finding a just solution to the problem of Palestinians trapped in the occupied territories. Then the Intefadeh seemed to draw them to the bargaining table. It would seem that Israel has done very much too little to show that Palestinians can achieve a just settlement with them without violence. Yes, the Palestinians are rabidly hostile - what can one possibly expect of an impoverished, dislocated and disenfranchised people? Further, Israel is a democracy, so its decisions to, for example, continue to build/allow settlements is sensitive (to an extent) to the will of Israelis. Can we really expect the average Palestinian to allow much exculpatory argument for non-military Israeli targets? I can see how the Israelis have come to their siege mentality, but I have a very hard time getting too upset with Palestinians for slowly accepting the arguments of the Jihadi terrorists. They were fairly secular people, once, and some of the better-disposed of Arabs toward the west. Those generations have died out or emigrated. Israel made this problem for itself in a way the Palestinians didn't, because the Israeli state had agency the whole time and misused it.

[Nathan Smith]

"Yes, the Palestinians are rabidly hostile - what can one possibly expect of an impoverished, dislocated and disenfranchised people?"

One can expect them to be true to moral principles and to reject murder. Moreover, they're no poorer than billions of others, no more disenfranchised than billions of others-- less so, if anything-- and indeed no much disenfranchised than many of their fellow Arabs, and as for being "dislocated," they've lived in the places they're in for two generations. Plenty of others around the world have moved more recently than that, some under compulsion, others for economic reasons but reluctantly, and have come to terms with the change. One does not have some special right to live where one's great-grandfather lived. For the Palestinians to define themselves as "dislocated" is in a sense optional at the national level, even if for individuals it would be hard to define one's identity as 'oh well, this is where I live now.'

"Can we really expect the average Palestinian to allow much exculpatory argument for non-military Israeli targets?"

Yes, that is the moral obligation of the Palestinians as of all human beings, and by failing to reject murder they place themselves in the wrong.

[nato]

I should be clear about the approach I'm taking here, in which the Israelis are supposed to be the "adults" of the situation, and are held to a higher moral standards because they are the ones with the power. This isn't really fair, no, but it's efficient because Israeli state is the sort of state that should be sensitive to moral concerns. A populace in the Palestinians' position will never be, and if the responsible parties wait until they are, they'll be waiting forever.

What I should have been clear that I was *not* doing is excusing, en-masse, each individual Palestinian of whatever personal viciousness they might have toward Israelis.

[Nathan Smith]

Yes, that's basically right. It's hard for societies to be collectively sane without freedom of speech and some stable decision-making process. The Israelis' "realism" creates a dynamic that empowers extremists and extremism. They fail to understand human nature and human society.