Thursday, June 12, 2003

It’s Time for an International Force to Go to Israel and Palestine I have not been writing lately, but the latest assassinations and bombings in Israel and Palestine stirred me to go back to more regular blogging.   First, this is a war.  The U.S. and Israel are engaged in a war against a Palestinian resistance movement.   Second, it is a war that cannot be won by military means.  The reason is that the U.S., and virtually the entire world, including most of the Israeli government accepts the justice of creating a Palestinian state.   Arguing about terror is useless, because terror is strictly in the eye of the beholder.   Israel, by its continual killings of innocent bystanders and its willingness to tolerate extreme numbers of Palestinian civilian deaths, does not have the right to question Palestinian extremists who target Israeli civilians.   There is no moral high ground here.  Simply two populations at war, with no rules.   There is, however, a great disparity in military power.  Israel has plenty of arms and helicopter gunships and electronic listening gear, much of it supplied by the U.S.  The Palestinians have mostly homemade weapons and small arms—pitiful little rockets and knapsacks with explosives.  So Israel is continually tempted to try and try again to impose a military solution, thinking it should be able to use its overwhelming military might to impose “quiet” on the Palestinians.   However, military force is least effective when used against an idea.  And the idea the Israeli’s are fighting is the rights of the Palestinians to have a secure state of their own, not under foreign occupation, recognized by the world.  In order to do this, Israel must evacuate the occupied territories, and dismantle most of the settlements.   Yet by refusing to disengage so long as the resistance continues, Israel is condemned to a generations long war.   In this context, Israel has lost the ability to end this conflict.  Only a solution imposed from outside will work.   That solution should involve the total withdrawal of Israeli troops from the occupied territories, to be replaced by an international force whose job would be to temporarily guard the settlements while they were evacuated, and to prevent Palestinian extremist from infiltrating into Israel.   Given international legitimacy and protection, the majority of the Palestinian population will quickly isolate the extremists who deny the right of Israel to exist within its 1967 borders, and on that basis, a genuine collective effort can be made by Palestinians, the international community, and by Israel, to isolate extremism and build a secure society.   By trashing the international institutions that are capable of enforcing an international consensus, such as the world court and the UN, the Bush administration is isolating the U.S., and eventually forcing us into the same war that Israel is in.    We don’t need another war we cannot win.    12:31:28 PM   comment []

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