Look Before Leaping
Look Before Leaping
MARCH 25, 2015
I can think of many good reasons to go ahead with the nuclear deal with Iran, and I can think of just as many reasons not to. So, if you’re confused, let me see if I can confuse you even more.
The proposed deal to lift sanctions on Iran — in return for curbs on its bomb-making capabilities so that it would take at least a year for Tehran to make a weapon — has to be judged in its own right. I will be looking closely at the quality of the verification regime and the specificity of what happens if Iran cheats. But the deal also has to be judged in terms of how it fits with wider American strategic goals in the region, because a U.S.-Iran deal would be an earthquake that touches every corner of the Middle East. Not enough attention is being paid to the regional implications — particularly what happens if we strengthen Iran at a time when large parts of the Sunni Arab world are in meltdown.
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The Obama team’s best argument for doing this deal with Iran is that, in time, it could be “transformational.” That is, the ending of sanctions could open Iran to the world and bring in enough fresh air — Iran has been deliberately isolated since 1979 by its ayatollahs and Revolutionary Guard Corps — to gradually move Iran from being a revolutionary state to a normal one, and one less inclined to threaten Israel. If one assumes that Iran already has the know-how and tools to build a nuclear weapon, changing the character of its regime is the only way it becomes less threatening.
The challenge to this argument, explains Karim Sadjadpour, a Middle East specialist at the Carnegie Endowment, is that while the Obama team wants to believe this deal could be “transformational,” Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, “sees it as transactional” — Iran plugs its nose, does the deal, regains its strength and doubles-down on its longstanding revolutionary principles. But, then again, you never know. What starts out as transactional can end up being transformational in ways that no one can prevent or predict.
A second argument is that Iran is a real country and civilization, with competitive (if restricted) elections, educated women and a powerful military. Patching up the U.S.-Iran relationship could enable America to better manage and balance the Sunni Taliban in Afghanistan, and counterbalance the Sunni jihadists, like those in the Islamic State, or ISIS, now controlling chunks of Iraq and Syria. The United States has relied heavily on Saudi Arabia, ever since Iran’s 1979 revolution, and while the Saudi ruling family and elites are aligned with America, there is a Saudi Wahhabi hard core that has funded the spread of the most puritanical, anti-pluralistic, anti-women form of Islam that has changed the character of Arab Islam and helped to foster mutations like ISIS. There were no Iranians involved in 9/11.
Then again, it was Iranian agents who made the most lethal improvised explosives in Iraq that killed many American troops there. And it was Iran that encouraged its Iraqi Shiite allies to reject any extended U.S. military presence in Iraq and to also overplay their hand in stripping power from Iraqi Sunnis, which is what helped to produce the ISIS counterreaction.
“In the fight against ISIS, Iran is both the arsonist and the fire brigade,” added Sadjadpour. To Saudi Arabia, he added, the rise of ISIS is attributable to the repression of Sunnis in Syria and Iraq by Iran and its Shiite clients. To Tehran, the rise of ISIS is attributable to the financial and ideological support of Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies.
And they are both right, which is why America’s interests lie not with either the Saudis or the Iranian ideologues winning, but rather with balancing the two against each other until they get exhausted enough to stop prosecuting their ancient Shiite-Sunni, Persian-Arab feud.
Then again, if this nuclear deal with Iran is finalized, and sanctions lifted, much more Iranian oil will hit the global market, suppressing prices and benefiting global consumers. Then again, Iran would have billions of dollars more to spend on cyberwarfare, long-range ballistic missiles and projecting power across the Arab world, where its proxies already dominate four Arab capitals: Beirut, Baghdad, Damascus and Sana.
But, given the disarray in Yemen, Iraq and Syria, do we really care if Iran tries to play policeman there and is embroiled in endless struggles with Sunni militias? For 10 years, it was America that was overstretched across Iraq and Afghanistan. Now it will be Iran’s turn. I feel terrible for the people who have to live in these places, and we certainly should use American air power to help prevent the chaos from spreading to islands of decency like Jordan, Lebanon and Kurdistan in Iraq. But managing the decline of the Arab state system is not a problem we should own. We’ve amply proved that we don’t know how.
So before you make up your mind on the Iran deal, ask how it affects Israel, the country most threatened by Iran. But also ask how it fits into a wider U.S. strategy aimed at quelling tensions in the Middle East with the least U.S. involvement necessary and the lowest oil prices possible.
Correction: March 27, 2015
Thomas L. Friedman’s column on Wednesday incorrectly described the Taliban as an Arab movement. Most of its members are Pashtuns, not Arabs.
June 4, 2013
Israel Lives the Joseph Story
How would you like to be an Israeli strategist today? Now even Turkey is
in turmoil as its people push back on their increasingly autocratic
leader. I mean, there goes the neighborhood. The good news for Israel is
that in the near term its near neighbors are too internally consumed to
think about threatening it. In the long run, though, Israel faces two
serious challenges that I’d dub the Stephen Hawking Story and the Joseph
Story.
In case you missed it, Hawking, the British physicist, cosmologist and
author of “A Brief History of Time,” canceled a planned trip to Israel
this month to attend the fifth annual Israeli Presidential Conference.
Cambridge University, where Hawking is a professor, said Hawking had
told Israelis that he would not be attending “based on advice from
Palestinian academics that he should respect the boycott” of Israel
because of the West Bank occupation.
“Never has a scientist of this stature boycotted Israel,” Yigal Palmor,
of Israel’s Foreign Ministry, declared. I strongly disagree with what
Hawking did. Israelis should be challenged not boycotted. (After all,
Palestinians are also at fault.) Nevertheless, his action found wide
resonance. The Boston Globe said Hawking’s decision was “a reasonable
way to express one’s political views. Observers need not agree with
Hawking’s position in order to understand and even respect his choice.
The movement that Hawking has signed on to aims to place pressure on
Israel through peaceful means.”
That was not Al-Ahram. That was The Boston Globe — a reminder
that in this age of social networks, populist revolts and superempowered
individuals, “international public opinion matters more not less,”
notes the Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi, the author of
“Imagined Democracies.” And, in Israel’s case, it is creating a powerful
surge of international opinion, particularly in Europe and on college
campuses, that Israel is a pariah state because of its West Bank
occupation. It is not a good trend for Israel. It makes it that much
more dependent on America alone for support.
This global trend, though, is coinciding with a complete breakdown in
Israel’s regional environment. Israel today is living a version of the
Biblical “Joseph Story,” where Joseph endeared himself to the Pharaoh by
interpreting his dreams as a warning that seven fat years would be
followed by seven lean years and, therefore, Egypt needed to stock up on
grain. In Israel’s case, it has enjoyed, relatively speaking, 40 fat
years of stable governments around it. Over the last 40 years, a class
of Arab leaders took power and managed to combine direct or indirect oil
money, with multiple intelligence services, with support from either
America or Russia, to ensconce themselves in office for multiple
decades. All of these leaders used their iron fists to keep their
sectarian conflicts — Sunnis versus Shiites, Christians versus Muslims,
and Kurds and Palestinian refugees versus everyone else — in check. They
also kept their Islamists underground.
With these iron-fisted leaders being toppled — and true, multisectarian
democracies with effective governments yet to emerge in their place —
Israel is potentially facing decades of unstable or no governments
surrounding it. Only Jordan offers Israel a normal border. In the
hinterlands beyond, Israel is looking at dysfunctional states that are
either imploding (like Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Bahrain and Libya) or
exploding (like Syria).
But here’s what’s worse: These iron-fisted leaders not only suppressed
various political forces in their societies but also badly ignored their
schools, environments, women’s empowerment and population explosions.
Today, all these bills are coming due just when their governments are
least able to handle them.
Therefore, the overarching theme for Israeli strategy in the coming
years must be “resiliency” — how to maintain a relatively secure
environment and thriving economy in a collapsing region.
In my view, that makes resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict more
important than ever for three reasons: 1) to reverse the trend of
international delegitimization closing in on Israel; 2) to disconnect
Israel as much as possible from the regional conflicts around it; and 3)
to offer a model.
There is no successful model of democratic governance in the Arab world
at present — the Islamists are all failing. But Israel, if it partnered
with the current moderate Palestinian leadership in the West Bank, has a
chance to create a modern, economically thriving, democratic, secular
state where Christians and Muslims would live side by side — next to
Jews. That would be a hugely valuable example, especially at a time when
the Arab world lacks anything like it. And the world for the most part
would not begrudge Israel keeping its forces on the Jordan River — as
will be necessary given the instability beyond — if it ceded most of the
West Bank and Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem.
Together, Israelis and Palestinians actually have the power to model
what a decent, postauthoritarian, multireligious Arab state could look
like. Nothing would address both people’s long-term strategic needs
better. Too bad their leaders today are not as farsighted as Joseph.
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May 18, 2013
Without Water, Revolution
TEL ABYAD, Syria — I just spent a day in this northeast Syrian town. It
was terrifying — much more so than I anticipated — but not because we
were threatened in any way by the Free Syrian Army soldiers who took us
around or by the Islamist Jabhet al-Nusra fighters who stayed hidden in
the shadows. It was the local school that shook me up.
As we were driving back to the Turkish border, I noticed a school and
asked the driver to turn around so I could explore it. It was empty — of
students. But war refugees had occupied the classrooms and little kids’
shirts and pants were drying on a line strung across the playground.
The basketball backboard was rusted, and a local parent volunteered to
give me a tour of the bathrooms, which he described as disgusting.
Classes had not been held in two years. And that is what terrified me.
Men with guns I’m used to. But kids without books, teachers or classes
for a long time — that’s trouble. Big trouble.
They grow up to be teenagers with too many guns and too much free time,
and I saw a lot of them in Tel Abyad. They are the law of the land here
now, but no two of them wear the same uniform, and many are just in
jeans. These boys bravely joined the adults of their town to liberate it
from the murderous tyranny of Bashar al-Assad, but now the war has
ground to a stalemate, so here, as in so many towns across Syria, life
is frozen in a no-man’s land between order and chaos. There is just
enough patched-up order for people to live — some families have even
rigged up bootleg stills that refine crude oil into gasoline to keep
cars running — but not enough order to really rebuild, to send kids to
school or to start businesses.
So Syria as a whole is slowly bleeding to death of self-inflicted
gunshot wounds. You can’t help but ask whether it will ever be a unified
country again and what kind of human disaster will play out here if a
whole generation grows up without school.
“Syria is becoming Somalia,” said Zakaria Zakaria, a 28-year-old Syrian
who graduated from college with a major in English and who acted as our
guide. “Students have now lost two years of school, and there is no
light at the end of the tunnel, and if this goes on for two more years
it will be like Somalia, a failed country. But Somalia is off somewhere
in the Indian Ocean. Syria is the heart of the Middle East. I don’t want
this to happen to my country. But the more it goes on, the worse it
will be.”
This is the agony of Syria today. You can’t imagine the war here
continuing for another year, let alone five. But when you feel the depth
of the rage against the Assad government and contemplate the sporadic
but barbaric sect-on-sect violence, you can’t imagine any peace deal
happening or holding — not without international peacekeepers on the
ground to enforce it. Eventually, we will all have to have that
conversation, because this is no ordinary war.
THIS Syrian disaster is like a superstorm. It’s what happens when an
extreme weather event, the worst drought in Syria’s modern history,
combines with a fast-growing population and a repressive and corrupt
regime and unleashes extreme sectarian and religious passions, fueled by
money from rival outside powers — Iran and Hezbollah on one side, Saudi
Arabia, Turkey and Qatar on the other, each of which have an extreme
interest in its Syrian allies’ defeating the other’s allies — all at a
time when America, in its post-Iraq/Afghanistan phase, is extremely wary
of getting involved.
I came here to write my column and work on a film for the Showtime series,
“Years of Living Dangerously,”
about the “Jafaf,” or drought, one of the key drivers of the Syrian
war. In an age of climate change, we’re likely to see many more such
conflicts.
“The drought did not cause Syria’s civil war,” said the Syrian economist
Samir Aita, but, he added, the failure of the government to respond to
the drought played a huge role in fueling the uprising. What happened,
Aita explained, was that after Assad took over in 2000 he opened up the
regulated agricultural sector in Syria for big farmers, many of them
government cronies, to buy up land and drill as much water as they
wanted, eventually severely diminishing the water table. This began
driving small farmers off the land into towns, where they had to
scrounge for work.
Because of the population explosion that started here in the 1980s and
1990s thanks to better health care, those leaving the countryside came
with huge families and settled in towns around cities like Aleppo. Some
of those small towns swelled from 2,000 people to 400,000 in a decade or
so. The government failed to provide proper schools, jobs or services
for this youth bulge, which hit its teens and 20s right when the
revolution erupted.
Then, between 2006 and 2011, some 60 percent of Syria’s land mass was
ravaged by the drought and, with the water table already too low and
river irrigation shrunken, it wiped out the livelihoods of 800,000
Syrian farmers and herders, the United Nations reported. “Half the
population in Syria between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers left the
land” for urban areas during the last decade, said Aita. And with Assad
doing nothing to help the drought refugees, a lot of very simple farmers
and their kids got politicized. “State and government was invented in
this part of the world, in ancient Mesopotamia, precisely to manage
irrigation and crop growing,” said Aita, “and Assad failed in that basic
task.”
Young people and farmers starved for jobs — and land starved for water —
were a prescription for revolution. Just ask those who were here,
starting with Faten, whom I met in her simple flat in Sanliurfa, a
Turkish city near the Syrian border. Faten, 38, a Sunni, fled there with
her son Mohammed, 19, a member of the Free Syrian Army, who was badly
wounded in a firefight a few months ago. Raised in the northeastern
Syrian farming village of Mohasen, Faten, who asked me not to use her
last name, told me her story.
She and her husband “used to own farmland,” said Faten. “We tended
annual crops. We had wheat, barley and everyday food — vegetables,
cucumbers, anything we could plant instead of buying in the market.
Thank God there were rains, and the harvests were very good before. And
then suddenly, the drought happened.”
What did it look like? “To see the land made us very sad,” she said.
“The land became like a desert, like salt.” Everything turned yellow.
Did Assad’s government help? “They didn’t do anything,” she said. “We
asked for help, but they didn’t care. They didn’t care about this
subject. Never, never. We had to solve our problems ourselves.”
So what did you do? “When the drought happened, we could handle it for
two years, and then we said, ‘It’s enough.’ So we decided to move to the
city. I got a government job as a nurse, and my husband opened a shop.
It was hard. The majority of people left the village and went to the
city to find jobs, anything to make a living to eat.” The drought was
particularly hard on young men who wanted to study or marry but could no
longer afford either, she added. Families married off daughters at
earlier ages because they couldn’t support them.
Faten, her head conservatively covered in a black scarf, said the
drought and the government’s total lack of response radicalized her. So
when the first spark of revolutionary protest was ignited in the small
southern Syrian town of Dara’a, in March 2011, Faten and other drought
refugees couldn’t wait to sign on. “Since the first cry of ‘Allahu
akbar,’ we all joined the revolution. Right away.” Was this about the
drought? “Of course,” she said, “the drought and unemployment were
important in pushing people toward revolution.”
ZAKARIA ZAKARIA was a teenager in nearby Hasakah Province when the
drought hit and he recalled the way it turned proud farmers, masters of
their own little plots of land, into humiliated day laborers, working
for meager wages in the towns “just to get some money to eat.” What was
most galling to many, said Zakaria, was that if you wanted a steady
government job you had to bribe a bureaucrat or know someone in the
state intelligence agency.
The best jobs in Hasakah Province, Syria’s oil-producing region, were
with the oil companies. But drought refugees, virtually all of whom were
Sunni Muslims, could only dream of getting hired there. “Most of those
jobs went to Alawites from Tartous and Latakia,” said Zakaria, referring
to the minority sect to which President Assad belongs and which is
concentrated in these coastal cities. “It made people even more angry.
The best jobs on our lands in our province were not for us, but for
people who come from outside.”
Only in the spring of 2011, after the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt,
did the Assad government start to worry about the drought refugees, said
Zakaria, because on March 11 — a few days before the Syrian uprising
would start in Dara’a — Assad visited Hasakah, a very rare event. “So I
posted on my Facebook page, ‘Let him see how people are living,’ ”
recalled Zakaria. “My friends said I should delete it right away,
because it was dangerous. I wouldn’t. They didn’t care how people
lived.”
Abu Khalil, 48, is one of those who didn’t just protest. A former cotton
farmer who had to become a smuggler to make ends meet for his 16
children after the drought wiped out their farm, he is now the Free
Syrian Army commander in the Tel Abyad area. We met at a crushed Syrian
Army checkpoint. After being introduced by our Syrian go-between, Abu
Khalil, who was built like a tough little boxer, introduced me to his
fighting unit. He did not introduce them by rank but by blood, pointing
to each of the armed men around him and saying: “My nephew, my cousin,
my brother, my cousin, my nephew, my son, my cousin ...”
Free Syrian Army units are often family affairs. In a country where the
government for decades wanted no one to trust anyone else, it’s no
surprise.
“We could accept the drought because it was from Allah,” said Abu
Khalil, “but we could not accept that the government would do nothing.”
Before we parted, he pulled me aside to say that all that his men needed
were anti-tank and antiaircraft weapons and they could finish Assad
off. “Couldn’t Obama just let the Mafia send them to us?” he asked.
“Don’t worry, we won’t use them against Israel.”
As part of our film we’ve been following a Syrian woman who is a
political activist, Farah Nasif, a 27-year-old Damascus University
graduate from Deir-az-Zour, whose family’s farm was also wiped out in
the drought. Nasif typifies the secular, connected, newly urbanized
young people who spearheaded the democracy uprisings here and in Egypt,
Yemen and Tunisia. They all have two things in common: they no longer
fear their governments or their parents, and they want to live like
citizens, with equal rights — not as sects with equal fears. If this new
generation had a motto, noted Aita, the Syrian economist, it would
actually be the same one Syrians used in their 1925 war of independence
from France: “Religion is for God, and the country is for everyone.”
But Nasif is torn right now. She wants Assad gone and all political
prisoners released, but she knows that more war “will only destroy the
rest of the country.” And her gut tells her that even once Assad is
gone, there is no agreement on who or what should come next. So every
option worries her — more war, a cease-fire, the present and the future.
This is the agony of Syria today — and why the closer you get to it,
the less certain you are how to fix it.
SC: I heard a report on this Saturday 25th may 2013 on Reshet Bet.
How Turkey Controls Water Resources to Iraq, Iran and Syria.
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May 4, 2013
This Ain’t Yogurt
AN Arab friend remarked to me that watching the United States debate how much to get involved in
Syria
reminded him of an Arab proverb: “If you burn your tongue once eating
soup, for the rest of your life you’ll blow on your yogurt.”
After burning our tongues in
Iraq
and Afghanistan, and watching with increasing distress the aftermath of
the revolutions in Libya, Tunisia and Egypt, President Obama is right
to be cautious about getting burned in Damascus. We’ve now seen enough
of these Arab transitions from autocracy to draw some crucial lessons
about what it takes to sustain positive change in these countries. We
ignore the lessons at our peril — especially the lesson of Iraq, which
everyone just wants to forget but is hugely relevant.
Syria is Iraq’s twin: an artificial state that was also born after World
War I inside lines drawn by imperial powers. Like Iraq, Syria’s
constituent communities — Sunnis, Alawite/Shiites, Kurds, Druze,
Christians — never volunteered to live together under agreed rules. So,
like Iraq, Syria has been ruled for much of its modern history by either
a colonial power or an iron-fisted autocrat. In Iraq, the hope was that
once the iron-fisted dictator was removed by us it would steadily
transition to a multisectarian, multiparty democracy. Ditto for Egypt,
Libya, Tunisia and Yemen.
But we now see the huge difference between Eastern Europe in 1989 and
the Arab world in 2013. In most of Eastern Europe, the heavy lid of
communist authoritarian rule was suppressing broad and deeply rooted
aspirations for democracy. So when that lid was removed, most of these
countries relatively quickly moved to freely elected governments —
helped and inspired by the European Union.
In the Arab world, in contrast, the heavy lid of authoritarianism was suppressing sectarian, tribal, Islamist and
democratic aspirations. So, when the lids were removed, all four
surfaced at once. But the Islamist trend has been the most energetic —
helped and inspired not by the European Union but by Islamist mosques
and charities in the Persian Gulf — and the democratic one has proved to
be the least organized, least funded and most frail. In short, most of
Eastern Europe turned out to be like Poland after communism ended and
most of the Arab countries turned out to be like Yugoslavia after
communism ended.
As I said, our hope and the hope of the courageous Arab democrats who
started all these revolutions, was that these Arab countries would make
the transition from Saddam to Jefferson without getting stuck in
Khomeini or Hobbes — to go from autocracy to democracy without getting
stuck in Islamism or anarchism.
But, to do that, they need either an external midwife to act as a
referee between all their constituent communities (who never developed
trust in one another) as they try to replace sectarianism, Islamism and
tribalism with a spirit of democratic citizenship or they need their own
Nelson Mandela. That is, a homegrown figure who can lead, inspire and
navigate a democratic transition that is inclusive of all communities.
America, we all know, played that external referee role in Iraq — hugely
ineptly at first. But, eventually, the U.S. and moderate Iraqis found a
way back from the brink, beat back both Sunni and Shiite violent
extremists, wrote a constitution and held multiple free elections,
hoping to give birth to that Iraqi Mandela. Alas, they got
Nuri Kamal al-Maliki,
a Shiite who, instead of building trust with other communities, is
re-sowing sectarian division. Decades of zero-sum politics —
“I’m-weak-how-can-I-compromise/I’m-strong-why-should-I-compromise” — are
hard to extinguish.
I believe if you want to end the Syrian civil war and tilt Syria onto a
democratic path, you need an international force to occupy the entire
country, secure the borders, disarm all the militias and midwife a
transition to democracy. It would be staggeringly costly and take a long
time, with the outcome still not guaranteed. But without a homegrown
Syrian leader who can be a healer, not a divider, for all its
communities, my view is that anything short of an external force that
rebuilds Syria from the bottom up will fail. Since there are no
countries volunteering for that role (and I am certainly not nominating
the U.S.), my guess is that the fighting in Syria will continue until
the parties get exhausted.
Meanwhile, wherever we can identify truly “good” rebels, we should
strengthen them, but we should also be redoubling our diplomatic efforts
to foster a more credible opposition leadership of
reconciliation-minded Syrians who can reassure all of Syria’s
communities that they will have an equitable place at a new cabinet
table. (Never underestimate how many Syrians are clinging to the
tyrannical
Bashar al-Assad
out of fear that after him comes only Hobbes or Khomeini.) That way,
when the combatants get exhausted and realize that there can be no
victor and no vanquished — a realization that took 14 years in Lebanon’s
civil war next door — a fair power-sharing plan will be in place. Even
then, Syrians will almost certainly need outside help to reassure
everyone during the transition, but we can cross that bridge when we
come to it.
Here’s the one alternative that won’t happen: one side will decisively
defeat the other and usher in peace that way. That is a fantasy.
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December 8, 2012
The Full Israeli Experience
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Tel Aviv
THESE were the main regional news headlines in The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday: “Home Front Command simulates missile strike during drill.” Egypt’s President “Morsi opts for safety as police battle protestors.” In Syria, “Fight spills over into Lebanon.” “Darkness at noon for fearful Damascus residents.” “Tunisian Islamists, leftists clash after jobs protests.” “NATO warns Syria not to use chemical weapons.” And my personal favorite: “ ‘Come back and bring a lot of people with you’ — Tourism Ministry offers tour operators the full Israeli experience.”
Ah, yes,
“the full Israeli experience.”
The full Israeli experience today is a living political science experiment. How does a country deal with failed or failing state authority on four of its borders — Gaza, South Lebanon, Syria and the Sinai Desert of Egypt — each of which is now crawling with nonstate actors nested among civilians and armed with rockets. How should Israel and its friends think about this “Israeli experience” and connect it with the ever-present question of Israeli-Palestinian peace?
For starters, if you want to run for office in Israel, or be taken seriously here as either a journalist or a diplomat, there is an unspoken question in the mind of virtually every Israeli that you need to answer correctly: “Do you understand what neighborhood I’m living in?” If Israelis smell that you don’t, their ears will close to you. It is one reason the Europeans in general, and the European left in particular, have so little influence here.
The central political divide in Israel today is over the follow-up to this core question: If you appreciate that Israel lives in a neighborhood where there is no mercy for the weak, how should we expect Israel to act?
There are two major schools of thought here. One, led by Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, comprises the “Ideological Hawks,” who, to the question, “Do you know what neighborhood I am living in?” tell Israelis and the world, “It is so much worse than you think!” Bibi goes out of his way to highlight every possible threat to Israel and essentially makes the case that nothing Israel does has ever or can ever alter the immutable Arab hatred of the Jewish state or the Hobbesian character of the neighborhood. Netanyahu is not without supporting evidence. Israel withdraws from both South Lebanon and Gaza and still gets hit with rockets. But this group is called the “ideological” hawks because most of them also advocate Israel’s retaining permanent control of the West Bank and Jerusalem for religious-nationalist reasons. So it’s impossible to know where their strategic logic for holding territory stops and their religious-nationalist dreams start — and that muddies their case with the world.
The other major school of thought here, call it the “Yitzhak Rabin school,” was best described by the writer Leon Wieseltier as the “bastards for peace.”
Rabin, the former Israeli prime minister and war hero, started exactly where Bibi did: This is a dangerous neighborhood, and a Jewish state is not welcome here. But Rabin didn’t stop there. He also believed that Israel was very powerful and, therefore, should judiciously use its strength to try to avoid becoming a garrison state, fated to rule over several million Palestinians forever. Israel’s “bastards for peace” believe that it’s incumbent on every Israeli leader to test, test and test again — using every ounce of Israeli creativity — to see if Israel can find a Palestinian partner for a secure peace so that it is not forever fighting an inside war and an outside war. At best, the Palestinians might surprise them. At worst, Israel would have the moral high ground in a permanent struggle.
Today, alas, not only is the Israeli peace camp dead, but the most effective Israeli “bastard for peace,” Defense Minister Ehud Barak, is retiring. As I sat with Barak in his office the other day, he shared with me his parting advice to Israel’s next and sure-to-be-far-right government.
Huge political forces, with deep roots, are now playing out around Israel, particularly the rise of political Islam, said Barak. “We have to learn to accept it and see both sides of it and try to make it better. I am worried about our tendency to adopt a fatalistic, pessimistic perception of history. Because, once you adopt it, you are relieved from the responsibility to see the better aspects and seize the opportunities” when they arise.
If Israel just assumes that it’s only a matter of time before the moderate Palestinian leaders in the West Bank fall and Hamas takes over, “why try anything?” added Barak. “And, therefore, you lose sight of the opportunities and the will to seize opportunities. ... I know that you can’t say when leaders raise this kind of pessimism that it is all just invented. It is not all invented, and you would be stupid if you did not look [at it] with open eyes. But it is a major risk that you will not notice that you become enslaved by this pessimism in a way that will paralyze you from understanding that you can shape it. The world is full of risks, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t have a responsibility to do something about it — within your limits and the limits of realism — and avoid self-fulfilling prophecies that are extremely dangerous here.”
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