A World without Israel

Josef Joffe at Foreign Policy has an unbelievably illuminating article on the world if Israel didn't exist. As I've mentioned before, I am an undying believer in the right of Isreal's existence. Those who believe the Arab world would not be rife with strife if Israel was not around just don't have a clue.

Since World War II, no state has suffered so cruel a reversal of fortunes as Israel. Admired all the way into the 1970s as the state of those plucky Jews who survived against all odds and made democracy and the desert bloom in a climate hostile to both liberty and greenery, Israel has become the target of creeping delegitimization.

It's amazing to me that when a country has to repeatedly defend itself against overwhelming odds it winds up becoming demonized. I will accede some of her actions have had a deleterious effect. It is the actions of a paranoid and fearful society surrounded by openly hostile regimes.

The denigration comes in two guises. The first, the soft version, blames Israel first and most for whatever ails the Middle East, and for having corrupted U.S. foreign policy. It is the standard fare of editorials around the world, not to mention the sheer venom oozing from the pages of the Arab-Islamic press. The more recent hard version zeroes in on Israel's very existence. According to this dispensation, it is Israel as such, and not its behavior, that lies at the root of troubles in the Middle East. Hence the statocidal conclusion that Israel's birth, midwifed by both the United States and the Soviet Union in 1948, was a grievous mistake, grandiose and worthy as it may have been at the time.

[...]

Anatol Lieven of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace argues that what is happening between Israelis and Palestinians is a tremendous obstacle to democratization because it inflames all the worst, most regressive aspects of Arab nationalism and Arab culture. In other words, the conflict drives the pathology, and not the other way around which is like the streetfighter explaining to the police: It all started when this guy hit back.

The problem with this root-cause argument is threefold: It blurs, if not reverses, cause and effect. It ignores a myriad of conflicts unrelated to Israel. And it absolves the Arabs of culpability, shifting the blame to you know whom.

Pathology . . .that says it all. The Arab world can cry all they want about Palestine, but it is a 'strawman' aguemnt. According to the 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, "early in the 20th century a list of no less than fifty languages" that "it is therefore no easy task to write concisely ... on the ethnology of Palestine."

Now to the hard version. Ever so subtly, a more baleful tone slips into this narrative: Israel is not merely an unruly neighbor but an unwelcome intruder. Still timidly uttered outside the Arab world, this version's proponents in the West bestride the stage as truth-sayers who dare to defy taboo. Thus, the British writer A.N. Wilson declares that he has reluctantly come to the conclusion that Israel, through its own actions, has proven it does not have the right to exist. And, following Sept. 11, 2001, Brazilian scholar Jose Arthur Giannotti said: Let us agree that the history of the Middle East would be entirely different without the State of Israel, which opened a wound between Islam and the West. Can you get rid of Muslim terrorism without getting rid of this wound which is the source of the frustration of potential terrorists?

So let us assume that Israel is an anachronism and a historical mistake without which the Arab-Islamic world stretching from Algeria to Egypt, from Syria to Pakistan, would be a far happier place, above all because the original sin, the stablishment of Israel, never would have been committed. Then let's move from the past to the present, pretending that we could wave a mighty magic wand, and poof, Israel disappears from the map.

What's amazing about this pipe dream? It's if this ever happened the Arabs would still blame all their problems on ghost of Israel.

Civilization of Clashes

Let us start the what-if procession in 1948, when Israel was born in war. Would stillbirth have nipped the Palestinian problem in the bud? Not quite. Egypt, Transjordan (now Jordan), Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon marched on Haifa and Tel Aviv not to liberate Palestine, but to grab it. The invasion was a textbook competitive power play by neighboring states intent on acquiring territory for themselves. If they had been victorious, a Palestinian state would not have emerged, and there still would have been plenty of refugees. (Recall that half the population of Kuwait fled Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's liberation of that country in 1990.) Indeed, assuming that Palestinian nationalism had awakened when it did in the late 1960s and 1970s, the Palestinians might now be dispatching suicide bombers to Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere.

There is much, much more. Joffe goes through the five levels of conflict inherent in the Middle East which have nothing to do with Israel. Just remember the term...Pathology...it is the true definition of the Arabs of today.