Israel Matzav

Try victory

As Israelis went to the polls, not one of the leading parties offered the option of winning the war against the Palestinians. It's a striking and dangerous lacuna.

...

While the Arab effort has been patient, intense, and purposeful, it has also failed. Israelis have built a modern, affluent, and strong country, but one still largely rejected by Arabs. This mixed record has spawned two political developments: a sense of confidence among politically moderate Israelis; and a sense of guilt and self-criticism among its leftists. Very few Israelis still worry about the unfinished business of getting the Arabs to accept the permanence of the Jewish state. Call it Israel's invisible war goal.

Rather than seek victory, Israelis have developed a lengthy menu of approaches to manage the conflict. These include:

•Unilateralism (building a barrier, partial withdrawals): The current policy, as espoused by Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert, and the Kadima Party.

•Lease for 99 years the land under Israeli towns on the West Bank: The Labor Party of Amir Peretz.

• Palestinian economic development: Shimon Peres.

•Territorial compromise: The premise of Oslo diplomacy, as initiated by Yitzhak Rabin.

•Outside funding for the Palestinians (on the Marshall Plan model): U.S. Representative Henry Hyde.

•Retreat to the 1967 borders: Israel's far Left.

•Push the Palestinians to develop good government: Natan Sharansky (and President George W. Bush).

•Insist that Jordan is Palestine: Israel's Right.

•Transfer the Palestinians out of the West Bank: Israel's far Right.

These many approaches are very different in spirit and mutually exclusive. But they have a key element in common. All manage the conflict without resolving it. All ignore the need to defeat Palestinian rejectionism. All seek to finesse war rather than win it.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 7:09 PM