Foreign Affairs' Israel bashing fest
I haven't seen it, but the current issue of Foreign Affairs Magazine must be an Israel bashing fest. On Tuesday, I reported on an article by Robert M. Danin in the current issue, which extols the virtues of Fayyadism, and calls on Israel to participate in promoting it. Now, we have another excerpt, this one by Howard Sachar, that calls on the 'great powers' to impose a 'settlement' on the Israelis and the 'Palestinians.'Indeed, it is worth recalling that hardly ever in modern history have undersized nations whose relations with their neighbors have been drenched in rancor and blood managed to negotiate successfully more than interim cease-fires or armistices with one another. More frequently, and however unwillingly, these minor actors have accepted the initiatives of great powers with vested interests in acting as their protégés' advocates and guarantors and in constraining small states' irredentist and territorial ambitions.And how successful were any of those 'peace talks'? And how many of the disputes were existential? And were any of those countries democracies when the imposed solutions happened?
For precedent, one may hark back to the sequence of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century great-power conclaves -- of London, Paris, and Berlin, among others -- that established the independence or guaranteed the security of countries as diverse as Greece (1829), Serbia (1856), and Bulgaria and Romania (1878), or to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, which sculpted an aggregation of European successor states and Middle Eastern mandates from the debris of the prewar empires. Similarly, in the wake of World War II, the United Nations selectively acknowledged or postponed the demands of postimperial claimants to diplomatic recognition.
I can't get behind the firewall to read the full article, but I would bet on the examples being poor and inapplicable.
Labels: Foreign Affairs, Howard Sachar, imposed solution
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 7:11 PM
4 Comments:
I obviously misread him. I thought he meant Israel was the smaller power, surrounded by the Arab nations...
Wonder if he considered turning his argument around that way, just by removing the fake "Palestinians" and consider them Arabs, and how his argument changes.
Hi Carl.
Remember last year that i told you that Obama's goal was to impose a peaceplan,with UN troops to implement it?Sounds like there are voices going in that direction?
Will.
Yup. None of those countries had any territorial demands on the Ottoman Empire. On the other hand the Palestinians do have territorial demands upon Israel. Any one who thinks they will be satisfied with a rump state consisting of the West Bank and Gaza is dreaming.
The patchwork of Paris "Peace Conference" mandates and cynical side deals did not exactly stand out as a successful template--the Arabs and the Palestinians for gosh sakes never accepted the Balfour Declaration "imposed" on them, leaving us precisely here with a century's worth of complaints and failed wars after the fact.
Post a Comment
<< Home