The chaos that has erupted in the Middle East during the past few weeks has once again brought world focus onto the divided Israel/Palestine region. Now it seems as though Yasser Arafat's leadership of the Palestinians may be coming to an end, whether through exile or martyrdom. People in the United States and members of the European Union are still calling for peace in the region.
It has become apparent as the decades roll by, that peace through negotiations will never be achieved there. Arafat is clearly ineffective as the nominal Palestinian leader. Despite agreement after agreement, the battles and suicide bombings continue. Either Arafat is unable to control the Palestinians or he refuses to do so. Regardless of the situation, further discussions are pointless.
Most likely, Arafat has little control over anything. Despite being grouped under the umbrella term "Palestinians," the array of peoples who make up the displaced and persecuted pre-Israel inhabitants of the area do not share a unique culture, language or national history to unite them. Palestine really is not a nation-state and probably will be.
This does not necessarily justify Israel's actions. The creation of Israel in 1948 was a huge mistake on the part of the United States and the Allied Nations that supported it. Imposing a heavily armed nation polarized religiously with the local people and the surrounding nations was a recipe for the disaster that has plagued the region for more than 50 years.
Furthermore, Israel is hardly a paragon of virtue in the way they have dealt with Palestinians. Its responses to terrorist bombings kill more civilians than the bombings do. Ariel Sharon, in particular, has a bloody record going back decades, and his election as prime minister demonstrates the Israeli people's frustration with peacemakers who have failed to stop the violence.
Unfortunately, Sharon's heavy-handed approach may be the right one for moving toward an end to the conflict. Entangled in a war against an enemy that cannot be effectively negotiated with, Israel's only hope for protecting its people will be to crush terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah that operate within its borders, and secure those borders against attacks from outside.
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Throughout history, regional conflicts have rarely, if ever, been solved simply by negotiation. Lasting peace is only established either when one side or the other is utterly defeated or both sides are so strong that they have no hope of defeating one another.
This conflict is clearly one in which the Palestinians will never gain the upper hand. They have no way to build a nation in the Israeli-occupied, war-torn area they call home. Even if Israel agreed to withdraw from those areas completely, the Palestinians have no money and no ability to unify their political factions into a self-contained political entity.
The main reason Israel has not already used its military power to assert territorial claim on the West Bank, Golan Heights and Gaza Strip is political. The United States has been unwavering in its support of Israel, even though Israel's occupation of these areas is technically a violation of the original U.N. Charter and is regarded in official State Department documents as an illegal occupation.
If Israel went so far as to officially claim those areas, it would present a political conundrum for America. How could we support a nation that was clearly being aggressive and conquering its neighbors?
Even so, Israel may have no way to establish peace. Right now the situation is mired in double-talk that regards Palestine as an independent nation even though it is nothing of the kind. If the world could look honestly at the situation and grant Israel the leeway to fight domestic terrorism not as an international conflict but as crime, it could concentrate on tracking down individual terrorists rather than being forced to fire rockets into Palestinian neighborhoods.
Perhaps that is an overly optimistic view. It is possible that, given a greater mandate by the outside world, Israel would become even more oppressive and tyrannical in dealing with Palestinians. But if the rhetoric about Palestine as a sovereign nation was eliminated, the United States and rest of the world could address those issues as discrimination or apartheid, rather than as war.
In war between nations, the world community recognizes that civilian casualties are inevitable. Attacks on civilians within a nation by that nation's government cannot hide behind that thin veneer of necessity.
Eliminating Palestine as a nominally independent nation would be a severe blow to international diplomacy, but it may be the best long-term way to save innocent lives and end a seemingly endless conflict. Everything else has already been tried; it's time for someone to win this war so that the process of finding real peace can begin.
by Craig A. Butler
Daily Lobo Columnist
