[(Continued from p.4)]
cess could be brought to a halt. The protest would have to be against everything and everyone associated with Oslo, those who brought it and those who continued it, or nothing will change. Only a wholly new leadership can make a fundamental change (see the interview with Michael Kleiner on p.6 ). It is of course true that in Israel's case the difficulties are greater than in those of Yugoslavia: there the whole world cheers on a new leadership and here the whole world will oppose a radical change of Israel's course. But the difficulties would not be insuperable. The United States understands the limitations on democratically elected leaders imposed by their people's will. And many policy makers in this country, for all their readiness to push a malleable Israel into ever more radical concessions, must recognize the hollowness of the peace process, and would be ready, if reluctantly forced to do so, to consider alternatives themselves.Unfortunately, for many Israelis the impact of Oslo blowing up in their faces has been less to serve as a wake up call than to further demoralize and confuse them. Thus after weeks of Arab attacks, an October 20 poll published in the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot found that while 67% said that the peace process was a failure, 62% wanted to continue with it! And who can believe that the left will remain long shocked and on the defensive? In the face of an ongoing intifada, the process of attrition, internal division, concessions, now compounded by massive emigration, is likely to go on.
That leaves Israel's best hope for survival in war. This cannot be limited war with the infant Palestinian state. Israel's hands would be tied just as they are now, partly by the disparity in power but also by fear that strong measures would bring in neighboring Arab states. The bitter legacy of the peace process is to make Israel's chief hope for salvation a full scale Arab war against her.
Rael Jean Isaac is editor of Outpost.
Whenever any self-respecting nation faces an adversary, it offers that adversary two and only two choices. The adversary may choose complete non-belligerence. The two may dislike one another but there must occur not the slightest hint of an act of violence between them. (China-Taiwan comes to mind.) The second choice is war. There are no third choices.
Since the 1950s, Israel has refused to follow the rules of nations and has refused to restrict the policy options for the Arabs to these two. Israel has always offered the Arabs a third choice, one that should be called "controlled carnage." Under controlled carnage, the Arabs are permitted to murder Israelis and engage in violence, perhaps due to its presumed cathartic value and the mistaken belief that it somehow proves Israel's humaneness to the nations. Israel does not force the Arabs to choose between total absence of violence or total violence. As a result, the Arabs attack Israel and Israel does nothing or very little, all in the name of "restraint". The official name for controlled carnage beginning in the 1930s was havlaga, Hebrew for restraint.
More recently, Israel offered the Hizbollah in Lebanon this Third Option and continues to offer it even after the kidnapping of three soldiers and a fourth Israeli (in Switzerland) and the shelling by the Hizbollah of Israel. Israel has responded with absolutely nothing. Since the Hizbollah is essentially a wing of Syria, Israel is effectively allowing Syria to choose a Third Option between total lack of violence and total violence.
And it goes without saying that the "third option" has all along been the basis of Oslo. When two reservists were lynched in Ramallah (they took a wrong turn and the rules of Oslo say that Palestinian Arabs may walk safely on any street in Israel but the physical presence of a Jew in an Arab town is provocation and pollution) the official statements of the Israeli government all spoke about Arafat finally going too far.
Finally? O.K., so lynching and mutilating Israeli reservists is "too far." But that means that launching pogroms, lynching rabbis, fire-bombing cars with babies inside, desecrating synagogues and destroying Joseph's Tomb, stoning Jews at the Western Wall, releasing Hamas bombers to attack the Jews, violating every comma in Oslo, denying the Holocaust, firing daily at Israeli troops etc. were all not going too far! They were all legitimate parts of the Third Way.
Even as Israel launched its Operation Limp Wrist after the lynching of its soldiers in Ramallah, the retaliation only goes to show how clearly Israel is wedded to the Third Option of controlled carnage. By sending in helicopters to launch a Clinton-style retaliation on buildings (you know, the sort where the building structure is punished but no people get killed), Israel was not merely demonstrating its lack of backbone but also re-declaring the legitimacy of the Third Way of controlled carnage.
And what has the Labor Party learned from all this? Are they prepared to abandon the Third Way? On the contrary. Acting Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami and other Labor Party leaders promptly insisted that after Israel gets finished "punishing" the PLO, it still wants to "negotiate" with Arafat and get back to the serious business of creating a Palestinian fascist state in the suburbs of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. And, if anything, Operation Limp Wrist shows Arafat Israel is afraid to hit back. Indeed, Labor leaders clucked about how Israel better not retaliate "too hard" lest this cause instability and result in the toppling of Arafat. Earth to Jerusalem. HELLO.
Steven Plaut teaches at the University of Haifa.
November 2000 - 5 - Outpost