George Gilder - The Israel Test

Probing this scar tissue anew was the Academy Award-nominated Israeli animated documentary, the 2008 Waltz with Bashir , directed by Ari Folman, which occasioned many such suggestions by Israeli intellectuals that the most revealing and portentous event of the 1982 Lebanon War was this massacre, supposedly condoned by Israel.

Friedman, The New York Times , and the perennially leftist Pulitzer committee were following the venerable tradition in wartime journalism, tested in Vietnam, which holds that the vicissitudes and excesses inevitable in conflict become a saga of one-way scandals and salacious legal investigations. War is terrible, and soldiers of all nations often misstep in the fog. But Israel’s offenses in Lebanon, producing perhaps a few thousand civilian casualties, occurred in the middle of a civil war that produced perhaps a half-million deaths. It is invidious and ultimately suicidal for journalists from free nations to focus on a few sensational disputed incidents in the middle of a 15-year bloodbath.

Israel occupied southern Lebanon only when it became a terrorist training center for jihadists around the Mideast and a source of repeated attacks on Israel. Regardless of Pulitzer craft and laurels, no reasonable journalistic standard permits the reporter to contemplate a self-defense against extermination and equate it with attacks by genocidal forces.

By stigmatizing the Israeli army and its defense minister Ariel Sharon, Friedman helped make any success in Lebanon impossible. A classic “useful idiot” in Leninist terms, Friedman helped trigger a movement that for a time deprived Israel of one of its greatest leaders and provided new momentum to the Palestinian cause.

Land for peace, however, does have a positive meaning. Beyond the delusional “peace process,” there is the vision of the land itself yielding peace as it endows those who live upon it with the raw materials of an orderly and productive life. It is only this goal that makes the proposed exchange of land for peace a credible idea. It is only the notion that the Palestinians might want land on which to make such a peace that suggests Israel might buy peace by giving it to them.

But if the Palestinians seek land for this purpose, why must it come from tiny Israel? The Palestinian Arabs are surrounded on all sides by spacious and compatible Arab countries of whom they theoretically could become citizens. Why not the East Bank? That’s Jordan, where 300,000 Palestinian Arabs fled during the 1967 war.

A Muslim — Arab state from time to time sustained by Israel and created as a home for the Palestinians, Jordan held the West Bank until King Hussein’s treacherous 1967 invasion and shelling of Jerusalem. Jordan retains a far more compelling obligation to these people than does Israel.

Should the Palestinians shun Jordan, perhaps they would prefer the Soviet jihadist state of Syria, which in its guise as “Greater Syria” stretches its reptilian claws throughout the region, including into nearby Lebanon. Egypt is contiguous with Gaza and could easily absorb the Gazan Palestinians who have put their democratic fate into the hands of the terrorists of Hamas and Fatah.

Negotiators with illusions about their adversaries end up negotiating with themselves. Experts on business negotiation advise that “whenever you start negotiating with yourself, you might as well give up the shop.” This is what the Israelis have been doing for decades, among all their gaggle of solipsistic political parties, each with its fluff of afflatus and acid of animus and symbolic banner of nationhood, each often willing to give away what some other Knesset party cherishes. For the Arabs, these are what-is-ours-is-ours negotiations; what is Israel’s is negotiable and always on the negotiating table or chopping block.

Whatever the Arabs of the jihad and the intifada mean by the word “land” cannot be satisfied by giving up any particular patch of ground. Land to them is less transactional than transcendental and apocalyptic. As with all the ideologies of race and fatherland, all the cults of blood and soil, with all their ruinous and romantic rejections of modernity, inevitably making the Jews their first chosen enemies, they are haunted and driven by demons that no “peace process” can exorcise, much less negotiate out of existence.

Which is not to declare the Arabs beyond hope or help. Outside observers can easily assume a people are in the grip of a demonic ideology when they are actually only in the grasp of a despotic regime. Obscured in the terror applied by the regime against its own people is the reality that prior to the terrorists’ seizure of power, there were other parties in the contest and real majorities for peace and productivity.

In conferring democracy on Germany, or even Japan, for two much-cited examples, the United States did not miraculously graft alien values onto unwilling nations. The crucial process was not one of conversion at all. It was the total military defeat and destruction of the despotic faction and the transfer of power over time to already strong but long obscured constituencies for capitalist democracy.

Peace can come to the Palestinians tomorrow and nationhood the day after if only they will take what is already in their grasp and go to work. They are prevented from doing this primarily by the rule of a terror regime — it hardly matters whether it calls itself Fatah or Hamas or the Muslim Brotherhood — that thrives on violence, chaos and hatred and is kept alive by money from jihadist states and intimidated Western powers and international organizations.

The path to peace is not through negotiations but through invincible rejection of terror, joined to real opportunity for Palestinians who choose life over death. Over the next two decades, Israel will grow into the dominant economy in the Middle East and one of the most productive economies in the world. Palestinians must be made to see that displacing Israel is futile, but buying and selling its products and supplying labor for its factories and offices can make Palestinians once again the most successful of all Arabs, as they were between 1967 and 1987. Saved from the Nazi obsessions of their ruling clique, the Palestinians can become major beneficiaries of the emerging new global economy.

All right, now is the time for the test.

In the early 1940s in Europe, as Hitler ranted about the depravity of the Jews, the Nazis were already proceeding with the “final solution” that he had promised in Mein Kampf . They were preparing concentration camps near railroad lines at Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Auschwitz, and dozens of other cities. They were lining up railroad cars and gas trucks. They were mobilizing scientists and engineers to develop efficient techniques for the extermination of their fellow human beings. They were transforming a generation of young men into Brown Shirt brigades frothing with hate and lusting for violence against Jews. They were enlisting foreign allies such as the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini to extend the killing to Palestine.