"In the real world, diplomacy works ever so much better when it is backed up with an instant and credible threat of force."
The intellectual bankruptcy of this statement cannot be better illustrated than the case of the suicide bomber.
Whom are you INTIMIDATING??? The suicide bomber is ALREADY willing to die, your threat of force means NOTHING to him/her.
The statement is an oversimplification. The salient point, Carl is the one you've made repeatedly: it is human nature to DEFEND a lot more strongly than attack.
So, if you are talking about an ATTACKER, then indeed it is true that:
"works ever so much better when it is backed up with an instant and credible threat of force"
because the attacker is looking for GAIN, just as a party of robbers that attacks, looks for gain, and so can be DETERRED by "credible threat of force".
But that "threat of force" is completely INEFFECTIVE when directed at people who are DEFENDING themselves. They are already UNDER ATTACK, and in defense, are willing to risk it all, including sacrificing their lives.
Which is why, an attacker is rarely willing to DIE for illicit gain, whereas a defender is often willing to die.
I suggest, that theatening a suicide bomber with death, represents no deterrence at all.
The Palestinians see themselves as under attack by the Israelis. Israel is building settlements on their land, expanding. Palestinians are not creating forcible settlements in pre-67 Israel. Thus, to the vast majority of people in the region (and also outside - Europe, Asia etc.), who the AGGRESSOR is, and who the DEFENDER is, is very clear.
The importance of "defender" vs "attacker" for the morale of the party in conflict is seen in the relentless propaganda and attempts to portray your side as the "defenders", "victims", and having JUSTICE on your side. So, Israeli propaganda works day and night at portraying their actions as "defending" themselves - it is hard to muster much pain tolerance in a population by declaring yourself an "aggressor" looking for gain.
The conflicts which are the most intractable are the ones in which BOTH parties see themselves as "defenders" rather than aggressors. The Israeli/Palestinian conflict is a good example.
So how do you resolve this? Ultimately, it comes down to which side has more of a REASON to perceive themselves as defenders. Propaganda whatever the motivation, ultimately must stand the test of reality. You can convince yourself that you are "defending" yourself from a danger - domino theory in SE Asia, defence against the Red Menace and all that, led the U.S. into a multi-year conflict that cost some 60K American lives. So, yes, the propaganda can be effective. But in the end, the Vietnamese felt much more REAL sense of victimhood and being attacked, and needing to defend than did the U.S., and so, were willing to take on much greater casualties. And the result was that Americans reached the conclusion that the danger to them was not "really" as great, and pulled out. That's when the whole issue of defending ONLY "vital interests" came into play. It was the result of the common perception that you can only sustain a victorious fight if your population believes that they are defending themselves ("vital" as in LIFE/Death, latin derivation from 'life'). And the battle for defining what is "vital" is waged as propaganda (often with noble motives) - question is, will it stand the test of reality?
So too with Israel. Ultimately, there is no question in my mind that Israel will have to withdraw. They will lose the fight for legitimacy, "defence" and "victimhood" with their own population. They will reach the conclusion that nobody in the world seems to think that stealing land and putting up settlements represents anything other than what it is: an attempt at colonizing, an attack, a victimizing of the original inhabitants. And the Palestinians, who daily feel the Israeli whip on their backs, will have no trouble sustaining their sense of victimhood.
Israel will lose in the long run. They will pull out, just as they reached the correct conclusion in the case of pulling back from Lebanon. Which btw. is a good example. They argue: we can't pull out, because the PA wants to destroy the state of Israel (which is BS), and the terrorist attacks will not stop. Yet look at Lebanon. OF COURSE the terrorist attacks will not stop - after sowing hatred for so long, Israel has quite a bit of "crop" to reap. But take a closer look - needless to say, you won't get them to love you, and there will be unreconstructed haters and terrorist attacks, but note, that those have diminished DRASTICALLY in frequency and effectiveness. Compare the numbers of Israelis killed in Lebanon before and after - case closed!
Why did the Lebanon thing work? Because now Israelis have truly turned the "defender"/"attacker" equation in their favor. They went from "attackers" to "defenders", and the legitimacy of their case is acknowleged by the world (U.N. declarations etc.), and their own population - Israelis will defend their land to the death. And the Lebanese "defenders" are now cast as "attackers" - losing legitimacy in the eyes of the world, and a large portion of their own societies, which also has consequences in less material and moral support. Result: Israeli casualties dropped dramatically.
They need to do the same with Palestinians. It is impossible to sustain the fiction that Israel is merely "defensively" stealing Palestinian land - the Palestinians will NEVER buy that, and eventually, the Israelis will reach the conclusion, that their real interests lay in defending historical borders (pre-67) which have the greatest legitimacy (internationally recognized borders, U.N. resolutions etc).
What will it take? Unfortunately a lot of blood. Both parties will take a lot of pain. But the Palestinians have a much greater sense of legitimacy, "defence" status, and they will prevail. You won't cow a suicide bomber by threat of force or anything else. Israel will give up, but not before their population gets the same painful confrontation with reality that they got in Lebanon, that the U.S. got in Vietnam and so on. They will then elect a leader who will do the sane thing. But first, they must feel pain. And that has just begun.
Meanwhile, there is no reason why the U.S. should take a bullet for Israel. It is a disastrous policy to support a regime that is widely perceived as an aggressive attacker bent on occupying a people and stealing their land. We don't have the "justice" issue on OUR side. We should not be helping Israel in their suicidal unjust course. We should not be the stooge for their actions. We should not be seen to support the bad guys in this. Europe understands this, and the world does - the Israeli position has virtually no adherents.
It will take time, but the U.S. public will eventually turn against the blind support of Israel. And that will put Israel to a stark choice: pull back to pre-67, where the whole world can support you (reverse the "defender"/"attacker" dynamic), have "just cause" on your side, or face isolation and disaster without U.S. help.
So, the Israeli propaganda apparatus, and the Israeli lobby in the U.S. is furiously fighting the battle of perceptions for U.S. public opinion. They've had the upper hand for a very long time - they've had the money, the penetration, the contacts and the influence. They were far more sophisticated than the Arabs. But slowly, that is changing, as INEVITABLY population trends, which means votes, will shift the political power away from Jewish/Israeli to Arab concerns. And American Arabs will become more sophisticated politically and lobbying-wise. It will take time, as the other side has had a head start of decades. But it will happen.
And the thing that is most against the Israelis and the Israeli lobby in the U.S. is that in fact, they do not have a just cause in occupying land outside of the pre-67 borders. They have lost the battle of perception in the rest of the world. And they will EVENTUALLY lose it in the U.S.
The sooner the U.S. re-evaluates the Israeli-U.S. relationship the better for both the U.S. AND Israel. We will stop feeding the dreams of Greater Israel and giving the lunatic extremists reason to cling to a delusional position. That will enable the Israelis to start a national dialogue about the cost/benefits without the tempting "open checkbook" of Uncle Sam enabling the extremists to nurture unrealistic dreams. |
