Surely Krauthammer has this wrong. The growing unity of the Arabs and Muslims is not some sinister conspiracy of medieval Islam, but the result of Israeli stupidity. When the Israelis began occupying the West Bank many years ago without any kind of agreement with other countries in the neighborhood, or any kind of UN sanction, or any kind of accord with the Palestinians, they set in motion a fight that was guaranteed to go on forever. Basically, they offered the Palestinians no choice except to be slaves. Remember, for years, tens of thousands of Palestinian people worked in Israel. A possibility for some kind of accord existed at that time. But Israel did not offer some kind of just arrangement. Instead she offered slavery, and the Palestinians rejected the offer. With no work, with no way to build an economy, with no way even to get from one Bantustan to the next (i.e. Gaza to the West Bank) without passing through Israeli checkpoints, where death was a possibility and humiliation a certainty, the Palestinians radicalized to the point where young people were willing to die to take out a few Israelis.
This state of affairs did not come out of some radical defect of the Arabs, some bad seed of the children of Hagar, but was THE RESULT OF FOOLISH, BRUTAL AND EXTREMELY SHORTSIGHTED ISRAELI policy.
As I said in a previous post, the Israelis have one trump card in their hand -- their domination of Inside-the-Beltway Washington, which, though only one card, has proved to be powerful over the last few decades. The Israelis have used this trump card to take risks -- but never in the direction of peace. Rather, they have used the power conferred upon them by their Beltway connection to take risks only in the direction of brutality, of violence, of unilateral action, of taking from the weak because they are strong enough to take from the weak.
If they had taken risks in the direction of peace, we (in the USA) would have and could have bailed them out if they had gotten into trouble. But they never took a risk in that direction. And now they are living with the consequences.
The power of their Beltway Insider connection is ebbing fast, because Inside-the-Beltway is itself rapidly losing power, authority and respect. Meanwhile, Israel has accomplished three outcomes: she has riled up the entire Muslim world; she has alienated herself from practically everybody on the planet (except the prostitutes of Wash DC); and, she has destroyed Israel as a moral ideal. (When you think of Israel now, you think of a place like Sparta --- militaristic, touchy, arrogant, contemptuous of truth, turned inward.....).
People like Krauthammer are trying to keep alive the Israel-Beltway Connection by spinning an alternative narrative about Israel on the frontline against a vast and dangerous Islam. What rubbish. All we in the USA have to do to solve our Muslim problem, our Arab problem, our "terrorism" problem, our Middle East problem, is dump Israel, a country from which we get nothing, and give everything.
In fact, until we pull back from an Israel-centric foreign policy, we are going to go from bad to worse, because we are being in a very serious way distracted from dealing with our many serious, looming problems. It is actually in Israel's interest to distance herself from Washington, so that the host can recapture a little bit of native health. But since when does a parasite care about the host --- until too late. |
