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发帖数: 2018 | 1 http://www.wsj.com/articles/in-the-mideast-trump-gives-reality-a-chance-1514330434
A lot of people are in a funk over President Trump’s decision to recognize
Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. The liberal media, most former government
officials who’ve dealt with the Israeli–Palestinian imbroglio, and just
about everyone at the United Nations appear certain that the decision had a
lot to do with Mr. Trump’s disruptive nature, the president’s son-in-law
Jared Kushner, Evangelical Christians and pro-Israel Republican donors.
It’s possible that his decision was based instead on an old-fashioned
understanding of the way the world works, one that would be familiar to
Middle Easterners: There are winners and losers in every conflict, and
Palestinians have decisively lost in their struggle with the Jews of the
Holy Land. Diplomacy based on denying reality isn’t helpful.
This view runs smack into the tenets of contemporary conflict resolution, in
which diplomacy tries to make losers feels like winners, so that unpleasant
compromises, at least in theory, will be easier to swallow. It alleviates
the guilt of a Westernized people triumphing over Arabs that has made many
in Europe and even the U.S. uncomfortable with Israeli superiority. It also
runs counter to an assumption held widely among Western political elites—to
wit, quoting the current French ambassador to the U.N.: “Israel is the key
to peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians.” Israelis, in this
view, must make the big compromises.
The truth is surely the opposite. Recognizing the extent and irreversibility
of Palestinian defeat is the first step in the long process of salvaging
Palestinian society from its paralyzing morass. Far too many Palestinians
still want to pretend they haven’t lost, that the “right of return” and
Jerusalem’s unsettled status give hope that the gradual erosion of Israel
is still possible. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas tapped a
common theme among Palestinians in his recent oration before the
Organization of Islamic Cooperation when he complained that Jews “are
really excellent in faking and counterfeiting history and religion.”
The biggest problem the Palestinians have is that the Israelis don’t trust
them, and the Israelis cannot be ignored, sidestepped, bullied, bombed or
boycotted out of eastern Jerusalem and the West Bank. Fatah, the lead
organization of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the muscle behind
the Palestinian Authority, has often acted publicly as if the Israelis weren
’t the foreigners who truly mattered, appealing to Europeans, Russians and
Americans to intercede on its behalf. Americans and Europeans have
consistently encouraged this reflex by stressing their own role in resolving
the conflict, usually by suggesting that they would cajole or push Israelis
toward Palestinian positions.
For the Israelis, this has seemed a surreal stage play. The Fatah leadership
is well aware that only the Israeli security services have kept the West
Bank from going the way of the Gaza Strip, where Fatah’s vastly better-
armed forces were easily overwhelmed by Hamas in 2007. Fatah’s secular
police state—and that is what the Palestinian Authority is—has proved, so
far, no match for Hamas.
Western diplomacy has failed abysmally to recognize the profound split
between Palestinian fundamentalists and secularists and played wistfully to
the hope that a deeply corrupt Fatah oligarchy could conclude a permanent
peace accord with Israel. This delusion’s concomitant bet: Such a deal
would terminally weaken Hamas, since the secularists would have finally
brought home the mutton.
The most important point, however, is always ignored. Competent, transparent
, nonviolent Palestinian governance is the only chance Palestinian society
has of escaping the fundamentalist critique that has undermined oligarchs
across the Arab world. Fearful of playing the imperialists and keenly aware
of the efficiency of having a police state as a partner, Americans,
Europeans and Israelis have failed to use the leverage of financial aid to
set standards for Palestinian governance on the West Bank and in Gaza.
Palestinian Muslims are no different than other Muslim Arabs. Religious
militancy has grown astronomically over the past 40 years as the ruling
secular elites have calcified into corrupt, hypocritical, heavy-handed
autocracies. Westerners have not dealt with this well, since it defies the
top-down approach inherent in diplomacy—and also because fundamentalists
terrify them. Yet the past ought to tell Americans and Europeans that a two-
state solution to the Israel–Palestinian clash isn’t going to happen
before Palestinians reconcile in a functioning democracy that doesn’t scare
their Jewish neighbors. The overwhelming burden here is upon the
Palestinians.
The most valuable American contribution to the peace process, so far only
episodically delivered, is to remind the Palestinians that they first have
to get their own house in order and the Israelis that they have to care
about how Palestinians treat their own. Too often, the Israelis have viewed
the Palestinians—and Arab Muslims in general—as the ineducable “other,”
who is best left to his own rules so long as Israelis aren’t killed. Any
Israeli effort to control Palestinian-on-Palestinian abuse will surely be
met with a hail-storm of censure from the West. But the Israelis ought to
take a longer view. Barrier or no barrier, they are going to live with the
Palestinians forever. Israel should certainly want to correct its enormous
mistake of allowing Yasser Arafat, the father of Palestinian nationalism, to
import his thugocracy into the West Bank and Gaza.
Most Arabs have adjusted, however reluctantly, to the permanence of Zion.
They did so four decades ago when Egypt, slowly collapsing under its own
military dictatorship, checked out of the war. Americans, Europeans and
Israelis—not “the Arabs”—are primarily responsible for elongating the
big Palestinian delusions about the “right of return” and a sovereign East
Jerusalem. It’s way past time they stopped. Mr. Trump’s decision,
whatever the motivation, is a step forward. |
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