The two peace processes are over—now it’s time for a solution

The Israelis, writes Joshua Treviño at The Brussels Journal, have tried two peace processes. The first peace process was negotiation and co-existence, and resulted in a massively increased terror campaign against Israel. The second peace process, a response to the hideous failure of the first, was disengagement and escape. “Because the Israelis were too civilized to expel,” Treviño writes, “they chose to retreat.”

But this second paradigm failed too. Israel miscalculated on two counts. First, it failed to grasp that the enemy doesn’t simply hate Israel-in-my-town, nor Jews-nearby, but Jews and Israel per se, and he will travel to hunt and kill them.

(Just like the Nazis, by the way. The Nazis conquered entire countries, with one of their express purposes being the rounding up and killing of all the Jews in those countries.)

The two peace processes having failed, the Israelis are back in their usual game of muddling through, “managing” the conflict, invading Lebanon, then pulling out, withdrawing from Gaza, then going back in, then withdrawing again, and on and on and on. But, Treviño writes,

… we know what should be done, for the sake of the peace that Israel wants and its enemies manifestly do not. The road to peace runs through an Israeli military frontier on the Litani; and through a Rafah crossing choked with one million three hundred thousand Gazans fleeing to diaspora in the Muslim lands of the Nile. Were Israel the monstrous dispossessor and aggressor of the fantasies of its foes from Damascus to Europe, this would have been long since done. The pity, and the irony, is that it is not.

I’m happy to see a Brussels Journal contributor advocating the expulsion of the Palestinians from the lands controlled by Israel; it is of course, the only answer, but is almost never discussed. See Robert Locke’s important but so-far neglected article on how this could be done, published at vdare in July 2003. My only disagreement with Treviño is his suggestion that for Israel to take such steps would mean its becoming a monstrous dispossessor and aggressor. Not true. Any civilized, non-liberal country, that found itself in the situation in which Israel finds itself with regard to the Palestinians, would have long since expelled them. And in a civilized, non-liberal world, the act would have been accepted and approved. The fact that Treviño equates necessary measures of self-defense, which he supports, with monstrousness shows that he himself is still a liberal. He cannot imagine a non-liberal course of action that is moral and principled, even if it is the only viable way to protect Israel from the unrelenting murdering savages who seek its destruction. In his mind, therefore, Israeli survival can only be secured through immoral and unprincipled means.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 13, 2006 07:25 AM | Send