Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Israel makes clear that its existence is not up for negotiation

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/2089/israel_vs_hamas_and_others
 
 
Over on Twitter the other day, I spotted a plaintive Tweet to this
effect: Why oh why can't #Israel and #Hamas just negotiate rather than
fight?
 
That is a profound question. How best to answer it?
 
My own diplomatic career steered me well away from the Middle East in
general and the Israel Question in particular. So I almost never add
to the cacophony of opinion on the issues arising across the region,
unless I spot something that might have relevance for other problems.
In this case the underlying options for "negotiation" as between
Israel and Hamas are worth exploring precisely because they cast light
on how and why other difficult international negotiations work, or
not.
 
One classic way of looking at any negotiation, big or small, is to
analyse what the different parties really want. This turns out not to
be quite as simple as you might think. Parties have Positions (what
they say and think they want), but they also have less obvious
Interests (and wider and possibly mutually contradictory concerns that
drive their thinking on the issue at hand) and Needs (existential
concerns that need to be met for them come what may). Skilful
negotiators drill down “below" positions and start exploring those
deeper interests and needs to see where people who on the face of it
have quite incompatible demands may in fact find areas of common
ground.
 
Back in Bosnia in 1997 President Izetbegovic gave me a memorable
insight into how he saw negotiations for his beloved Bosniac/Muslim
community. He argued that within the former Yugoslavia space itself
there were some 2 million Bosniacs/Muslims but some 4 million Croats
and 10 million Serbs. The Bosniacs/Muslims therefore had no room for
manoeuvre – if things went disastrously wrong in a future conflict
with the Serbs and Croats combined, their whole community could be
effectively destroyed once and for all.
 
He concluded that until the Bosniacs found themselves unambiguously
safe as a community, they had to stand firm on certain vital (for
them) constitutional identity questions: "We cannot afford ethnic
disarmament for 50 years".
 
That makes sense. Someone who has everything to lose (or believes that
that is the case) is going to fight with frantic intensity compared to
someone for whom the outcome is important but not vital.
 
This idea is familiar in warfare. When a retreating army finds a solid
place to make a stand, it can be very difficult for the attacking army
to defeat it despite having far greater resources and mobility – the
defending side concentrates its effort and determination to excellent
effect, precisely because its realistic choices are so drastically
reduced.
 
The Bosniacs/Muslims in this sense are like the Israelis or Taiwanese.
In each case the 'negotiation' is all about survival as such. The
Israeli case is even more acute, given the experience of the Holocaust
that helped create the state of Israel in the first place.
 
This creates a totally different negotiating context. Everything is
zero-sum stark, with little scope for diplomatic drafting sleights of
hand and/or ingenious ambiguities that allow rival parties to build
little by little on Needs and Interests to help reconcile their
sharply differing Positions.
 
In other words, either Israel's opponents accept Israel's very right
to exist as some sort of authentic homeland for the Jewish people, or
they don't. In the latter case, what is there to talk about? Here is
an article from earlier this year by my former FCO colleague Tom
Phillips who has served as Ambassador in both Israel and Saudi Arabia
and finds it all very gloomy.
 
This logic explains why the rhetoric of Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is
so brazenly effective in its own vile terms. Ahmadinejad acts a global
anti-Semitic rabble-rouser in two ways. He periodically talks about
Israel as such disappearing from the world map. But he also jeers and
sneers at the Holocaust itself, thereby nibbling away at the very
legitimacy of Jewish self-determination (“even if they are there, they
shouldn’t be!”).
 
And he throws in for good measure a sly, related idea that no doubt
goes down well in the shisha cafes across the Middle East: Europe, not
the Muslims, brutalised and tried to wipe out the Jewish nation, and
then dumped the Jewish problem unfairly in the /Muslim world – the
Jews themselves say they don't need too much space, so why doesn't
Europe simply take them all back again?
 
As more and more people with a fervent anti-Israel instinct come from
the Middle East to make their homes in Europe, you can feel arguments
like this subtly and creepily gaining ground in public life here too;
anti-Semitism crossed with ersatz pragmatism. In the long run – and
maybe not so long run – that's where the votes are.
 
Broadly speaking, there are only three possibilities in any
confrontation of this sort. Either the extremes expand to squeeze out
the middle. Or the middle expands to marginalise the extremists. Or an
unstable, uneasy equilibrium between moderates and extremists
establishes itself for a while, and then adjusts with a new
convulsion.
 
The latter is what we are now seeing in the Israel/Palestinian
problem. Hamas has built up its weapon stocks to seriously threatening
levels and started to use them, so Israel has decided to demolish
them.
 
Israel is hitting back with ruthless precision at Hamas targets in
Gaza. This is what the negotiation between Israel and Hamas (and what
Hamas represents) looks like. Israel is telling Hamas (and Cairo under
its new management, and Qatar and Tehran, and Washington and Brussels
and Moscow) that if Ahmadinejad is right and the race is now on
towards mutually assured destruction, Israel is ready to compete but
on its terms and its timing.
 
In short, it is not surprising that Israel makes clear that its
existence is not up for negotiation as diplomats usually define the
term. Israel knows all too well that even if "moderates" or "realists"
in Hamas ranks or elsewhere in the Middle East are ready to think
about striking some sort of historic deal with Israel, those people
are unlikely to come to the fore as they fear being wiped out by well-
funded people far more extreme than they are. And Israel is also
necessarily on guard against so-called political solutions that in
fact are intended to be salami-slicing of Israel’s security.
 
Any hope? Not really. There is enough wealth, energy, and land across
the Middle East for all sides to find ways of reconciling their
Interests and Needs. But as long as the Arab/Muslim tendency decides
that removing Israel from the map is top of its Interests and Needs,
the negotiation can go on only through explosions, not talking.



 general and the Israel
 
Perche' questi luridi pipponi di propaganda, prete?
 
Am.

 wrote:

Splendido.
 
-- 
Tranquillo gni trombonno la moglie