Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: So it wasn't Israel

So it wasn't Israel
By RICH LOWRY
Last Updated: 3:55 AM, March 19, 2011
Posted: 10:37 PM, March 18, 2011
In the great Middle East who dunit, the verdict is in: The Jews are
innocent. They aren't responsible for the violence, extremism,
backwardness, discontent or predatory government of their Arab
neighbors.
The last few months should have finally shattered the persistent
illusion that the Israeli-Palestinian question determines all in the
Middle East.
In an essay in Foreign Policy magazine titled "The False Religion of
Mideast Peace," ex-diplomat Aaron David Miller
recounts the conventional wisdom running back through the Cold War:
"An unresolved Arab-Israeli conflict would trigger ruinous war,
increase Soviet influence, weaken Arab moderates, strengthen Arab
radicals, jeopardize access to Middle East oil, and generally
undermine US influence from Rabat to Karachi."
Behind these assumptions has long stood a deeply simplistic
understanding of the Arabs. Professional naif Jimmy Carter insists,
"There is no doubt: The heart and mind of every Muslim is affected by
whether or not the Israeli-Palestinian issue is dealt with fairly."
This is reductive to the point of insult. Carter thinks that Muslims
have no interior lives of their own, but are all defined by a foreign-
policy dispute that is unlikely to affect most of them directly in the
least. He mistakes real people for participants in an endless Council
on Foreign Relations seminar.
The Israeli-Palestinian issue certainly has great emotional charge,
and most Arabs would prefer a world blissfully free of the Zionist
entity. But the Israelis can't be blamed -- though cynical Arab
governments certainly try -- for unemployment and repression in Arab
countries.
Monumental events in recent decades -- the Iranian revolution, the
Iran-Iraq War and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait -- were driven by
internal Muslim confessional, ideological and geo-political
differences. Israel has nothing to do with the Sunnis hating the Shia,
or the Saudis hating the Iranians, or everyone hating Moammar Khadafy.
Adam Garfinkle muses in his book "Jewcentricity": "Imagine, if you
can, that one day Israelis decided to pack their bags and move away,
giving the country to the Palestinians with a check for sixty years'
rent. Would the Arabs suddenly stop competing among themselves, and
would America and the Arab world suddenly fall in love with each
other?"
Yet the pull of the illusion is so powerful that even those who don't
profess to believe in it, like George W. Bush, eventually get sucked
in. Barack Obama came into office ready to deploy his charm and
fulfill the millennial promise of the peace process once and for all.
He couldn't even get the Palestinians to sit down to negotiate with
the Israelis, in an unintended "reset" to the situation decades ago.
According to the illusion, the region should have exploded in rage at
Jewish perfidy and American ineffectualness. It exploded for
altogether different reasons.
We witnessed revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt without a hint of upset
at the Israeli settlements or America's continued failure as a broker
of peace. We've seen the Arab League petition the United States --
whose sole function is supposed to be monitoring Israeli housing
developments and paving the way for a Palestinian state -- to
undertake a military operation against another (recently suspended)
member of the Arab League, Libya.
It'd be easier if the key to the Middle East really were sitting
around a negotiating table with a couple of bottles of Evian, poring
over a map adjudicating a dispute so familiar that people have built
diplomatic, academic and journalistic careers on it.
The current terrain of the Middle East as it exists -- not as we
assume it should be -- is hellishly disorienting by comparison: What
to do when an ally invades another ally to knock around protesters in
violation of our values? When a tin-pot dictator thumbs his nose at us
and the rest of West and crushes his opponents with alacrity despite
our earnest protestations? When popular uprisings threaten our allies
more than our enemies?
It makes the old peace process seem alluringly comfortable and
manageable. No, the illusion will never die.
http://www.jidaily.com/2rYh/e

 innocent.
il fatto che si sentano sotto processo la dice lunga sulla loro coda
di paglia. E chi ha la coda di paglia, non è innocente.
Crucifigetur!