Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Why should Israel make peace with failed states?

Tel Aviv Journal: Why Should Israel Make Peace With Failed States?
    Martin Peretz
    May 11, 2011 | 12:00 am
There’s just so much press attention the Arab world can receive before
even obsessives like me begin to tire of its frenzy, pitilessness, and
perfidy. Yes, endless repetition of violence and violation can also
seem routine. Which, to tell you God’s honest truth, they are. There
is a great deal of exactitude behind this morbid fact. Still, the
present upheavals in their cumulative impact are deadening. Not only
to the victims of the regimes but to their observers, commentators,
rapporteurs.
Actually, many of these observers, perhaps most, are infatuated with
the Arabs. But infatuation is really a variant on infantilization. The
torment now spreading in the Arab world, however, is an evidential
repudiation of this view, a cardinal attribute of which is that
whatever difficulties obtained in the vast space from the Maghreb to
the outskirts of Baghdad are attributable to Israel, in particular,
and maybe even to the Jews, in general. This was very convenient in
that it matched with the traditional bigotries of Western diplomatic
elites. Yet it had a contemporary ring to it—from Barack Obama’s
pastor to the increasingly monolithic editorial view of the liberal
press.
One of the reasons that this is so is that this is a field where
knowledge is certainly arcane, if not deliberately suppressed. Given
the phantasmagoric nature of Arab governmental documents, would you
trust material from official archives? In addition to all of this is
the haste and fashion of news itself. The “experts” simply do not know
much about the topics on which they have to and do pretend expertise.
Many who report and interpret for us know exactly zero about their
quickly changing subjects. For most, a one-page memo or a quick update
will do. Syria is a case in point. I would bet that some of the
authoritative press people don’t know the difference between Hama, a
town the population of which Bashir Assad’s father, Hafez, bombed to
smithereens and killed some 10,000 to 40,000 (a difference that maybe
should make a difference) Sunnis in the process, and Hamas, the
governing terrorist organization in Gaza that is itself Sunni but is
willing to make alliances with anybody—that is, Turks, the Shia of
Iran, and the secularized Alawites in Damascus—as long as they are
antagonists, loathing antagonists, of Israel. In this sentence alone
lay a thousand facts and factoids. And don’t forget that between
Turkey and Syria lies a land dispute with a long past and passions
aplenty to match it.
What, for that matter, do even the professionals know about the
Berbers of North Africa, players in the ongoing Libyan war and the
more-or-less pacified Tunisian troubles, too? And what role will they
play when disturbance turns to real chaos in Algeria and perhaps
Morocco, where Berbers are really numerous but also where an Arab
census is not a census at all? (There are no believable numbers for
present-day Lebanon where the last calculus was taken in 1932, ten
years before the Vichy government terminated the post-World War I
French Mandate.) But Algeria will be the real doozey. First, the
Algerians threw out the French; then millions of them left for France;
now they are competing for France itself They hate one another at home
with a civil war in their near history that took about a quarter of a
million lives while almost no one was watching. Do you recall the long
civil war? No, not the “heroic” one depicted in The Battle of Algiers
where “the good guys” won and the French soldiers and the pieds noirs
were all Nazis. Yes, I mean the other one that dragged on for a decade
between the Salafists and the military regime. Oh, you didn’t notice.
Well, the army won. Had the Islamists triumphed it would have been, if
anything, much worse. Like Khomeini’s Persia without the pretentious
theology but with more blood.
Actually, it is Syria where outside ignorance and inattention have
reaped for the regime enormous latitude over the years. And enormous
latitude now when it has over just about a month murdered a thousand
people, maybe more. Not exactly its own people, by the way, but that
is how things are in the body counts of tyrannies. How many wounded
have been picked off by snipers (here acting as random rather than
precise killers) nobody really knows. But the scandal of this all is
the fact that the presidency of Barack Obama has been more or less
allied with the dictatorship since it came to power, a part of the
liberal idealist’s opening to the Arabs whoever they were. Or, to be
precise, the ignominy of it all was that it was a courtship by the
paradigmatic democracy of the paradigmatic oppressor which would
respond to every overture with insult and scorn. (The Saudis
experienced humiliation, too. It’s hard to tell whether they were
following us or we them. Anyway, it’s clear that the president likes
these royals. What will happen when the successor, Sultan bin Abdul-
Aziz, who is in his eighties and does not like us at all, ascends the
throne after his brother Abdullah, who liked us a lot and had an
ambassador in Washington, Adel al-Jubeir, who likes us even more,
departs to his maker and is buried in the anonymous desert sands, no
marker, no monument, no nothing. This is—I am serious—a particularly
tasteful part of Wahhabi tradition: the monarch dies; the monarch
disappears. Poof!)
Of course, the Obama-Clinton diplomacy—oops, I almost typed “Carter”
for “Clinton”—with Syria was initially an aspect of the president’s
patently foolish diplomacy with Iran about which people nodded sagely
but knew deep inside it was twaddle. But long after Obama understood—
reluctantly, I am certain—that there weren’t deals to be had with
Tehran (neither with Ahmadinejad nor with Khamenei) the president
pursued his Damascus gamesmanship with a stubbornness that was born of
his sense that he was always right. At least in foreign policy, about
which he knows even less than about technical economic issues, his
tenacity has been the cause of an almost seamless set of international
failures. Alas, very few in the United States notice because we are
fixated on our domestic exertions. Now, it may not be that Obama
actually desires American authority and grip in the world to slip
away, although I suspect that he might see this as a triumph for what
old enthusiasts of this disposition call international morality and
international law. Still, the decline of America is the sure
consequence of his actions.
I have just read two articles about Syria. One, “Hundreds Reported
Arrested as Syria’s Crackdown Widens,” is in The New York Times,
datelined Beirut. One knows that it is based on sources in Damascus
and other Syrian cities. But names can’t be used and, even in Lebanon,
informants are better off nameless lest Assad’s long-armed secret
police reach over the feeble frontier to silence him, like he silenced
Rafik Hariri, the zillionaire Sunni prime minister of the neighboring
cedar republic in 2005. “The scale and ferocity of the crackdown” is
actually hair-raising, what with young children being arrested with
their elders. There were dead ... but no one can make a true estimate.
Be afraid! (There are no consolations to be drawn from the fact that
the byline of Anthony Shadid, to whom we are all obligated for his
sophisticated and textured reportage out of the region, appeared today
with a Damascus dateline. He was admitted to Syria for the sole
purpose of interviewing Assad’s chief flak. In and out.)
“Living Dead: Why is Syria Going Up in Flames?” is the second article,
really an interpretative essay on Syria where a new writer for TNR,
Theo Padnos, lived for several years. We think we know a dictatorship
by how it behaves in exigent threat. But Padnos actually conveys the
essence of how “normal” life prepares people slowly, almost casually,
for dread. You can even sing along with the fashionable young of
Damascus in the jolly days. But you’ll end up being cannily knowing
about the erratic and also almost completely static rhythm of the
police state. How well the tyranny plays off these two impulses
determine its destiny. Maybe Assad will win this call. But maybe he
won’t.
Still, the Obama administration has been wishing him well for at least
two years. Or, rather, it should be said that Obama administration
initiatives involving Syria—had they been successful which, of course,
they were not—would have propped up the dictatorship by exaggerating
its intrinsic sway, its own freedom of movement and the justice of its
grievance against Israel. It is as if we have suddenly decided that a
regime that tries to capture another country and loses territory in
the process has the right to have it repatriated as if nothing had
ever happened. Try, try, and try again, so to speak.
This is especially the case in the Levant where the diplomacy of
boundaries going back to the fall of the Ottoman Empire—whose power
had been wielded at a time from Vienna to Central Asia—was so scrawly
and shifting that no one could know from one day to the next where
this scepter held sway and that one did not. A propos these vagaries,
in the diplomatic talks between France and England following the
signing of the Sykes-Picot agreement in 1916 up to 1923 the biblical
phrase “from Dan to Beer-Sheva” was the template of any map. But, of
course, the words were more evocative than determinate, metaphoric
than concrete. And so the cartographic war, from then and now,
continues. What are Syria’s real claims to the Golan Heights? There
were Syrian Arabs in the Golan prior to 1967. But no one actually
thought of himself as ethnically or nationally Syrian. Instead, they
replicated the diversity of hate, the permanent schismatics of
difference. Moreover, the resident Alawite contingent—surprise!
surprise!—is quite loyal to Israel. And there are Druze whose
affinities are hard to judge since they are neither Arab nor Jew. In
any case, what is Syria? It is certainly not a coherent or cohesive
nation, what with its constant incitement of sectarian strife. And
then there is the hydrostrategics of its geography, a permanent
temptation for anyone governing from Damascus.
Spotted around Israel are failed states. I doubt that the states to
the north, Lebanon and Syria, can be mended. Their essence was always
difference. But certainly not as democracies where the rights of
diverse groups are honored. Nobody sang hymns to variety and
diversification in the lands of the Arabs. Have we already forgotten
Iraq where the colonials established Sunni rule over a vast
preponderance of Shia? In Syria, 10 percent of the population governs.
The majoritarian rest, the Sunnis and their Muslim Brotherhood
vanguard, have been cowering since 1982 ... until they had just
cowered too much. Pity the Alawites when the Sunnis will strike for
revenge. On the other hand, how much can you pity the Alawites who
have been plundering and imprisoning and also murdering for four
decades?
What had Obama in his head when he tried to jumpstart Israeli
negotiations with Syria? Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights,
what else? The answer is simple and transparent: Israel’s retreat from
territories it had captured while they were being used by enemies
trying to vitiate Israel itself. But this is the president’s steady
trope. Israel should withdraw from the West Bank and ancient Jerusalem
and East Jerusalem and, yes, the Golan Heights, too, without a shred
of evidence that it would be protected, could be protected from attack
by armed soldiers, armed aircraft and armed terrorists, by a deadly
admixture of regular troops with guerrillas somehow coddled by human
rights organizations which define the latter virtually as civilians.
Do you believe that the Arabs truly want peace? Does President Obama?
Well, I don’t. There is always the ministration that NATO could force
the keeping of a peace. But Obama has blown that alternative, too, by
virtually opting out of its venture against Qaddafi and leaving the
leadership to Great Britain and France, whose bona fides are suspect.
Why am I not a believer? Because the only unifying strand in the
disparate state systems of the Arabs is their struggle against the
Jews, the Zionists, the Israelis. Nothing else motivates them so
doggedly. The Christians also are targets of the various Muslim
governments under which they live, and their numbers are falling in
every country of the region—except Israel where those who kneel at the
cross are experiencing what one might even call a revival. This is
especially so in Jerusalem where, quietly but decisively, the
communicants of Jesus are hitching their future to Zion. Ironic, no?
But the future plight of the Christians in the region has been
foreshadowed in Egypt where yet another slaughter of innocents took
place on May 8 after a string of fiery incidents. “We are in a
jungle,” cried a Coptic bishop. Eleven men and women, both Christian
and Muslim, were left for dead, with about 250 wounded, of which some
50 were shot. Two churches were incinerated. It was an assault by
Salafists who make the Muslim Brothers appear moderate.
We are now being sermonized, mostly by journalistic oracles, to
believe that these last months are a Prague Spring for Muslims. They
have an agenda and it is to convince Israel not to be a killjoy but to
join the party and ease the path to peace. I happen to believe that
Arabs need to learn to live with each other before Israel opens itself
to its neighbors’ villainy now being practiced on their own.

 Tel Aviv Journal: Why Should Israel Make Peace With Failed States?
c'è sempre una scusa buona, per NON fare pace....