Editorial: Foes must accept the Jewish state

In the Middle East, ordinary people pine for peace

THE machiavellian moralising now shaping the debate over the crisis in the Middle East is as irrelevant as it is obscene. In Israel and Lebanon, in the West Bank and Gaza, children are being killed while opportunist ideologues try to ignore the immutable facts that are shaping people's lives, and deaths. And it is about time they stopped. It is time to end abstract arguments about how the Middle East should be, to address the way it is, and by focusing on the facts find a way forward. It is time to stop arguing about alleged ancient wrongs, and to seek solutions for what is happening now. It is time to exclude the obscene ideologues who will happily see children, rarely their own, turned into suicide bombers. And it is time to cut through the ideological fog, and consider the facts behind the present fighting. Because unless this happens, this campaign will be followed by another and another, blighting the lives of generations yet to be born.

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There are fundamental facts that shapes the present campaign, like all the ones before it, back to the transformation of ancient Middle East Jewish communities into the state of Israel in 1948. The first is that Israelis will fight all comers who seek to destroy their country. For 60 years, Israel's citizen soldiers have defended their families against the odds. And as we are seeing this week, they still have the stomach for the struggle. The extraordinary thing is that even after six decades, many of the enemies of Israel either have not heard, or do not believe, that the Israelis will always defend themselves. Be they Hamas or Hezbollah, Fatah or the Al-Aqsa Brigades, terrorist organisations still talk of ending the Jewish state – a euphemism for another Holocaust. And while Egypt and Jordan have made their peace with Israel, Syria, Saudi Arabia and others continue to support terrorist attacks. And now in Iran, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad talks regularly and often of destroying Israel – almost as often as he talks about his plan to build a nuclear capacity, one that could be used to build bombs. Given Mr Ahmadinejad's oft-expressed desire to wipe Israel "off the map", the Israelis would be insane not to hear and believe what he says. Mr Ahmadinejad, after all, started his career with the Basiji militants, who arose out of Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution against the Shah of Iran and became infamous for sending Iranian children, each wrapped in a blanket to hold their bodies together for burial and carrying a key that would supposedly open the gates of paradise, to clear minefields during the Iran-Iraq war. In responding to Hezbollah's attacks from Lebanon, Israel is doing more than defending itself against the terrorists' rocket attacks, it is sending a clear message to the organisation's Iranian paymasters that however and wherever they attack, Israel will fight back. The closer Iran comes to acquiring weapons of mass destruction, the stronger the possibility of Israel mounting a pre-emptive strike against the Iranian arsenal, just as Israel destroyed Iraq's nuclear facility at Osirak in 1983. Nor is a nuclear-armed Iran something the rest of the world could readily accept. When Mr Ahmadinejad denounces Israel, he uses it as a proxy for everybody else his fundamentalist version of Islam loathes, which is pretty much the adherents of all other religions, including other Muslim faiths. In facing down Iran, Israel's cause is the cause of the whole world. The simple fact of the Israeli ideal, that Jews stand and fight, rather than appease their enemies, will always apply, even if it creates the risk of Armageddon in the Middle East. The first immutable fact of politics in the Middle East is that Israel will never give up and will keep conquered land, won in defensive wars, which provide it with militarily defensible frontiers. Palestinian leaders and all their allies either accept this or stand condemned for forcing a war that will never end on their own people.

But if this first fact gives no hope to Israel's enemies, the second is rich with opportunities for an end to the evils of war that benight the region. Israel has demonstrated a willingness to compromise with its opponents once its own right to existence is acknowledged. In large part this is due to the strength of its democratic system. Certainly no politician in Israel will ever dare to defy public opinion by being seen to jeopardise national security – that way lies electoral oblivion. One of the reasons Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has fought back so fiercely in the present crisis is that he is not a former general and needs to demonstrate his defence credentials. But while there is no large party of appeasers in Israel, only a tiny handful of religious zealots want perpetual conflict against the Palestinian people of the West Bank. The vast majority of ordinary Israelis pine for a peace so their children do not have to spend years in the army and which ends the risk of a renewed suicide bombing campaign against them. And they are willing to be convinced by politicians who can make war but prefer to pursue peace. This occurred in the 1970s when prime minister Menachem Begin reached an accord with Egypt. It happened again in the 1990s when prime minister Yitzhak Rabin – who was assassinated by an Israeli extremist for his trouble – thought he had a deal with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Most recently it occurred when prime minister Ariel Sharon, perhaps the toughest in Israel's tradition of tough soldier-statesmen, revolutionised Israeli politics by abandoning the Likud political movement to create a new peace party, Kadima. Recognising that there was no point in endlessly brawling with the Palestinians, he evacuated the Gaza Strip and announced an Israeli withdrawal into more easily defended lines on the West Bank. This was an extraordinary about-face for Mr Sharon, but his plan increased opportunities for an end to the endless fighting with Palestinian terrorists. And the voters endorsed it, making Mr Sharon's political heir, Mr Olmert, prime minister in the March elections. The Sharon plan does not give the Palestinians anywhere near everything they want. But it demonstrated that while Israel will fight when it has to, it will talk when it can.

And this terrifies the enemies of Israel, who rely on permanent conflict to hold power over the long-suffering Palestinian people. The late Yasser Arafat ran a corrupt administration that could only hold on to power by convincing his people he was their only defence against Israel. And for 30 years, he had no compunction in sanctioning terror campaigns around the world as a means of bolstering his own support. Certainly the Palestinian Authority has started to hold fair elections in the past couple of years. But the culture of Palestinian politics that he created continues. The men with guns in the terrorist organisations who prospered under Arafat's leadership know peace would mean an end to their power. The suicide bombing campaigns of 1994 to 1996 and earlier this decade were intended as much to incite Israeli reprisals against Palestinians as they were to destabilise Israel. The terrorists will keep the conflict with Israel running for as long as they can, rather than surrender politics to people who know more about administration than explosives. And the terrorists are terrified of anybody who threatens their power. Among all the anger against Israel over the past couple of weeks, one simple fact is quickly being forgotten – that this present crisis was brought into being by Hamas kidnapping an Israeli soldier. And they did so because they were worried about what would happen if Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas had put a proposed referendum on a settlement of sorts with Israel to the voters – because it might have passed. But now we will never know, at least not in the short term, which is what Hamas, and Hezbollah, as well as its patrons in Syria and Iran, want. Because their own ambitions depend on presenting Israel as an inveterate enemy of the ordinary Palestinians, rather than a country prepared to negotiate for a permanent peace. That almost all the ordinary people of the region want an end to war seems assured. But only in the long-established democracy of Israel are the politically powerful prepared to listen to, and obey, the people. So the second simple fact of Middle East politics is that the best hope for peace is for Palestinian politicians, reporting to an openly elected and solely sovereign parliament, to one day be able to negotiate a settlement.

Extremists on either side will dispute these facts. Others will argue they ignore the complexities of the conflict. They always do. But until Israel's right to exist is accepted, there can be no peace. Until the terrorists and the empire-builders in Syria and Iran, where elections are run according to rules set by religious rulers, leave ordinary Palestinians, as well as the Lebanese, in peace, the fighting will continue. Like Europe at the end of the Thirty Years War, the people of the Middle East are sick of war. A new set of rules that recognises these realities must be found. Because the world has been hearing all the arguments used this week for 60 years, and we are no closer to peace in the Middle East. Certainly some of the facts of political life are hard for Palestinians and their supporters to face. Others are awkward for Israelis and their allies. But the facts must be faced. Because once they are, a path through the blighted landscape of Middle East politics becomes clearer.