Breaking the Cycle
“The only small chance for peace today is the same chance that existed before the Gaza invasion: The moderate Arab states, Europe, the United States and, mainly, Israel, must help Hamas’s enemy, Fatah, prepare the West Bank for real freedom, and then hope that the people of Gaza, vast numbers of whom are unsympathetic to Hamas, see the West Bank as an alternative to the squalid vision of Hassan Nasrallah and Nizar Rayyan.”–Jeffrey Goldberg, NYTimes, 1/13/09
A small bit of sanity in an insane time. Goldberg observes in this OpEd that Hamas cannot be bombed out of existence. They are based on an unforgiving ideologly that thrives on violence. One can only hope to undermine them by strengthening real Palestinian governance and freedoms, showing that the path of cooperation leads to justice. This demands, rather than hard military actions, hard political actions. An immediate end to new settlement and an elimination of most of the old ones in the West Bank, restitution for the homes lost in 1948, and a real commitment to coexistence on equal terms. This won’t be easy, but the current war will not only not defeat Hamas, it will strengthen them in the long term, as Goldberg notes.
Terrorism works because its very cruelty demands a cruel response, forcing the the stronger actor to reveal its power and confirm the worst about itself, which then feeds right back in to the call for resistence…in the form of more terrorism. The images of suffering in Gaza are part of that campaign. They confirm the worst about Israel in the eyes of many viewers, validating the Hamas claims that Israel is a brutal regime. But Israel cannot ignore the rocket attacks on its civilians either, and so the cycle goes on and on. Terror, response, revulsion, which justifies more terror. Some step of this cycle has to be broken, and Hamas is not going to do it, though many Palestinian civilians might, if they are so empowered. Israel can break the cycle, though it hasn’t done so yet.
The Talmud teaches that peace is the highest value, but also that there can be no peace without justice. I disagree. Justice for the people of the West Bank won’t bring an immediate peace to the beleagured citizens of Israel, but it is a vital first step and one that only Israel can take. It is not giving in to terrorism to respond to violence with reconciliation, but breaking the very back of the terrorist to ignore their invitation to violence. “We had no choice,” is not a foreign policy that can lead anywhere, nor is it a moral calculation of any value. It’s simply part of the cycle that extremisits on all sides want to maintain. Israel has got to step in front of this cycle, disrupt the pattern, and pray (sorry, but it might just come down to that), that the better angels of the Palestinian people are also heeded once they have the chance to be heard through the Wall and over the rockets.
