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Israel Should Not Pay the Price for Iraq
(Financial Times-UK)- Dore Gold The British prime minister's repeated need to refer in the same breath as Iraq to the Israeli-Palestinian issue, and especially the diplomatic road map for resolving this conflict, is perplexing, for the present Iraqi conflict has absolutely nothing to do with Israel. It is as though the war on Iraq requires that the West now balance its military activities in an Arab state by taking a harder line on Israel. If the EU, Russia, and the UN failed adequately to confront Iraq's non-compliance with UN resolutions, why should Israel expect that they will provide any fair judgment of its security situation? If the quartet were to give the Palestinian leadership a passing grade in the war on terrorism, when it still has done nothing at all to root it out, the lives of Israeli citizens would again be put at risk. The best way to help the postwar peace process is to stop the diplomacy of linkage, which undermines the credibility of its advocates and their ability to play any role in an eventual Arab-Israeli peace settlement.