Daily Alert Archives

Waiting for War

(New York Jewish Week) Gary Rosenblatt - •This is the Middle East we're dealing with, where the thinking is very different from our Western attitudes, and it is dangerous to make assumptions based on our own sense of logic. •A case in point is what happened when Israel pulled out of Lebanon in the spring of 2000. The Barak government saw the move as not only a chance to bring its soldiers home from the war front, after almost two decades, but to signal the Arabs that Israel had no claim on the land and only wanted peace. •Instead, the move was perceived in the Arab world as a full-scale retreat by the Israeli army, a humiliating defeat for Jerusalem, and a sign to Arabs everywhere that keeping up the violent pressure eventually will lead to Israeli withdrawal. Indeed, the leaders of the Palestinian intifada that began a few months later point to the Lebanon pullback as an inspiration and turning point in their determination to renew hostilities with Israel. •America is learning, as Israel has come to understand, that trying to resolve conflict in the Arab world through diplomatic negotiation, politics, and reason is simply dismissed there as weakness. Power, and the use of it, is respected. •Israel knows that targeted assassinations of terror leaders and demolishing homes of the relatives of terrorists don't play well in the Western media, but they are effective tools in staving off the wholesale murder of one's citizens. So impossible choices must be made between tolerance and force, between world opinion and homeland security. •Israel has, reluctantly and agonizingly, opted to make its first priority the protection of its men, women, and children, even if it loses international support and public opinion along the way. Washington appears to have made a similar calculation, recognizing that to adopt the European position - that war is never an alternative - is to appease our enemies and endanger our own people, postponing rather than precluding an ultimate showdown.
2003-03-10 00:00:00
Full Article