イスラエル／パレスチナ和平

Jerusalem Post Jun. 3, 2003


>If Bush wants to get anywhere with this, he must stop avoiding and accommodating Arab intransigence and deploy the moral clarity that has been his hallmark. He must call the Arab world to end the conflict it began, not in 1967, but in 1947, when it rejected the United Nation's partition of this land into "Arab" and "Jewish" states. Today, the issue is not Israelis who cannot utter the words "Palestinian state," but Arab leaders Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas and Mubarak who cannot utter the words "Jewish state." Like the defunct Cold War, the Arab-Israeli conflict is not symmetrical, but a matter of aggression and expansionism by one side and self-defense by the other. No non-Muslim nation has ever supported the Arab insistence that Israel is illegitimate, yet the West has continued to tiptoe around Arab aggression, rather than reject it head on.

Let us not delude ourselves. Peace will be produced not by diplomacy, but by an Arab decision to accept not only Israel's de facto existence, but its legitimacy as a Jewish state. Diplomacy that allows the Arab world to dodge this fundamental issue not only invites failure, but could actually set back the cause of peace.

>The old myth was that the lack of a Palestinian state was what was preventing peace. The new realization should be that Arab acceptance of Israel's legitimacy is peace, and that statehood will be a byproduct of ending the attempt to drive Israel into the sea.

Destroying Israel remains a critical plank of the militant Islamic agenda, and Palestinian statehood has for decades been seen by the Arab world as a means to that goal. If militant Islam is America's target, it should be focusing on destabilizing Iran and demanding up front that the Arab world speak, not just of Israel, but a Jewish state. Then we will know that we are on our way to a new Middle East, rather than more of the same.