IASPS Op-Eds
March 13, 2001
Sharon's Unity Government - Part II: A Prediction
by Robert J. Loewenberg, IASPS PresidentIn making his first business a demand for US dollars, Prime Minister Sharon is undercutting his opposition to the peace process. This is because US aid (i.e., free money) is directly related to Israel's deterrence.
The Arab "Intifada 2" is a strategic doctrine. It is not spontaneous whether as young people throwing rocks (the rocks are provided by Marwan Barghouti's Tanzanim) or as armed terrorist attacks. Certainly the hatred is real. The peace process, so-called Conflict Resolution or talking-people-out-of-hating-you has almost nothing to recommend it. But what makes it unsuccessful is just this contempt for another's hatred in trying to talk him out of it.
This is patronizing and cowardly; contemptible in a word. If Christians mean, as they intend, something good by loving one's enemy, they must include the "enemy" part as well as a Christian's "loving." If you love your enemy, have the decency to let him be your enemy if that's who he is. Of course that means you will have to "deter" him to remain Christian and remain simply.
Doing so, a hard thing in every way, is what arouses the need to love enemies. If this the meaning of "Tough love" as they call it nowadays, it's a good sign. America is still Christian as it must be to remain at all.
As for the hatred the Arabs are led by, it is intermixed with less heated strategy. Terrorism is not "violence" meaning morally or strategically indifferent action. Moreover, as strategy it makes good sense or, as Ehud Barak himself once said in underlining the point opposite to the one I am about to make, one can only respect the Arabs who respond as they do to the provocation of the peace process. However, and this is what is meant by Barak's opposite point, the provocation of the peace process is its inability to deter Arab strategy. If the Jews are pulling out why shouldn't the Arabs strain every nerve to take advantage? They believe this is their land, and they are Muslims. Jews should respect this, including the hatred of Muslims for Jews.
When Yossi Beilen says Zionism meant the "Jews only wanted a sanctuary for peace," he wasn't absolutely right. But then he wasn't wrong. This is why it is a failure. No people are granted such a sanctuary. The question for Sharon in turning straight to Washington on March 20 for millions of dollars is, does he want a sanctuary or does he want Israel to house a people. If the latter, Israel must deter Arabs. Aid prevents it. It deters the Jews from facing what it takes to be a people.
That the peace process itself is the failure at least in considerable measure of Zionism and the attempt to camouflage it is clear. The Arab writer Rami Khouri explained this before Oslo in 1993. Other Arabs understand. If your enemy is surrendering by pulling out of lands he cannot live in because he wants aid-based socialism instead, or the political economy of a universal and homogeneous state in which "peace" as in Marxism is the aim, then it is one's duty, if you are the Arab enemy, to take advantage of this.
But Sharon knows one great truth: be against the peace process. Why then is he running to America for money the Jews have no right to and which is destroying them in any case? In casting forth at last a man who is against the peace process and senses it is not only a bad policy but a grotesque policy at odds with people and also with a people, the Jews have made a fateful intersection. With Sharon as their representative, the Jews have intersected with the policy that has brought the peace process about. But this policy, socialism to use a loose abstraction for recoiling from the truth of national existence and finitudes of other kinds, means the Jews are holding fiercely as people must to their lives, families and livelihoods. In other words, the intersection, among the Jews at any rate, of the peace process and their livelihoods is the dead center point explaining how Sharon can seek US aid and at the same time try to deter the Arabs. I mean the intersection is a contradiction.
State run "settlements" and subsidized Israeli-style business without markets, capital and freedom have all done more to depopulate Israel and make retreat inevitable by means of the peace process than Arabs. And now the Arabs are at the gates -- in the Jewish neighborhoods. They now occupy as people the lands that Israel could not settle as people. The mantra that the Jews left because they "would not occupy another people" is not worth a moment's discussion; politicians' talk. The Jews left because they preferred socialism and didn't have the stomach to hold the mirror of aid and terrorism up to it. But this is what made terrorism inevitable in its own right at the same time lashing the Jews to free monies and aid up to $8-10 billion per annum.
Instead of reversing what caused the peace process and has now shredded deterrence, Sharon is poised to bring on more of everything he and Israelis (and American and, regionally, Turkish strategic interests if not American politicians and bureaucrats) must stop.Sharon is acting upon the same contradictory impulses of other Israelis. On the one hand he wants to end a shocking and incomprehensible policy of national decomposition. On the other hand, as our NBNs on the economic side of this site show daily, Sharon must respond to the political and economic imperative to deal with the "strike and strike and strike" demands for government paid or subsidized salaries, mortgages, profits and welfare in huge annual amounts of up to 10% of the GDP.
Outside money is the cause of the first, of the shocking policy of national decomposition in that it has deterred growth and established a demographic decline in wealth, population and all else that is essential to a human presence in land, certainly in hostile lands. But outside money is also what is needed to deal with the second, the political and economic imperative to run the all-encompassing and all-powerful socialist State which holds together Israel's political economy. Practically this is not an abstraction. It refers to the lives, jobs and businesses of Israelis who have no idea in the world how aid could be a bad thing or if there might be such an intersection I describe here. What people know is the Israeli political economy, explained in the NBN entitled "Israel's Number 1 National Security Interest: Aid." It is Sharon's legitimate interest, too. He reasons he will not stay in power a minute without aid or, which is the same thing, without insisting it is in truth Israel's number 1 national security interest. His problem arises, however, in the fact that aid is Israel's national security danger; more so than Arabs who are in largest part a danger because of aid -- 20 years of it.
Just consider the practical, deterrence side of the matter. (The other sides of the matter have been detailed on this site and in Institute research for more than 15 years. They are now, facing Arabs at the gates of Gilo and Ramot, academic.)
These two considerations, aid and terror, side by side, cancel out any policy of serious deterrence of terrorist strategy. If money made it possible for Israel not to hold the territories, the predictable turn of events has changed things. These territories, having been planted with government subsidized settlers instead of with free men are filled now with Arabs, armed and full of hate on the borders of what is sometimes called "Israel proper:" the suburbs, essentially of two cities, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
It is free money that impelled the Arabs closer to the Jewish towns where, relatively speaking, life was normal even months ago. Although it was not hard to predict, repeatedly since 1993, that the peace process would drive the worst elements into power in the State, continually revving up the peace process to trigger the money which in turn triggers the Histadrut strikes and the businessmen's needs for anti-inflationary government monetary and fiscal policies, all of this driving the process onward in the circle (and the downward spiral), it was certain to reach the stage of "intersection."But, a good thing, it is today far less easy to take the outside money that once made it possible for Israel not to hold the territories. Israel cannot today not hold the territory of Israel proper, of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. It can be held. But this will require that Israel deter the Arabs in their strategy of Intifada 2, which is the war to continue the peace process. This is the circle again. It begins with aid; the trip to Washington.
But this intersection, made evident today by the fact that the Jews are not protected in their normal comings and goings as human beings still has two sides or two "lines." One line is the dawning of what is meant by "the worst." It refers to those, post-Rabin figures, who have literally attempted to drive away Jewish policemen from protecting Jews from Arab mobs in Jerusalem or conducting peace talks at the same time a Arab young man waves bloody arms from windows in Ramallah where he has just murdered and dismembered two Jewish soldiers, showing them and his red arms to cheering crowds. Rabin was no saint but he scolded Jews, unfairly but sincerely, for not beating Arab terrorists with sticks when they invaded playgrounds in daylight. He used a venal attorney general to scourge the settlers and used policemen to beat them. Still, he had some grasp of limits. It is impossible to imagine him taking actions like those of Ben-Ami. But he made them possible by running out these lines toward intersection.The other line is the daily strikes and all the rest that clogs the Economic side of our NBN site. The system knows no other way. It needs the money.
But now that the intersection is not in the territories, what is to be done? Then, when it was in the territories, the Jews simply left and scourged the settlers, indeed rationed them out for Arabs to kill. It was not a hope for peace that compelled Israel to seek out the peace process. Whatever individuals may have thought or hoped, the idea was, trading deterrence for money, to run the socialist domain so that the Arabs, too, would want a "sanctuary," meaning they too would subdue their will to peoplehood and a national existence for what Ben-Ami today calls the "international envelope of "an imposed, agreed arrangement." Here is what will be done, bringing war and peace as it does at this moment, if what otherwise must be done is not done. What is this international envelope?
This "international envelope," as Professor Ben-Ami told Ha'aretz editorial writer Ze'ev Schiff, "...would pay for 'the price of peace.'" In other words, the peace process planners at the highest levels, in Israel, in the EU and in America would use their force, "an imposed, agreed arrangement," to overcome primitive impulses, nationalism, to solve what now is an even more intractable problem, the intersection, that inspired the peace process, itself an Israeli-Jewish plan first and primarily, beginning in a more or less formal way as far back as 1967.But now, to repeat what we have said here and for a long period, "they are in the neighborhoods."
If it was hard on the Jews to deter the Arabs at the start, in the territories, how hard is it now? And understand, it is not America or the media or the world (meaning the Arabs, one billion of them, and Europe) that will not permit deterrence, meaning stopping the Arabs from use of their strategic instrument of terrorism, "Intifada 2." It is the Jews of Israel, including Sharon who recoil from this now life or death response.
Deterrence means stopping the strategy from succeeding. Sharon understands this perfectly. It is not "rocket science." Barak and Fuad understand it, too. And they all make their feints at it. It is the money that makes them cower. And the reason, in the particular case as affects simply deterrence, is whatever it is that drives toward "the sanctuary" in the Jews or at least in their political leadership and political class. Mr. Ben-Ami's international envelope to pay the price of peace is today's variation on this theme, what late 19th century historian Mommsen called the Jews' penchant for "decomposition." Of course he is known to history as an anti-semite.
But who, in this vein, will denominate the proposition, almost literally absurd, uttered by Mr. Barak on his own first trip to the US, at that time to see Mr. Clinton who had helped him so openly and extensively to defeat Mr. Netanyahu? Barak said, his words preserved as the New York Times' "Quotation of the Day," 1/3/00: "The price of even the most successful war is immeasurably more expensive than the price of peace, no matter how heavy."
Instead of thinking of Sharon in conceptual clichés, for example, as the man who will execute quintessential liberal policy because he is the liberal's enemy -- Nixon on China -- Sharon's real and only challenge is in the other direction. He is first of all a socialist. Beginning with the now nearly insuperable task of deterring the Arabs at the same time he is demanding that aid and free money continue, Sharon represents the "intersection" at which peace is war. This means, secondly, he is contending with the Jews and he is one of them.