Military Option Has Run Its Course

At a recent U.N.-sponsored conference in Copenhagen on peace in the Middle East, I was shaken at how old-fashioned and out of touch the peaceniks seem now, isolated on a planet and in a time warp of their own. Back in the old days, the peace camp had lofty goals and a plausible agenda; now, it seems like any other special-interest group, a bunch of sadly familiar figures pushing a recondite objective, using an idiosyncratic and shopworn language that corresponds to no other, a whole lexicon of terms, of tropes, conventions, formulas, code words and shorthand that hardly any but the expert can interpret.

They measure history in an encrypted atlas: Madrid, Oslo (I and II), Camp David (I and II), the White House lawn (famous to them for “the handshake”), Wye Plantation, Taba (I and II). Violence too has its nicknames, which get traded around at peace conferences like Chance cards in Monopoly: Baruch Goldstein, the No. 18 bus (one and two), Dizengoff Center, the central bus station (one, two, three and four), Mohammed Dura, Shalhevet Pass, and now the Dolphinarium, Passover, Jenin, Salah Shehada, Frank Sinatra cafeteria.

The participants talk about resolution number this and resolution number that, and about timetables, breakdowns, deadlines and cutoff dates. They babble vainly on.

And yet, I count myself among them, more so now than ever.

Israel has reoccupied the West Bank. It has bombed the headquarters of the Palestinian security forces in Gaza and on the West Bank. It has raided supposed bomb-making facilities and arrested or killed alleged bombers and potential bombers. It has demolished the homes of the families of bombers and reputed bombers. It has demolished the refugee camp at Jenin and bombed the neighborhood of one Hamas mastermind, so far. It is planning to exile the families of suicide bombers from the West Bank to Gaza (one wonders what it plans to do to suicide bombers’ families who live in Gaza--perhaps exile them to Gaza also?). It has cracked down ruthlessly on movement across the West Bank and has instituted harsh curfews in the big towns. It has begun building a fence (only about 120 feet, so far, out of more than 200 miles, but time is measured differently in biblical lands) between what it calls Israel and what are called the Occupied Territories.

Still the suicide bombers come, more and more. This means, and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the Israelis must eventually realize it, that a military/physical solution is not practicable. Or perhaps, it is practicable (meaning you can do it), but it simply won’t work--if security for Israelis is your goal. If remaining in power is your goal, if drumming up nationalist fervor is your goal, then perhaps the military option is serviceable. But if protecting your people is your goal, then Sharon’s Palestinian policies have obviously been a big failure.

This is a tough one for the Israelis, who probably always imagined that their evident military superiority would serve in any serious test of wills to protect them more or less utterly. Even the peaceniks on the Israeli side secretly harbored this belief. Perhaps they were imagining their military power as it might have been wielded by a leader of subtlety and nuance, a leader capable of to and fro, a leader with a certain degree of moderation, which is not what they voted into office, and not what they have. Sharon has taken every opportunity to destroy the possibility for peace, has stomped on every little shoot of dialogue. He is like a mad elephant rampaging through a small, ancient village carefully built by elders out of mud and sticks. Wherever he goes, everything is destroyed.

He is trying to destroy hope and build a nationalist camp based on statewide despair. His policies are making the Israelis hopeless while, at the same time, enabling the worst elements in Palestinian society, pushing them to new heights of cruelty and making that cruelty more palatable to a broader range of the Palestinian population. This is good for Sharon, who has caught the Israelis in a circular bind of logic in which they accept more and more violent means to quell the kind of violence that instead is pumped up under attack.

To blame Sharon for all this is not to blame the victim. Sorry. To blame him is to blame one of the main perpetrators. But what’s more interesting is what his role might turn out to be, because all leaders both create and are influenced by the stream of history in which they find themselves. I like to think, when I’m fanning my weak spark of optimism, that there is another fate for Israel than that of an armed, walled fortress, oppressing its neighbors and being attacked and sabotaged by them, forever. I like to imagine, as I blow on the dying embers, that what Yossi Beilin (the much-maligned and marginalized peace technocrat, and a perennial figure at peace talks, conferences, secret meetings and negotiations) believes is true. That, as the masters say in chess, because the endgame is already preordained, worked out and on paper (from the days of “Oslo” and “Taba”), all it takes to get there is to step gingerly and cleverly through the soggy, swampy, ambushed middle of play. I even nourish a sick hope that perhaps Sharon has boxed himself into a corner where he will end up being the one to sign the peace. An indication that that’s the direction in which things are going: last week’s near-agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinian leadership (whoever that is) concerning security and what I like to call “de-reoccupation.” True, it didn’t happen. But they are talking.

Except for President Bush, the international community supports a peace initiative. (Bush says he does, too, on his better days, but he has boxed himself into his own foreign-policy corner with his war on terror.) The Quartet--the U.S., Russia, the European Union and the United Nations--is working toward that goal, as is the Trio, composed of Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt. Quartet and Trio, more words from the peaceniks’ lexicon, but still, they exist.

It’s tragic that Sharon’s ill-conceived “plan” for Israel’s security can only be shown to be unsuccessful because the suicide bombers are still lining up inside Israel to kill more Israelis. All the peaceniks said this would happen, from the beginning. That’s because the peaceniks know the Palestinians and have been talking to the Palestinians for years. Sharon, apparently, doesn’t, and has misjudged the Palestinians every which way, although he certainly knows how to push their buttons.

Sometimes a situation has to reach a nadir before people realize what they ought to have realized before, but did not choose to. The Israeli right didn’t want to make peace with the Palestinians because it did not think it had to. Israel was stronger, remember? Today, a small but important segment of the Palestinian population has repudiated suicide bombing publicly. In Israel, too, there is a tiny resurgence of debate. Strength, the Israelis have seen once again, resides in many characteristics. Not just firepower, but also tenacity. Not just ruthlessness, but also desperation. The Hamas/Sharon combination--a melange of suicide bombing and bombing tout court--has brought us to where we are now. We are at the end of Israel’s military option, as the destruction of Shehada’s neighborhood and neighbors has shown us. Perhaps Israel is willing to go farther down the dangerous military path, but even its best friends will agree for only so long (witness Bush’s reaction to the Shehada bomb), and then Israel will be on its own.

That’s not a safe place to be.