Who said it?

Submitted by Ron Thompson (United States), Apr 16, 2008 at 10:55

I'm sure I can come up with a short list, but who said, "Israel can only negotiate with an enemy who has lost"?

This is an important thought which should be frequently said, if not hammered into the skulls of, all those in Europe and in both parties in America who think it makes sense to even try to negotiate with Hamas or Hezbollah, or for that matter with the threadbare figure of Abbas, who has neither the political strength or moral courage to budge from a negotiating position that Israel must return to the pre-'67 borders and surrender East Jerusalem.

My own phrasing of this thought has been to say that the Arabs in general and the Palestinians in particular must suffer a MORAL defeat before any chance of a lasting peace can occur. This is necessary with or without (more) military defeats of either conventional or terrorist Moslem violence against Israel or the West.

The models are what happened to Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, which of course also involved utter military defeat, but also Soviet Russia, which, fortunately for us and them, did not require outright military defeat and an unconditional surrender.

These are, in my mind, the only same geopolitical thoughts and models with which to approach the otherwise endless and ominous position of 400 million Arabs, or a billion-plus Moslems worldwide, that the very existence of 5 million Israelis is an intolerable "offense" to Moslem sensibilities and to "Islam", the world's only major religion which has no concept of nonviolence in its theology, and indeed, no Golden Rule in its teaching.

The longer we fail to learn this, the higher the costs to everybody, costs which move from the Israelis and luckless and leaderless Palestinians, but go on to include all humanity.

Ron Thompson

Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome but not comments that are scurrilous, off-topic, commercial, disparaging religions, or otherwise inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the "Guidelines for Reader Comments".