A Few Additional Comments [not to this piece but to 9/21/09 article, Peace Process or War Process]

Submitted by Ron Thompson (United States), Sep 21, 2009 at 20:26

A Few Additional Comments

Everything that follows, with one exception, is in 100% support and agreement with this longer-than-usual piece by Pipes.
First I've recently finished reading a 600 pg biography of Kemal Ataturk (2000, written by Andrew Mango), which I'm reminded of by Pipes' discussion of Palestinian "irredentism."

Among many other points I was struck by Ataturk's very deliberate and repeated rejection, which he sought to instill in the political dna of the population, and future leaders - NO to pan-Islam, and NO to pan-Turkism. In other words, he expressly rejected any form of irredentism, and did it so convincingly that he was able very quickly to bring the new nation of Turkey back to international respectability in place of the corpse of the Ottoman
Empire.

I was also struck by his increasing hostility to religion, especially Islam, on PRACTICAL grounds - it interfered with not just his policies but the very mindset he wanted for his countrymen in order that they might take their place in the modern world and not fall further behind than they already were before and after World War I.

Would that there were any single Muslim-born leader or prospective leader anywhere in the Middle East (or anywhere else for that matter in the Islamic world) capable of thinking in these terms.

Second, this piece might have cited the very unusual circumstance of four stories in recent days in the Washington Post which in import if not express purpose generally support, or at least are consistent with Pipes' thesis of Victory. Articles in the Post consistent with any of Pipes' views are very rare at all, let alone four in quick succession.

The first article, on Sunday, is an upbeat piece on Israel's growing proficiency in missile technology, so much so that any vestige of rationality left in the Iranian leadership must be increasingly worried that even one missile among many could get through to Israel before a devastating Israeli response (although this story could have a bit of a hidden agenda).

The second article, by the same reporter I think, pointed out that Obama's push to stop settlement construction has boomeranged in the sense that the population of Israel, instead of being made nervous about American support, has strongly rallied behind Netanyahu, so much so that his coalition
government now looks far less 'fragile' than it did when formed.

Third, and related, but in a 'pundit' piece, a Post editor wrote that Israel's refusal to buckle to US pressure has not produced the kind on international 'outrage' that usually happens whenever Israel defies 'consensus' opinion of what it must surrender in the fictitious name of being 'serious' about peace.

And fourth was a military piece (backing up why I've said, if I may mention it) that both of Israel's military actions, against Hezbollah in 2006 and Gaza last January now (mysteriously!) look much more like victories than either did at the time. As I wrote somewhere at the time, a reasonably sensible use of a DELIBERATE disproportion of violence - that is, nothing annihilationist, but definitely not linited to tit-for-tit either - seemed entirely sensible,
especially in Lebanon, and without regard to the howls of those who refuse to take the challenges Israel faces seriously.

With regard to the single point of disagreement, I think it should be part of a call for outright victory that one outcome, instead of just waiting for the Palestinians to admit and realize they are defeated - and that Israel is there not only to stay, but to contribute mightily to the whole region's development if allowed to - might just be that the Palestinians might have to be relocated, either by incentives or by harsher attritionist means. As
another friend said (not my regular Jewish advisor friend), of course the Palestinians deserve a land of their own - just not in Palestine. She suggested that Saudi Arabia might give a chunk of its unused land near some coast, perhaps to be made viable with huge Israeli and international
health, rather as Israel is doing on its own in the Negev.

Although I do not suggest it as a strict precedent, I recall from the Ataturk biography that the problem of Greek and Turkish irreconcilability in northwestern Anatolia (northwestern Turkey) was finally and irreversibly settled by a wholesale relocation of Greeks from an area they had inhabited, as a developed culture far, far longer than the "Palestinians" in Palestine.

If unremitting hostility continues, or larger scale violence returns, let alone if the Iranian nuclear threat gets more imminent, relocation of this disastrously led population should not be unthinkable.

Ron Thompson

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