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The Middle East Mess
| Article
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19911 |
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Section : |
EDITORIAL
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| Issue
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4 / 1992 |
1,045 Words |
| Author
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Morton A. Kaplan
Editor and Publisher |
The Bush administration deserves great credit for arranging a Middle East peace conference, but this conference runs the risk of becoming another Marshall mission to China. Marshal failed to understand that the KMT and the CCP had excellent reasons, because of the fear of American reaction, to pretend to negotiate but equally good reasons not to let the negotiations succeed.
The Middle East situation is not the dilemma that China was, since there are peace agreements that could satisfy the legitimate interests of each side. However, this conclusion is doubted by many Arabs and Israelis, and they have political reasons in terms of domestic support not to agree.
I am no fan of Prime Minister Shamir's although it is now clear that he is not the most intransigent man in Israel. Still, he is an expansionist, and he has scant sympathy for the legitimate aspirations of the Arabs on the West Bank. But the Arabs have been even worse enemies of their own national aspirations.
In a different world, a strong, but not conclusive, case could have been made that the creation of Israel was a historic injustice. Although the tie of segments of world Jewry to the Holy Land was strong and continuous, the Arabs had had a majority since the diaspora. The Holocaust, however, changed that calculus. Psychologically and humanly, there was no alternative to an Israel that could defend the rights of Jews throughout the world. There was no strong sense of Palestinian nationality: That developed later. And there was enough land for both populations. Indeed, the Jewish influx created conditions that led to an Arab influx.
The blame for the Holocaust is beside the point, although it is to be noted that the leader of the Arabs in Palestine, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Aminel-Husseini, spent World War II in Berlin by Hitler's side. Nor is the subsequent quantity distribution by the Saudis of the infamous czarist, anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the elders of Zion entirely irrelevant. And even if the creation of Israel were an injustice, its destruction would be an even greater injustice.
If the Arabs had had the sense to accept the existence of Israel in 1948, it would have been a much smaller nation. If King Hussein had felt sufficiently secure politically to stay out of the 1967 war, as Israel begged him to do, Israel never would have taken the West Bank. But it was the Arab objective to destroy Israel. I have personal knowledge of this.
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