Stephen Walt apparently considers himself a realist when it comes to the Middle East. He is one ot the authors of The Israel Lobby, whose thesis is that American Jews working for Israel have distorted American foreign policy in th Middle East to the detriment of American interests in he region. There is little point in discussing this thesis. He believes it,as do many others. I will assume that Stephen Walt is not particularly anti-Semitic and actually believes that a more even handed approach to the Middle East will bring about peace. In his post yesterday, Stephen Walt takes issue with Tom Friedman's article on Sunday suggesting that squaring the circle in the Middle east will take an extraordinary effort and extraordinary skill. In response Stephen Walt thinks achieving peace in eh Middle East should actually be pretty easy:
It's easier than Tom Friedman thinks: a realistic Middle East strategy
Friedman says there are two big problems: extremist settlers in Israel and extremist groups like Hamas among the Palestinians. And for good measure, he tosses in the obstructionists in Syria and those dangerous mullahs in Tehran, whose opposition makes solving this problem nearly impossible. We also need help from Egypt and Saudi Arabia, but it's hard to count on them. His conclusion: "whoever lines up this diplomatic Rubik's cube deserves two Nobel Prizes."
Actually it's not that hard, although I doubt the Obama administration will summon the political will and diplomatic stamina that will be necessary to pull it off. To see why, you need a fuller picture of the situation than Friedman provides.
To begin with, Friedman would have you believe that settlement expansion is just the work of some isolated religious extremists, and the only problem is that no Israeli government has "mustered the will" to face them down. In fact, settlement expansion has been the conscious policy of every Israeli government since 1967 -- Labor, Likud, and Kadima alike. ... Thus far, Ehud Barak is the only Israeli leader to make a serious effort to negotiate a two-state solution, and even his best offer at Camp David fell well short of a viable two-state proposal. And when Oslo collapsed, Friedman's columns helped spread the false claim that PLO leader Yasser Arafat had turned down a great deal and was solely responsible for the failure, a myth that undermined the peace camp in Israel and reinforced the political dynamics that Friedman now blames for the current impasse.
Friedman also fails to mention the role that the United States has played in bringing this situation about.
Walt's position, that the settlements are the major impediment to peace, is ahistorical and his ability to place all of the responsibility for the present conflict upon Israel likewise defies belief, however, he honestly believes what he writes and his work should be read with that understanding. Yet, even if one were to grant all of his assumptions, ascribe all the blame to Israel and the blinkered support of the United States, Walt makes a couple of statements that must be addressed.
... Friedman's suggestion that the involvement of Syria and Iran makes this problem nearly intractable misses the key point: it's not their policies that make our problems more difficult, it is our policies that have helped drive some otherwise unlikely allies together and given them an issue they can exploit for their own reasons. Syria has no other way to pressure Israel, so it uses the Palestinian issue (and its support for Hamas and Hezbollah) as part of its long campaign to get back the Golan Heights, which Israel conquered in the Six Day War. Similarly, as Trita Parsi has shown, Iran supports Islamic Jihad and other Palestinian groups in part to pressure the United States to acknowledge its legitimate security interests in the Persian Gulf and partly to discredit conservative Arab states like Saudi Arabia and make it harder for them to form an anti-Iranian coalition in the Gulf. This situation explains why Saudi Arabia has been pushing its own peace plan since 2002 (a plan now formally adopted by the Arab League): they know that ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would strengthen their position and undermine Iran's.
Syria is ruled by a small group of Alawite Muslims considered by the surrounding Sunni Muslims to be apostates. They rule their state the way most desperate and anti-democratic thugs rule states, through violence and intimidation. Syria does not care particularly for the Palestinians but is desperately afraid of their own Islamists (see Hama). The Alawites primary strategic concern is for their won survival. They need to retain (and regain) hegemony over Lebanon, in order to support their economy by essentially stealing from the more robust Lebanese economy, and they need a patron who will offer them protection from various elements in the neighborhood who would like nothing more than to establish an Islamic state in Damascus. If the Syrians wanted peace with Israel, they could have traded the peace for the Golan Heights at any time in the last 30 years. Of course, such a trade would have destabilized the regime and for that reason Bashir Assad might well be convinced, like his father before him, that peace with Israel would be suicidal. As with much of the dysfunctional Middle East, the most radical and most willing to kill hold the high cards and determine policy.
The second point, that Iran simply wants nuclear weapons and supports genocide in its words and deeds is partly true. Iran would like hegemony over the gulf, which supplies a significant fraction fo the world's oil. That their goal would be to use oil as a weapon, to continue to expand their writ, and to destroy their enemies (since their economy is dependent on oil and their ideology is incompatible with a robust, ie open economy, is apparently not considered noteworthy by Walt.
Finally, the omission that invalidates almost all of his points is the most glaring omission. Stephen Walt completely ignores the genocidal anti-Semitism that is preached, taught, disseminated throughout the Middle East. Historically, nations that have adopted anti-Semitism as part of their national policy have always acted on that ideology. To think that the Palestinians, who proclaim their greatest desire to kill Jews on a daily basis, would be satisfied with a two state solution defies logic. The Palestinians, both secular and religious, since 1948 have vowed to destory Israel and kill Jews; the Iranians have, since the Khomeini revolution in 1978 have vowed to destroy Israel and kill Jews; to think that such deeply held hatred can be simply addressed is simply nonsense and a fantasy with no concordance with the reality Walt prefers. The Stephen Walts of the world act as if the words of the genocidal Jew haters do not exist or do not matter, but words have always preceded action when genocide is involved.
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