Almost every responsible political leader today expresses a desire to contribute to peace in the Middle East.
Easier said than done. A real effort to promote peace requires an understanding of what motivates the parties to the conflict.
I can't say I quite get what makes the Palestinians tick. If they truly want a two-state agreement with Israel, they sure have a strange way of pursuing it, rejecting every proposal put on the table since 1947.
But I do believe that anyone who genuinely seeks peace should consider four key factors that inform the Israeli worldview.
First, geography.
The throwaway line these days is that geography no longer matters in an era of long-range missiles. Not so fast.
As the late Sir Isaiah Berlin famously quipped, "The Jews have enjoyed rather too much history and too little geography."
Israel is a small country, about the size of New Jersey or Wales, and barely two-thirds the size of Belgium. To put it into a Middle East context, Egypt is approximately fifty times larger than Israel, Saudi Arabia a hundred times.
And there's more. Until its 1967 war for survival, Israel's borders, which were nothing more than the armistice lines from the 1948 War of Independence, were nine miles at their narrowest point, near the country's midsection and most populous area.
When President George W. Bush first saw that narrow width from the vantage point of a helicopter, he was reported to have said, "There are some driveways in Texas longer than Israel is wide."
Topography matters too.
When the towering Golan Heights were in the hands of Syria before the Six-Day War, for example, Jewish villages and farms below were regularly targeted by Syrian shelling. Ask my wife. She was a volunteer in a kibbutz there. With the Golan Heights in Israel's hands, those villages and farms no longer have to rush their children into underground shelters on practically a daily basis.
In other words, how to address Israel's legitimate security concerns in a peace deal is not by any stretch a simple proposition.
Second, history.
Notwithstanding Arab claims to the contrary, the Jewish people have been linked to this region for over three thousand years. The bond between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel is central to the historical narrative. The Jewish people were born here, their sacred texts emerged here, their temples were built here, and, even when forcibly exiled, they never stopped dreaming of their return. It is a story, quite frankly, unlike any other in the annals of mankind.
To read the Hebrew Bible is to come across Jerusalem and Zion literally hundreds of times.
The metaphysical and physical link between the Jewish people and its wellsprings of history and holiness must be acknowledged -- in the same way perhaps as Muslims see the tie between Islam and Mecca and Medina.
Third, psychology.
Some dismiss Israel's preoccupation with security as obsessive. How can it be, they ask, that the country with the strongest armed forces in the region feels so beleaguered, so under the gun?
New York Times columnist Roger Cohen typifies this approach. Regarding Israel's concern about Iran, he wrote: "Closure [on a past that holds the insistent specter of annihilation] is the overcoming of horror. It is the achievement of normality through responsibility. It cannot be attained through the inflation of threats, the perpetuation of fears, or retreat into the victimhood that sees every act, however violent, as defensive."
The "inflation of threats"? The "perpetuation of fears"? Is that all there is to Israel's current situation? Hardly.
While Cohen has sought more than once to recast Iran as a misunderstood country, Israelis hardly share his optimism about Tehran's intentions.
What is any nation to make of calls for its destruction from another nation that is hell-bent on acquiring the tools to achieve its goal?
And when the threatened nation is Israel, surely, the alarm bells go off -- and with good reason.
After all, Israel has a history. So do the Jewish people. And it teaches that there are those who wish to do harm and mean what they say. They are not to be neglected or minimized.
That history also teaches that, all too often, Israel and the Jewish people have stood largely alone in facing the danger. Pledges of help are more often made than kept. Relying on the good will of others has proved a risky proposition. The files are replete with empty promises and unfulfilled commitments.
So yes, Israel has every right, indeed obligation, to take Iran's nuclear ambitions seriously -- just as it has every right, indeed, obligation, to take seriously the 40,000 missiles in Hezbollah's arsenal in Lebanon and the desire of Hamas in Gaza to emulate Hezbollah's example.
Are the words of Hamas and Hezbollah, which cry out for Israel's annihilation, simply to be ignored, filed away in the drawer of rhetorical excess?
For that matter, should Israel be comforted by the fact that its presumed peace partner, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, has said that he will never recognize Israel as a Jewish state and entered into a reconciliation agreement with Hamas?
And given recent events in Egypt and Syria, should the view of the neighborhood from Jerusalem necessarily look rosy and reassured?
In sum, are those who have themselves been targeted for destruction more than once simply to assume it cannot be tried again and instead get a good night's sleep?
And fourth, yearning.
The survivors of the exiles, the pogroms, the inquisitions, the blood libels, the ghettos, and the death camps don't need lectures about why they should seek "normality" and position themselves on "the right side of history." After all, wasn't Israel established in such large part precisely to create, at long last, a new condition for the Jews? Normality -- nothing more, nothing less.
And yet, it hasn't entirely come to be, at least not yet.
The fears are there not because they can't be forgotten, but because the threats endure. And the threats can't be ignored because the Jewish people's genetic code includes an early warning system, which tells them that the Iranian regime and its friends just might mean what they say. That the spinning centrifuges and those liquid-fuel and solid-fuel rockets just may be meant for seven million Israelis. And that, given half a chance, Hamas and Hezbollah would act on their desire for a world without Israel.
Israel doesn't need UN resolutions, editorials or speeches about the imperatives of peace. It needs credible, committed partners in the search for peace. When it has such partners, as history has amply shown, Israel will go to great territorial lengths, even at risk to its own security, to achieve a solution.
Of course, at the end of the day, Israel's partners don't have to buy its narrative any more than Israel has to buy theirs.
Yet Israel is asked to recognize their needs -- the needs of dignity, justice, and respect. And that is indeed a legitimate request for the process of conflict resolution.
So they, in turn, need at least to take into account the Israeli worldview, as Anwar Sadat and King Hussein, peacemakers both, did to their everlasting credit.
Then, perhaps, in the words of the Jewish prophet Isaiah, "Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, nor shall they learn war anymore." Nothing could be more central to the Jewish mission.
To learn more, visit ajc.org.
Furthermore, KampungNik mis-states other elements of history. Israel was the birthplace of Judaism & Christianity. Saudi Arabia was the birthplace of Islam. And the history of the past 100,000 years is not a history of city-states or nations. This is deception masquerading as informed dissent. Israel had been attacked for her entire existence. Can he claim that about Switzerland? That provides special reason for Israelis to be unduly concerned about their safety. Such concerns do not represent territorial greed, unlike the implications of KampungNik's distortions. They represent legitimate fears of attack. Just look at Eilat last week to see what KampungNik's misdirections really mask.
David Harris is an extraordinary advocate. His Jewish sympathies have not been compromised nor hidden to gain political acceptance. Harris makes reasonable points but not at the cost of compromising the very values the Zionist movement represents.
He tries to assert Jewish exceptionalism by claiming historical ties to the region. 3000 years ago the Israelites where not the only people to call this land home, the Canaanites where their before the Israelites and the Philistines where there at the same time. As a natural migration route out of Africa this area has seen human habitation for 100,000 years, 95,000 of those without the Israelites. The fact is that this area is the birthplace of all three Abramic religions and as such they all have a claim.
That the Jewish people have a long history of suffering no one will argue. This has contributed to a sort of national paranoia that views all other peoples as potential persecutors and enemies. This has led to a people so consumed with their own historical suffering that they dehumanise others to justify any act their paranoid minds deem necessary to deal with their enemies and blinds them to when their conduct mirrors that of their historical oppressors.
They should blame themselves first. When they abuse the power that they gain through illegal and immoral methods, the society will soon or later revolt against them.
Just wait and see, in 20-30 years from now, they will be hunted and prosecuted here in US. Guaranteed. They should stop blaming others are take a critical look on their leaders and the way they enslave people to work for less so they can accumulate wealth..
"A system based on blasphemy might last, but a system based on injustice never does." Prophet Mohammad PBUH
Fact is we (the west) are not ready for peace. once we are there will be peace. We are a nation that don't do things unless it is in our interest. At some point peace will be in out interest and no geographical size of constraints will matter.
We invaded Iraq based on nonsense, so at some point we will fabricate something to make peace between the two groups.
So please stop making excuses for what we do .
Furthermore, we didn't invade Iraq based on nonsense. We invaded because our alcoholic President was determined to kill Iraq's President, and he didn't care how many others he had to kill & main in order to do so. Since we voted for that fellow - well some did - we get what we got.
The Arabs would not accept the Jewish State (later to be named Israel) in 1947, when it was supposed to be only a little sliver of land. Now the PA openly states that it will never accept Israel as the Jewish State. This is the crux of the matter.
Anyone who doesn't like it you know we have nukes!
And are you going to lend a hand, or is this something for somebody else to do?
When Israel has a government with a foreign minister Avigdor Leiberman has the instincts of a bouncer, how can we expect it to be rational about anything but staying in power. The demonstrations throughout Israel and especially in Tel Aviv indicate that my displeasure with this government is not unique; I support these demonstrators in their displeasure of Netanyahu's coalition government.
Peace treaties are the best defense, and both Israel and the Palestinians have been posturing because of internal problems of the PA and of the intransigent coalition comprising the current government. And so negotiations are aspiration rather than a reality. The people of Israel want peace, and as these demonstrations show, 63 years of never-ending fear-mongering by the current as well as past governments even when it isn't valid, the people of Israel are having their "Israeli summer," and they have faith in the IDF and institutions of the state, but their faith does not extend to this current government.
You may be correct...or not. That is why in the democracy called Israel, elections will determine the people's will (at least to the same extent as in other democracies.)
"because Jordan has so many former PalestiniaÂns in its borders." Actually, Jordan, 75% of the land mass of original mandatory Palestine, is comprised almost ENTIRELY of a Palestinian population, except for those Bedouin, and other migrants that the Saudi Hashemite dynasty to whom Britain gifted most of Palestine, continue to tenuously rule over.
"Peace treaties are the best defense," and "until the upset in Egypt Sinai was a quiescent border ". How do you square those 2 comments? Peace treaties are a piece of paper, as ephemeral as the value of the paper dollar, when it is backed by the non-existent "full faith and credit of the United States."
Finally, your "displeasure" with the Israeli government is that it continues to demand the security guarantees that the electorate voted for. The "displeasure' of the demonstrators is purely socio-economic.
8) It is different from if Indian people will demand a state inside of US state right now, Or immigrant from Mexico will demand CA and south lands from US. It even not the same as Japan will demand Kurils from Russia which they took after WW2 and there many other diff examples.
"And they utterly destroyed everything in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox and sheep and donkey, with the edge of the sword." -- Joshua 6:21
Tradition!
So, when you will master fully Hebrew or read best translations with best commentates you will find that Joshua did not follow the God command and wanted to negotiate with people of Jericho to convince them to drop the horrible practice to sacrifice their children to their Gods by murdering them… and you will learn more details from learning ancient commentary. In 48 -- 99% Israelis were living or populating free land, of course, these were Arab neighbors here and there on that small spot on the a map. But on a part that Jordan occupies in 48 there were no Jews left- they were forced to leave. That how E. Jerusalem came up in history. Go to E. J. and see old stone housed with spots - light colored strips on a stone - on a doorposts where Jewish mesuzas were posted before