March/April 2009-Opinion

Force: An Inconvenient Truth
David Frum

“The problem with you Jewish people,” the Arab politician said to me, “is that you are always for the underdog—even when the underdog is trying to kill you.”

During the Gaza war, many American Jews were gripped by exactly this strangely self-destructive sympathy. I saw it close up, among some of my own friends. They anguished as much (or more) over the suffering inflicted by Israel’s defensive actions as by the danger and terror of Hamas’ aggression. One of them—a former national security official with a lifelong involvement with Israel—burst out to me: “I’m just sick of it all. I can’t support it any more.”

This way of thinking was crystallized by Ehud Olmert in a speech to the Israel Policy Forum in June 2005: “We are tired of fighting; we are tired of being courageous. We are tired of winning, we are tired of defeating our enemies.”

Let’s hope that Israelis and Jews never again have reason to discover that defeat gets tiresome even faster than victory.

Yet the fatigue and frustration that Olmert—and my friend—expressed are real. Throughout the Gaza war, people asked the question: How does this end? They hit us—we hit them harder—but the problem does not go away. Everything we try to do to resolve this problem has failed. Oslo failed. Unilateral withdrawal from Gaza failed.

And it’s not as if any better alternatives are in sight. Help Fatah against Hamas? Unlikely to succeed. Negotiate with Hamas? That will empower people who seek only to destroy you. Reoccupy Gaza? Worst of all.

So we are left with the cycle of Palestinian provocation and Israeli response, a cycle that means chronic insecurity for Israelis, poverty and worse than insecurity for Palestinians.

As Jews, we recoil from the cruelty of the situation. As Americans, we are horrified by its wastefulness. And as modern rationalists, we are depressed by its overwhelmingly pointless stupidity.

In the face of all these instincts, what we need most is the humility to say: This problem needs desperately to be solved, but it is not we who have the power to solve it.

Sometimes in politics, the only thing to do is the dumb thing, not the smart thing. Your neighbor throws a rock at you. The smart thing is to walk over, find out what’s bothering him, and see if you can resolve the disagreement without escalating the violence.

Then he throws another, bigger rock.

And another.

And another after that.

At that point, you have to recognize:
I guess we’re in a rock-throwing competition, dumb as it is.

He hits me, I hit him harder. He hits me again, I hit him harder still. How does this end? I don’t know. I only know, if I don’t have the power to end it, I’m not going to improve the situation by meekly allowing him to throw rocks at me without consequence. Because then there will be more and more—and next maybe something worse than rocks.

Tragically, sometimes it is the dumb response that our fallible human species understands best. Israeli troops have evacuated Gaza. During the war, many predicted that Hamas would launch a massive wave of retaliation as soon as Israeli operations ceased. Instead, Hamas has been relatively quiet, either because its capacity has been weakened or because it has been deterred. We don’t know which, and it does not matter.

Throughout the long Arab-Israeli conflict, Israelis have been urged to hasten to make peace because time was not on their side. No? In 1948, Israel was a country not much richer than its neighbors and barely their military equal. As time passed, Israel caught up to Western European standards of living and American standards of technology. Israel’s enemies, by contrast, fell farther and farther behind. As recently as 1960, Syria’s standard of living exceeded South Korea’s, and Algeria’s nearly equaled Portugal’s. This conflict, painful and tragic as it has been for Israel, has weighed heavier and done more harm to those who have sought to destroy Israel.

My friend and co-author Richard Perle, the chairman of the Defense Policy Board at the Department of Defense during George W. Bush’s first presidential term, likes to repeat a story of an encounter with a peace protester. “War solves nothing,” the protester said. “Well,” Richard answered, “it has a better record than social work.”

The fact is that many of the seemingly most intractable political problems of our time were settled because one side or the other gave up the fight. Alsace-Lorraine was settled in this way. The Irish problem likewise. And Vietnam, too—the United States gave up.

So it might have to be with Israel-Palestine. And despite Olmert’s unwise words, everyone in the democratic world had better hope that in this conflict, it is not Israel that gives up first.

The American political scientist James Burnham once quipped that “where there is no solution, there is no problem.” Israel cannot solve this problem, and so it achieves nothing by worrying about it. Let those who lose most from war worry most about how to end it.