A Durable Peace (26 page)

The civil enfranchisement of the Palestinians is by now a moot issue, since they have their own flag, their own passports,
and, most importantly, their governing institutions and the ability, however one may criticize it from a Western democratic
perspective, to vote for their representatives and leadership. What I am stressing here is that the issue at the core of the
Palestinian conflict with Israel is not lack of Palestinian self-determination as such, but the Palestinian demand for
unlimited
self-determination, beyond their current integration in Jordan and the arrangement for self-governance in a final peace settlement
with Israel. That Palestinian demand for unbridled self-determination is not in itself a demand for greater freedom to insure
Palestinian liberties, but a demand for the freedom to extinguish the liberty and life of the Jewish state. For unbridled
Palestinian self-determination would mean a Palestinian state armed to the teeth, in league with such regimes as Iraq (whose
leader, Saddam Hussein, has been repeatedly adulated by the Palestinians), and with powerful elements like Hamas and Islamic
Jihad, inspired by Iran, all openly calling for Israel’s destruction. Such a radical state, strategically poised on the hills
above Tel Aviv, would make Israel’s existence a precarious one at best.

If the Palestinians’ wish is merely to control and better their lives, that wish could have been accommodated many times during
the twentieth century. It certainly can be fulfilled in a final peace agreement with Israel. But if the Palestinians continue
to harbor a desire not to run their own affairs but to free themselves of Israel’s very existence, that wish will bury any
chances for a true and lasting peace. It is my fervent hope that the mainstream elements of Palestinian society will rid themselves
of this poisonous ambition, so that a genuine and enduring peace may finally be established between our peoples.

The Arab-Israeli conflict, therefore, is not rooted in the territories that changed hands in 1967, nor in the refugees that
resulted from the Arab attack on Israel in 1948, nor in any claimed lack of self
determination for the Arabs of Palestine. The real root of the conflict is the persistent Arab refusal to recognize Israel
within any boundaries.

These devices of Arab propaganda, especially the most recent one of self-determination, have been directed solely against
Israel and therefore have received the credulous support of many governments. These governments will soon have to reexamine
just how tenaciously they wish to support this claim. For the Arab campaign against Israel has developed what I call the Palestinian
Principle, which dictates that any minority that does not want to be a minority does not have to be one. The Arabs, I should
emphasize, were not demanding
civil
rights for the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza. If that were the demand, Israel could have satisfied it
by annexing the territories and making all the Arabs citizens of Israel or offering them full individual rights under Israeli
law as resident foreign nationals who would retain their present Jordanian citizenship.

The Arab governments and the PLO summarily rejected such options. They refused to consider the Arabs of the territories living
under an Israeli state in any condition, even as equal citizens. They were not interested in
civil
rights. Instead, they demand national rights over the territories—which means the creation of still another Arab state, another
Arab regime, another Arab army. It is not enough that the Palestinians enjoy full integration in Jordan, a country with a
solid Palestinian majority encompassing the majority of the territory of Palestine. It is not enough that members of the same
people living across the border from Jordan in the West Bank and Gaza should enjoy equal civil rights and self-governance
in any political settlement. On the contrary, we are told that the Palestinian Arabs of Judea-Samaria, a tiny area sixty miles
long by thirty miles wide, should be given a state of their own, as demanded by the Palestinian Principle. That is, the Palestinians
demand unlimited self-determination, with no limitation of potentially destructive sovereign powers.

What will this Palestinian Principle do to the post-Communist
world? I described in the opening of this book how the international community is going back to Versailles to seek organizing
principles for according sovereignties to various national groups. While Wilson at Versailles strove for a world in which
each distinct nation has its own distinct state (a demand that the subsequent conferences could not universally fulfill),
neither he nor his disciples ever said that each
minority
should have its own state—that is, in addition to a homeland in which the co-nationals of that minority constitute a majority.
The issue here is not whether the Lithuanians are entitled to have a state of their own, independent from Russia. The issue,
rather, is whether the
Russian minority
in Lithuania is entitled to have its independence from Lithuania despite the existence of an independent Russia. Similarly,
the issue is not whether the Czechs and the Slovaks should have retained their union or formed independent states, but rather
whether the Hungarian minority
within
Slovakia can legitimately agitate for independence
despite the existence of an independent Hungary.
Eastern Europe is replete with examples of minorities of one national population overlapping into the national territory
of another people. So is Western Europe, for that matter. So are all the republics of the former Soviet Union. So is Africa.
So are vast parts of Asia. Will each and every one of these minorities have its own state?

The United States is not exempt from this potential nightmare. In a decade or two the southwestern region of America is likely
to be predominantly Hispanic, mainly as a result of continuous emigration from Mexico. It is not inconceivable that in this
community champions of the Palestinian Principle could emerge. These would demand not merely equality before the law, or naturalization,
or even Spanish as a first language. Instead, they would say that since they form a local majority in the territory (which
was forcibly taken from Mexico in the war of 1848), they deserve a state of their own. “But you already have a state—it’s
called Mexico,” would come the response. “You have every right to demand civil rights in the United States, but you have no
right to demand
a second Mexico.” This hypothetical exchange may sound farfetched today. But it will not necessarily appear that way tomorrow,
especially if the Palestinian Principle is allowed to continue to spread, which it surely will if a new Palestinian state
comes into being.

Ironically, the inevitable effect of the Palestinian Principle is to
diminish
respect for minority rights internationally. For if every minority can be considered a serious threat to the long-term integrity
and viability of any state, then governments will find themselves seeking ways to suppress and ultimately eliminate all recognizable
minority groupings within their borders. What this means could be seen recently in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where Serbian nationals
were engaged in a campaign of “ethnic cleansing” against a Moslem minority that constituted a local majority. The mentality
behind the horrifying efforts to drive the Moslems from their homes is not unrelated to the Palestinian Principle. For if
every minority has the right of secession, it is not surprising that some wrongly conclude that they had better expel the
minority and avoid the trouble altogether.

What I am arguing is that the Palestinian Principle has potentially divisive and destabilizing consequences in the search
for a new world order. It is a political fragmentation bomb that will explode the civil and national peace of many lands,
not only because the Arabs have promoted the incendiary idea that no minority must remain a minority, but also because the
PLO until very recently demonstrated grisly
methods
to pursue its realization: terror, blackmail, extortion, and the co-option of the entire world stage without moral inhibitions
or limits. Up until the collapse of Communism, it was possible for many governments to subscribe to the Palestinian Principle
without thinking too carefully about its consequences for themselves. The Cold War not only froze the national conflicts within
the vast territories controlled by the Soviet empire; it put a cap on the amount of leeway that contending sides in national
disputes had outside the direct Soviet dominion. The United States and the Soviet Union may have supported competing
sides in Latin America or Asia or Africa, but they made sure that things would not get out of hand. Now that the superpower
rivalry has abated, the paradoxical result is
less
order and less security in national conflicts, not more. New champions of unlimited self-determination proclaiming their
“national rights” can crop up in the most surprising of places, and if the feverish attempts of the arming of Iraq, Iran,
and other countries with weapons of mass destruction is any indication, their capacity to acquire formidable weapons to exercise
their perverted versions of “self-determination” is expanding, not shrinking.

This, then, is the new threat posed by a new Palestinian state in the Middle East. It is not merely the obvious physical threat
to Israel, which I will discuss in detail in
Chapter 7
. It is not even the danger to peace and stability in the Middle East
as a whole, which will surely be threatened by the emergence of such an independent state capable of purveying terror and
other dangers. Even more than these, it is the impact that the creation of such a state will have on the problem of limiting
the demands of minorities for sovereignty the world over.

At present, the chief contribution of the Palestinian Principle has been to obstruct the achievement of a negotiated settlement
to the Arab-Israeli dispute. For it is important to make one point clear: No matter how the borders are drawn, any durable
settlement would leave a significant number of Arabs living side by side with their Jewish neighbors under Israeli sovereignty.
(Twenty percent of Israel’s citizens are Arabs.) It has long been recognized that being a minority is not necessarily a tragedy.
All nations have their minorities. The tragedy is to be
everywhere
a minority This was precisely the situation of the Jews before the creation of the State of Israel. But the Arab rejectionists
employ the reverse logic: For them, it is a tragedy that Arabs should be a minority.
anywhere
in the Middle East. They find it intolerable that some Arabs should live as a minority in Israel, even as non-Arab peoples
live as minorities in
their
midst—and this despite the fact that the Arab citizens
of Israel enjoy the civil liberties and rule of law that are denied to many non-Arab peoples living under Arab regimes.

The Palestinian Principle is not a standard that the Jewish state can apply to its Arab minority, and it is not a standard
the Jewish people has ever applied to itself. The Jews who constituted significant minorities in many lands for centuries
before the Holocaust (for example, 10 percent of Poland’s population) never demanded a state of their own in the areas in
which they formed a local majority. Nor did the Jews, once they had attained statehood, possess twenty-one states and ask
for more, as the Arabs today demand for themselves.

The Palestinian Principle has been, of course, enthusiastically accepted by Moslems all over the world, who see it as the
logical extension of the idea of a Realm of Islam. The American writer Charles Krauthammer was able to point out that the
intifada (the mass violence of Palestinian Arabs against Israel) is not restricted to the Arab-Israeli dispute—it is a worldwide
enterprise directed at many non-Moslem governments by radical Moslem minorities demanding secession: in Azerbaijan and Tajikistan
from the Soviet Union before their independence; in Kashmir from India; in Kosovo from Yugoslavia; in Xin Jian from China;
and so on. The Palestinian Principle seems to mean that if there is ever a significant Moslem majority in any section of Britain
or France, there will eventually be a demand for secession there as well.

If the Palestinian Principle is transparently false and obviously dangerous, how is it that it has been accepted by so many
people around the world? The first reason is that the Arabs took pains to invent a new Palestinian identity in the West Bank,
in effect creating a “West Bankian” people presenting the demands of an entirely new “nation.” If the issue had been presented
in irredentist terms—that is, that the Arabs in Samaria and Judea wished to be reunited with Jordan—the conflict would have
been reduced to a squabble over where the border should be drawn and the whole issue would have lost its hold on Western imaginations
so captivated by the idea of self-determination.

The second reason for the virtually unchallenged spread of the Palestinian Principle is Arab oil. One cannot overlook the
power and influence of the Arab League and OPEC, which in the 1970s transformed themselves into mighty propaganda machines
for the cause of self-determination of the Arabs of Palestine. The Palestinian cause was critical for the oil sheikhs of the
Persian Gulf, who were able to get away with subsidizing the PLO and anti-Zionist propaganda instead of actually shelling
out the funds necessary to build homes for the refugees. Thus the participation of the oil states became a decisive factor
in focusing attention on the Palestinian Arabs. It is quite likely that if there were 150 million Basques in twenty-one Basque
countries controlling 60 percent of the world’s oil supply, incessantly agitating and fulminating for a quarter of a century
about the need for self-determination for the Basques of Spain (all the while threatening oil cutoffs and aircraft hijackings
if this self-determination were not granted), many would believe today that the main obstacle to peace in Europe, possibly
in the world, is the “Basque Problem.”