A Bloody Endless Peace
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
"War is peace," entered our cultural vocabulary
some sixty-four years ago. Around the same time that
Orwell's masterpiece was being printed up, an
armistice was being negotiated between Israel and
the Arab invading armies. That armistice began the
long peaceful war or the warring peace.
The entire charade did not properly enter the realm
of the Orwellian until the peace process began. The
peace process between Israel and the terrorist
militias funded by the countries of those invading
armies has gone on for longer than most actual wars.
It has also taken more lives than most actual wars.
War has an endpoint. Peace does not. A peace in
which you are constantly at war can go on forever
because while the enthusiasts of war eventually
exhaust their patriotism, the enthusiasts of peace
never give up on their peacemaking.
Warmongers may stop after a few thousand dead, but
Peacemongers will pirouette over a million corpses.
As you read this, Obama is probably stumbling
through some ceremony or speech in Israel. The
speeches all say the usual things, but there really
is only one purpose to the visit. There really ever
only is one purpose to these visits. The revisiting
of the endless peace war.
Two decades after the peace process has failed in
every way imaginable. Two decades after cemeteries
on both sides are full of the casualties of peace.
Two decades which have created two abortive
Palestinian states at war with one another and with
Israel.
Two decades later, it's still time for peace.
Peace time means that it’s time to ring up some more
Israeli concessions in the hopes of getting the
terrorists and their quarreling states back to the
negotiating table for another photo op in the
glorious album of peacemakers. And if the photos are
properly posed, perhaps there will even be another
Nobel Peace Prize in it for all the participants.
It would be nice to think that the peace disease was
one of those viruses carried only in the bloodstream
of liberals. But it's not.
Every so often I am asked about a solution to the
Israeli-Palestinian-Arab-Muslim conflict and the
interrogators are baffled when I tell them that
there is no solution. "No solution at all? But there
has to be a solution. What of all the moderate
voices of goodwill? What of all the mothers who only
want to raise their children to sing happy songs
about peace? What about all the old soldiers who are
tired of war? What if we get them all in a room to
shake hands and pose for photos? Then won't there be
peace?"
As society has become more progressive, it has
become progressively more difficult to explain even
even to intelligent people that the world simply
does not work that way.
For two Cold War generations it was nearly
impossible to communicate that there really would be
no peace with the Soviet Union other than the cold
kind maintained by a mutual balance of power. Their
children and grand-children appear equally
unequipped to understand that most serious wars end
with either one side definitively losing and
fundamentally changing as a result of that defeat or
both sides maintaining a cold peace that will last
only as long as neither side believes that it can
squash the other with a surprise attack.
Israel did have peace until it began peace
negotiations. It wasn't a perfect peace, but aside
from the minor problems of the Intifada, a
comparative pinprick set against the violence that
began after that infamous Rose Garden handshake, it
was a good time whose like was then not seen again
until Israel stopped playing peace process with the
terrorists and learned to keep them away instead.
But the relative absence of violence, according to
the amateur peacemakers, isn't peace. A wartime
peace isn't what they want. What they want is a
peacetime war. Let there be handshakes and suicide
bombings. Let there be bloody bodies scraped off the
sidewalk, but let there also be children's choirs
singing about peace. Let a thousand tombstones rise,
so long as everyone can believe that peace is at
hand.
This vulgar worship of peace as a religion, a creed
that restores the faith of faithless men and women
in humanity is a combination of empty sentimentality
and calculated ignorance.
We must have peace in our time, the peacemakers
say. And Israel must provide it. More territorial
concessions must be put on the table. More goodwill
must be shown. More ends must be bent over backward
so that the peacemakers can stare at their
televisions and sigh, their faith in the goodness of
every man, woman, child and suicide bomber restored
once again.
Who will Israel make peace with? President Abbas of
the Palestinian Authority, who hasn't run for office
since Hamas won the elections, doesn't want to
negotiate. Hamas only wants to negotiate a
short-term pause in its campaign to destroy Israel.
When he isn't warring with Hamas, Abbas is declaring
that he shares the same view on terrorism as Hamas.
Hamas or Abbas, whichever the peacemaker chooses
will surely make him an ass.
But peacemakers don't fancy details. They like the
big picture. And the big picture is that there must
be an answer. Tens of thousands demanded it in
London before the war and Chamberlain delivered it
to them. Peace arrived in our time, shortly before
the Nazi bombers. Thousands more demanded it of
every American president who faced a Communist thug
across a negotiating table. And they got it.
There were nuclear treaties that meant nothing to
the Soviets and that did not bring peace, but that
made all the amateur peacemakers feel better about
themselves. And then instead of peace coming across
a negotiating table, the Soviet Union collapsed
because a persnickety cowboy wouldn't give up a
missile defense program that every Harvard graduate
knew could never work. And now, as another Harvard
graduate proudly tries to take credit for Israel's
Iron Dome, they still know it can't work.
Reagan didn't end the Cold War with treaties; he
ended it by doggedly pursuing superior firepower.
And that is why in the name of peace, the Harvard
grad looking over Iron Dome on his visit to Israel,
has shown Russia his peaceful flexibility by
abandoning the final stage of missile defense. Every
Harvard grad knows that missile defense doesn't
bring peace. But what could anyone expect from
Reagan? The poor dummy went to Eureka College. How
could he know that defeating the USSR wouldn't work?
Obama wants the same thing from Israel that he's
trying to get by selling out Poland on missile
defense. Peace. While the only times Israel had any
measure of peace is in the aftermath of a war,
Harvard grads and the people who listen to them know
that peace only comes about at the tail end of a
long string of concessions and appeasement. And then
when you have finally given your tormentor your
house keys, your car keys and your lucky
2-dollar-bill, then having rifled through your empty
pockets, he will finally nod grudgingly and agree to
peace at last.
That is if he doesn't actually want to kill you.
And that is the trouble with peacemakers; they don't
really take into account how to make peace with
killers. Most countries lock up violent murderers
when they kill a dozen people for fun. But when they
kill a dozen people in order to liberate other
killers or lay claim to a piece of land, then they
are worth negotiating with. And the only outcome of
the negotiations is establishing murder as a
negotiating tactic.
Peace leads to war because peacemaking rewards the
warmakers. It rewards the obstinate killers who
refuse to stop killing. And the more it rewards
them, the more they kill.
That is why Israel has been decades late in
delivering the peace that all the amateur
peacemakers want. Every time it phones Terrorism
Inc. to place an order for peace with extra
brotherhood on top, a suicide bomber pulls up to its
front door. And so for two decades, in a pesky
reality of peacemaking that none of the peacemakers
care to hear about... peace has meant war.
Every time a new phase of the endless peace process
is launched, more people die. More people die during
the negotiations than otherwise. The peacemakers
explain this by saying that the terrorists who
aren't at the negotiating table are trying to
sabotage the terrorists who are at the negotiating
table. The dead are sacrifices for peace and if
Israel fights back against either group of
terrorists, then it is guilty of obstructing the
peace process which was otherwise going well.
So here we are with Obama t-shirts on sale to
liberal American Jewish tourists in Jerusalem
kiosks, a city whose Jewishness the man on the
t-shirts will not recognize because it would harm
the prospects for peace. And the question on their
minds is how are we finally going to make peace
happen.
The rational response is that peace simply isn't
going to happen. The two terrorist groups in their
two states were set up for the sole purpose of
destroying Israel. They are funded and supported by
those countries that were attacking Israeli
farmsteads with tanks around the time that Orwell
was putting his final touches on "War is Peace,
Slavery is Freedom and Ignorance is Strength."
They are not going to stop trying to destroy Israel
because it's all they know and it's their only
reason for existence. And if that weren't enough,
they have spent generations teaching their children
to hate and there is no sign whatsoever of them
putting the brakes on the hate machine which
expresses more clearly than anything else that they
do not intend to stop fighting now or even twenty
years from now.
Not when their educational system is busy training
the suicide bomber of tomorrow.
But ignorance is a particular strength of
peacemakers. They don't want reasons why it can't
happen. Nor do they want to hear that the best kind
of peace with people whose religion tells them that
they will go to heaven if they die while cutting
your throat is the heavily armed peace of cold iron
and steel.
War is their peace and ignorance is their strength.