MIDDLE EAST: SELF-DEFENSE OR WAR?

By Dietrich Fischer and - - Reprint | | Print |

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NEW YORK, Jul 24 2006 (IPS) - Bombs are falling again on innocent civilians in Lebanon, Gaza, and northern Israel. Why? It is necessary to go back in history to understand what is happening today, write Johan Galtung, a Professor of Peace Studies and Founder and Co-Director of TRANSCEND: A Peace and Development Network (www.transcend.org), and Dietrich Fischer, Director of the European University Centre for Peace Studies (www.epu.ac.at) and Co-Director of TRANSCEND. The problem is the vicious cycle of repeated mutual retaliation characteristic of wars, and underlying it the unresolved conflict between Jews and Arabs. This problem cannot be solved by de-escalation in the choice of targets and level of destruction. A ceasefire is urgent to end the immediate suffering, but it will remain only temporary as long as the underlying conflict is not solved. Israel should consider how to make peace rather than war. One way out might be a Middle East Community modeled after the European Community of 1958, with Palestine fully recognised. It would be in Israel\’s and its Arab neighbor\’s interest to learn from that success story. People of good will should come together in the midst of the present crisis to elaborate what a peaceful Middle East could look like.

Palestine is the victim of settler colonialism, practiced by England on what later became the territory of the US, and upheld by both of them as a right, conferred to Jews in the 1917 Balfour Declaration.

Someone suggested to a German, “Since Germany is responsible for the holocaust, a Jewish state should really be established in Germany, as partial compensation. Baden-Wuerttemberg would be about the right size.” The German protested, “That is impossible! Where should the people go who now live there?” This shows how the Palestinians who used to live in what is today Israeli territory must feel.

Of course, biblical history, the location of ancient Jewish holy sites, and the reality of Israel’s existence as a state for what will soon be 60 years, make it necessary to find a solution that allows both Israeli and Palestinians to coexist peacefully in the former Palestine.

Palestine is further the victim of Israeli occupation after the 1967 war. Israel withdrew from Gaza in September 2005, but still occupies the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Therefore, under the United Nations charter, the right of self-defense would accrue to Palestine as acts of liberation from occupation by an illegal war. UN Security Council Resolution 242 (1,i) clearly demands the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the territories occupied in 1967.

The problem, however, is that Palestine as a state does not now exist. There is a right of self-defense, but to whom does it accrue? To the Palestinians, a non-state? They live many places. To the Arab/Muslim world? That means many and strongly connected people, separated mainly by artificial borders drawn by Western colonial powers, according to Caesar’s principle “divide and rule“. Does it accrue to Lebanon, and if so, also to Hezbollah as one of the many militarised factions in Lebanon? Does it apply to Syria, also with territory occupied by Israel?

Or is this an on-again/off-again war and like all wars two-way, with a first phase starting in May 1948 between the state of Israel and Arab states, and a second phase starting in June 1967 with Israel against Arab states, but increasingly against Arabs in general, and at present broadening to Muslims in general?

A war consists of offense and defence. Defence can take two forms: a retaliatory attack into the territory of the aggressor (offensive defense), or simply repelling an aggressor from one’s own territory up to the border, but not beyond (defensive defense). The mutual killing and capture of military combatants is no surprise. In modern war, the use of rockets and bombs dropped from the air has become typical, and in post-modernity, even the killing of civilians by state terrorism or non-state terrorism.

The problem is not who started it, whom is to blame, or what can and cannot be justified as “self-defense“: the parties will defend themselves by the means available to them. Nor is the problem whether an act of war is “proportionate“: the stronger parties will use what they have, and in so doing will, as here, stimulate the desire for increased armament, even the acquisition of nuclear weapons, in the weaker parties.

The problem is the vicious cycle of repeated mutual retaliation characteristic of wars, and underlying it the unresolved conflict between Jews and Arabs.

This problem cannot be solved by de-escalation in the choice of targets and level of destruction. Albert Einstein compared the arms limitation talks of the League of Nations to discussions in a town council after a series of fatal stabbings on how long and how sharp the knives ought to be that people are allowed to carry when they go out.

A ceasefire is urgent to end the immediate suffering, but it will remain only temporary as long as the underlying conflict is not solved. Israel should consider how to make peace rather than war.

What has ended the long cycles of wars between Germany and France, and between the members of today’s Nordic Community, was a joint project of building a better future for all, through mutually beneficial cooperation, something that can inspire the imagination and hope of people who suffered from frustration and despair.

One way out might be a Middle East Community modeled after the European Community of 1958, with Palestine fully recognised.

In early 1945, Germany was at war with 25 countries it had occupied and three nations it exposed to genocide–the Jews, the Cinta-Roma, and the Slavs, particularly Russians. Today it has reasonable relations with them all. How was it able to accomplish that? The key was reconciliation, through apology and compensation, but above all letting truth speak through new textbooks, hiding nothing, conveying to victim nations and future generations of Germans the horrors of Nazism with a German vow of Never Again. Germany also became a pillar in the European Community construction, while avoiding a dominant role. It remained a friend of the US but, like any good friend, said No when the friend went astray and attacked Iraq.

It would be in Israel’s and its Arab neighbor’s interest to learn from that success story. People of good will should come together in the midst of the present crisis to elaborate what a peaceful Middle East could look like. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)