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Jonathan Friendly is the national editor of , which owns the weekly Jewish newspapers in Detroit and Atlanta. He is a former journalism professor at the University of Michigan and a former reporter and editor at The New York Times.
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By Jonathan Friendly
February 8, 2005
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has told Israel that it faces "hard decisions" in the near future in its effort to secure a meaningful peace with the Palestinians. But, in fact, it is the United States that must make difficult -- indeed fundamental -- choices about its policies toward the Middle East.
Those choices will determine not just whether Israel and the Palestinians can find ways to tolerate each other, but also whether the Arab states and their current brand of Islam can live in peace with America and with the Western world.
What Rice was pointing out was that Israel must figure out how quickly it can relax some of its security measures so that daily life for ordinary Palestinians can become easier. Most of those measures -- IDF raids on militant strongholds, curfews in the West Bank, the security barrier and stringent checkpoints -- were forced on Israel more than four years ago when Yasser Arafat launched the second intifada with suicide bombings and shootings of Israeli settlers. Most Israelis would be happy to give those measures up, as well as to get out of Gaza entirely, if the new Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, proves able to rein in the terrorists of Hamas and Islamic Jihad and Fatah's own Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.
Israel has already shown it is willing to release a significant number of its 7,000 Palestinian prisoners and to turn over to the Palestinian Authority tax revenues it has been collecting. If all goes well, it may reopen its checkpoints to some of the Palestinians who were working in Israel in September 2000. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was willing to go to Sharm el-Sheik this week to meet with Abbas and Egyptian and Jordanian leaders, and he has accepted America's request to come to the United States to meet again with Abbas for more serious talks about the boundaries of a Palestinian state, control of Jerusalem and what number of Palestinians may be allowed to return to communities their parents left in 1948.
Israel has shown repeatedly that it is competent to defend itself and to make effective decisions about which Arab governments it can trust and how much. America is not in that position because it has never really thought through what it is must do in the Middle East. America's policies after World War I and the breakup of the Ottoman Empire were to leave "the Arabs" to Britain and France. After World War, II it thought about oil supplies and military bases to combat the Soviet Union. Even as recently as the first Gulf War, it was reacting more to Iraq's expansive secular nationalism than to the deeper challenge of Islam as a muscular pan-Arab movement.
Eventually, we are going to have to decide whether the West and Islam are, as scholars like Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington have proposed, engaged in a "clash of civilizations" during which there can only be truces, hudnas, but never permanent peace. We are going to have to decide whether we will truly encourage liberty and oppose the despotism that keeps so many ordinary Arabs uneducated, poor and hopeless. President George W. Bush has spoken ringingly of a commitment to democracy and freedom, but it is not apparent what the United States is prepared to do to help end the monarchies of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, the military tyrannies of Egypt and Syria or the religious authoritarianism of Iran.
Are we prepared to move slowly, perhaps over decades, but always in the same direction? Or will we continually tailor policies to suit our domestic political imperatives such as cheap oil and relatively bloodless wars?
Voting in Iraq and Afghanistan is progress. And the Sharm el-Sheik declaration of a formal end to Israeli-Palestinian violence is worth substantial rejoicing. But they should not distract us from our own need to make a very tough call about basic beliefs and our willingness to pay the price for staying a long and difficult.
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
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