The Palestinians and the Israelis must learn they can’t win
Some wars last a lot longer than others, even when one has lost, or at any rate can’t win. Why do some leaders take decades to negotiate peace? Do some conflicts continue endlessly, with all the suffering and destruction they cause, merely because the leaders are numbskulls?
In some cases — especially in dictatorships where decisions really can come down to one person — blockheaded leaders are to blame. Dictators frequently don’t care if people die, so long as they can pretend they are not losers.
But in other conflicts — I think of my own area of expertise, Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries — there are structural reasons that make it hard for leaders to recognize that they have in fact lost.
The big nation couldn’t win
The Thirty Years War (16181648), for example, lasted so long because (among other reasons) the Habsburgs were the mightiest power in Europe. They were Emperors of Germany and kings of Spain, Portugal, Naples and Sicily, Hungary, and rulers of Austria and what is now the Czech Republic.
They were fighting against their Czech subjects, and then against the Elector Palatine, whom they defeated, and then the King of Denmark, whom again they defeated. They couldn’t believe that they could not win a complete victory — even though a major power, France, was funding their opponents behind the scenes. Eventually, France just declared war directly.
Similarly, the Habsburgs had lost the Eighty Years War (15661648) against the Dutch, their former subjects, who had rebelled against them. The Dutch provinces were so small — but they were wealthy, their cities were heavily fortified, and they could stop the Habsburgs’ army anytime it became necessary by breaching their dikes. It is particularly hard for a large power to recognize that it has been defeated by a small one.
A similar dynamic seems to be at work in the contemporary world. If you want to negotiate successfully, you can’t use the occasion to feel better by screaming out your anger. You have to compromise, and that means you have to have a calm, realistic assessment of what’s possible.
When nations get stuck in endless war, their partisans get ever more emotional, shrieking about how just their cause is and how demonic their opponents are. Even if it is true that your opponents are brutal and commit war crimes ... you still have to deal with them. They are not going away.
The Palestinians can’t either
This brings me to the longest lasting, perhaps most intractable conflict today, that in the Middle East. I fear that the Palestinian leadership has the same difficulties that the Habsburgs had in the seventeenth century.
Because of the peculiar circumstances of the conflict, they can see themselves as the top dogs, compared to the embattled Israelis, since there are a lot more Arab Muslims than Jews, and we know who surrounds who and which side has the oil. They believe that eventually they must win, and therefore they’re unwilling to compromise.
But they see themselves as the underdogs, compared to the successful Israelis. They feel oppressed while believing that eventually they must win, and therefore they’re even more unwilling to compromise.
The conflict should have ended back when Bill Clinton was President, over 20 years ago. Clinton later wrote of those negotiations, “It was historic: an Israeli government had said that to get peace, there would be a
Palestinian state in roughly 97% of the West Bank, counting the [land] swap, and all of Gaza, where Israel also had settlements. The ball was in Arafat’s court.”
But Arafat never responded to the proposal. In 2007, Palestinian negotiators treated a similar (even slightly better) proposal from Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert the same way. Apparently, they hope that if they wait forever, they will get everything they believe they are entitled to — that is, total victory.
Palestinian leaders need to recognize that Israelis aren’t going away. They have nowhere to go, and know no other home — and just in case anyone has forgotten, they have nuclear weapons. Palestinian supporters must recognize that Israel exists.
Palestinian leaders have demanded a return to the pre-1967 status quo for 50 years. This isn’t serious negotiating. If your demands never change, you don’t really want a deal. But the status quo favors Israel.
Nor can the Israelis
In the current climate, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is also an obstacle to peace. Sometime, perhaps shortly before he comes up for re- election, the Arab world needs to propose a credible peace proposal, so that Israeli voters have a good reason to vote Netanyahu out of office.
Until then, while Palestinian leaders keep denying reality and the activists keep screaming “No justice, no peace,” people keep killing each other endlessly. The worst people control events. And there’s nothing just about that.