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A Bloody Endless Peace

"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.

Two decades later the peace process has failed in every way imaginable and 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 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. Now that Abbas is back together with Hamas, there isn't even anyone to negotiate with.

But peacemakers aren't interested in details. They like their mindless idealism 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 has 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 aside from all the terrorism was going really well.

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.

Comments

  1. Anonymous10/7/14

    The progressive strand called peacemakers humming their old hippy anthem: “…imagine there´s no countries, no religions too…” New lyrics are desperately needed.

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  2. Anonymous10/7/14

    Superb article.
    But how does this analysis help us to stop Iran acquire nuclear weapons? Or is it too late?

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  3. Anonymous10/7/14

    There will be no peace with the Palestinians and the Arab world. They want us dead. We engage in sham "negotiations" with them only because of the high diplomatic, economic and political price of not doing so.

    In order to maintain the appearance of negotiating, we need to state positions on the central issues. There are two tactics with regard to this. One is to offer concessions that are limited enough -- either territorially or functionally -- to do little harm in the event that they ever need to actually be paid. This is a fool's game because the amount we can profitably concede in the face of continuing hostility is so limited as to not even constitute the appearance of negotiating. The second tactic is to condition any concessions on corresponding Arab concessions that they are unlikely to ever pay. At the moment, requiring cessation of claims on the part of the Arabs is a sufficiently high bar, though not without risk.

    What Obama did in his speech (and what Europeans have been doing for years) was to counter both tactics simultaneously. First, he demands concessions (the 1949 armistice lines as the default in the absence of agreement on swaps and no Israeli military positions in the conceded territory) that are indefensible in the absence of genuine stable peace. Second, he demands these concessions prior to cessation of claims by the Arabs (refugees and Jerusalem to be negotiated after borders).

    There is a point at which the price of participating in these sham negotiations becomes higher than the price of not participating in them.

    POSTED BY BEN AT 1:33 PM 9 COMMENTS LINKS TO THIS POST
    THURSDAY, MAY 19, 2011

    Now that I've finished my series, I'm going to occasionally take the liberty to comment on current events. So let me explain what Obama just said and did not say about his vision of a "peace" agreement:

    1. The borders will be based on the '67 lines with swaps. (That's the part the headline writers seized upon.)

    2. Israel must withdraw the IDF fully from the areas to be handed to the Palestinians. His words: "The full and phased withdrawal of Israeli military forces should be coordinated with the assumption of Palestinian security responsibility in a sovereign, non-militarized state." This contradicts one of Israel's main demands, namely, that the IDF remain in the Jordan valley.

    3. He pointedly did not insist that Palestinian refugees be resettled in the Palestinian state, as opposed to in Israel. His words: "Two wrenching and emotional issues remain: the future of Jerusalem, and the fate of Palestinian refugees. But moving forward now on the basis of territory and security provides a foundation to resolve
    those two issues in a way that is just and fair..."

    In short, we got some bla bla about the right to security and the right not to be isolated in the UN, but he sided with our enemies on all the substance.

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  4. Another outstanding contribution to clarity and the truth, Daniel. It needs to be seen by millions of cloudy eyes. Max.

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  5. Anonymous10/7/14

    Great piece! Very rational as well as entertaining. Too bad that the peaceniks can't be swayed by reason. As you've pointed out their beliefs are a set of delusions elevated to religious conviction. Their belief is that if "we only understood each other" then we could have peace. They truly can't emotionally grasp the reality that the Muslim terrorists' only goal is to kill those that don't believe like them. Maybe if they realize the Muslim terrorists think about them they way they think about the Tea Party Republicans, then they could understand how much the Muslims hate them.

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  6. "Now that Abbas is back together with Hamas, there isn't even anyone to negotiate with. " -- Well, thank God for little things!

    Sultan -- for the life of me, I can't fathom why Hamas decided that now is a good time to pick a fight with Israel. Any thoughts?

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  7. it's the summer, they have a bunch of rockets and a unity government with Obama's backing

    perfect time for a war

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  8. The close proximity in Israel between those that want Jews dead and committed thousands of violent acts to prove that they are serious right from the beginning of Jewish re-migration to it's ancient home-land in the 1900's and the delusion of the Jewish peacediots baffles me most. In the past when Germany or Russia where distant and comparatively unknown (by the general public) entities and the new power-hungry political leaders in those countries had done not much more than show their imperialistic desire, one could still imagine the idea that dialogue could defuse ideological differences. In Israel's case the left shows it's suicidal tendency by harboring the thought it can come to terms with proponents of a religion who's theological basis, the Koran, has a higher percentage of anti semitic passages than Mein Kampf and who have proven they only want Jews killed.
    Hereby a link to the English subtitled speech by Naftali Bennet at the Ha'aretz peace conference well worth seeing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZURAL5fHqU&feature=youtu.be

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  9. A taste of what Japan got for Saud, Kuait, Quatar, and Iran might work.

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  10. Anonymous11/7/14

    Whenever I read about famous Jews throwing fundraisers for Obama, I am reminded of an elderly, now-departed Jewish lady I loved. Whenever anything bad happened in her family, she would shrug her shoulders and lament "it's the Jews' fate to suffer in this life.' I gave up trying to convince her otherwise, since I ultimately began to see her point.
    How self hating and disloyal does a wealthy Jew have to be to raise funds for Obama ? Last I heard, he is the only world leader who has not called Netanyahu during the current crisis.
    sophie

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  11. Daniel, every thing you write is frustratingly true, but even more frustrating is the inability of the leaders of our country to do what is right, regardless of censure and condemnation from a world that censures and condemns us regardless of what we do.
    Rather than risk the the lives of the best of the best amongst us, which is inevitable when walking into a vipers den when the viper has had time to prepare and is waiting, we should be cutting off the electricity and fuel that we still astoundingly supply this enemy. You will notice that of all the targets attempted in Eshkelon, the electric power station there is not one of them, because that is where they get their electricity from! Is there another nation in the world, in the middle of a war, that would be supplying their enemies with the fuel and electricity?
    Do you know what עם דפוק means? Methinks you do.
    BTW, My reserve unit is waiting for a call-up, and my grandson is already there.
    Shabbat Shalom and may HaShem continue to watch over us.....in spite of ourselves.

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  12. Cletus Socrates11/7/14

    As a child growing up during the Vietnamese War I thought surely, if we could get all the parties to the table they would realize they could agree to stop killing each other.
    Today's progressive peacemakers have the same child-like idea they can do the same (well, many pursue it for malicious purposes)

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  13. Yehuda Lev, Holit, Israel12/7/14

    Mr Greenfield. Wish you would send the occasional commentary to Ynet to shake up the more irrational of my fellow countrymen. You put it much better than I ever could.

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  14. whirlwinder18/7/14

    Peace, for Islam, is just a short interlude in jihad so they can regroup, resupply arms and fighters and re-engage the enemy. It should not need to be stated, but every non-muslim in the world is their enemy.

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