Will the road map lead to genuine Arab compromise?

by Ross Mackenzie
June 5, 2003
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/rossmackenzie/

There is the "road map." There are key heads of Arab regimes
condemning terror as never before. There is President Bush 
in the Middle East as these words are keyboarded, trying to 
demonstrate regarding the 55-year-old conflict between Arabs 
and Israelis a steadfastness equal to his (and America's) 
resolve in Iraq.

There is for the first time a Palestinian prime minister - 
in power all of one month - insisting he is working to win a 
"cease-fire" from suicide terror groups Hamas, Islamic Jihad 
and Fatah's Al Aqsa Martyr Brigades. There is Israel, in the 
person of Ariel Sharon, accepting the outlines of the road map 
and the ultimate creation of a Palestinian state "in principle."

If the dream of lasting peace between Arabs and Israelis is 
ever to be achieved, perhaps now is the time.

But more likely not. Despite so much seemingly favoring it, 
the road map likely will take its place over there on the shelf 
with all the other failed efforts, such as Oslo, Camp David, 
the Tenet Plan and the Mitchell Report. President Bush is 
trying to parlay his newfound credibility with certain Arab 
autocrats - if not with Arabs in the street, not even with 
vast numbers in the streets of Baghdad - into resolution 
of the Arab-Israeli conflict at last.

But the Arabs remain the essence of the problem.

Periodically the cry goes up. Israel must yield, relent, 
compromise and concede. Israel - always Israel.

Yet here is a country, a solitary democracy in an autocratic sea,
created by the United Nations and warred against constantly by 
Arab regimes and their foot soldiers - currently the Palestinians. 
Israel has repelled every Arab attack, won every war - as well 
it must, for the first war it loses will be the last war it fights. 
And still, following every conflict and during the intervening 
periods of relative truce, world opinion demands that the Israelis 
give up, give in, and give back e.g. the Sinai, the Golan, 
southern Lebanon, the West Bank, and the very Jerusalem so closed 
and defiled during Arab occupation.

Maybe the reason for this abiding hostility to Israel is 
deep-seated religious or ethnic hatred. Maybe in those areas of 
the Arab world dominated by Islam, it's the Koran. Maybe in the 
Western democracies - even at their highest political, social 
and intellectual levels - it's an inexplicable guilt combined 
with an insidious anti-Semitism.

Whatever. When in history has the attacked so determinedly been
required to compromise by yielding in various ways (land, security,
settlements, right of return, sovereignty over Jerusalem) to the
perpetrating vanquished - to give them through politics what they
lost in wars they have waged?

A Palestinian state already exists. It is called Jordan. The vast
Arab territories possess plenty of lands to set up housekeeping 
for the Palestinians - if the Arab regimes possessed the matching 
moxie (a moxie they demand of Israel) to relocate the Palestinians 
on those lands, and thereby to resolve the Palestinian "problem." 
But the Arab regimes neither offer nor provide such a solution 
because they prefer the Palestinians where they are - at the 
point of the spear and strapping on suicide bombs in their 
abiding war to eradicate Israel, and Jews, from the face of 
the Earth.

Despite prattling to the contrary by the too-long-Arabist State
Department, surely President Bush understands these things. 
Surely he understands the impossibility of success without 
working crucial changes in Arab attitudes. Surely he understands 
that the Palestinians, with Comrade Arafat still the puppeteer, 
are the Arabs' terror arm against Israel. Surely he understands 
that there can be no freedom without security, and that Israel 
cannot yield anything that compromises its security without 
compromising the liberty of its people.

Will the road map lead to an Israel dwelling side by side with 
a sovereign, peace loving Palestine by 2005? Not likely. 
Over the years, the Israelis have demonstrated repeated 
willingness to compromise on everything except the one thing 
on which they cannot - their own security - while the Arabs 
have compromised on hardly anything at all.

Unless the Arabs genuinely compromise as military losers 
customarily are required to do, we are far more likely to 
have an Israel more extensively walled off - fenced - against 
Palestinian incursion, because the Arabs will have left the 
Israelis no alternative route to at least a semblance of 
security.

Unless the Arabs relent on borders and settlements and 
right of return - and bring the Palestinians (and Palestinian 
terror) to heel - by 2005 the road map probably will have 
proved little more than a guide into yet another dead-end 
posted with a sign reading, "No Way Out."