Conrad Black: Only after Hamas is destroyed can there be a Palestinian state (msn.com)
Given the Gazan war and the
tensions that are always present in the Middle East but are particularly high
now, a little original thinking would be particularly useful. As I have had
occasion to write in this space before, there can be no resolution of the
Israeli-Palestinian issue until the terrorist apparatus of Hamas is completely
destroyed. This is not just another episode, the latest skirmish, in the
endless series of such incidents until on some far-off day by sheer attrition
the parties turn their swords into plowshares.
Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7
was an act of war in violation of an agreed ceasefire and was conducted with
the maximum possible barbarity, with the support of the Iranians, to sabotage
an impending agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and specifically
targeted against the most vulnerable people — children, women and the elderly,
and those who had shown their commitment to reconciliation with the Arabs by
choosing to live so close to the border of Gaza. It combined the sneak attack
aspect of the Japanese descent on Pearl Harbor with the repulsive notion of a
massacre of the innocents as on 9/11 at the World Trade Center in New York. The
loss of life was somewhat smaller in Israel, but proportionately much greater.
There could be no clearer
statement of the absolute refusal of Hamas, the governing authority in Gaza, to
accept the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. Since they will never
agree to it, they’ve made it clear that they will never cease to persevere
against Israel in the most barbarous manner possible. Since no peace, beyond a
tactical ceasefire certain of eventual violation, is available with such a
recalcitrant and genocidally motivated organization as Hamas, the road to peace
is through the extermination of its terrorist capacity.
Israel is approximately halfway
towards that goal and has substantially worked out a plan for its completion.
It is clear that hundreds of millions of dollars of assistance given supposedly
as humanitarian aid, including from the government of Israel, to the Hamas
regime in Gaza has gone to strengthen Hamas’s military capabilities and to
build the most elaborate subterranean network of bunkers and tunnels in
history. It is here that the remaining Hamas fighters are lurking, counting on
misplaced western hysteria about civilians and hostages to save them from the
justified vindictive wrath of the Israel Defence Forces.
How
Israel's war against Hamas has impacted the Middle East | Watch (msn.com)
When then-prime minister Stephen
Harper gave one of the most cogent and important speeches of any Canadian prime
minister since Pierre Trudeau’s imposition of the War Measures Act in 1970, to
the Knesset in Jerusalem in 2014, he concluded his remarks: “Through fire and
water Canada will stand with you.” This is the appropriate policy for a western
democracy to espouse. The Jews and Syrians are the senior sovereign peoples in
the region between Persia (Iran) and the Mediterranean, and the idea that all of
Israel constitutes an occupation of other people’s land is false. The
Palestinians are Arabs that are supposedly, according to some theories,
descended from the Philistines and can be distinguished from the Jews, Bedouins
(Jordan), Syrians, Egyptians and the Lebanese Christians who may broadly claim
descent from the Phoenicians.
In the same address in 1917 when
the British foreign secretary, Arthur James Balfour, promised a Jewish homeland
in Palestine, then governed by Turkey, he promised not to compromise the rights
of the Palestinian Arabs, and the obligation to grant a state to Israel as a
homeland for the Jews comported a parallel obligation to find a suitable
jurisdiction for the Palestinian Arabs. Obviously, that second obligation has
not been fulfilled but the way to address it is not to attempt to destroy the
obligation to the Jews, which has been fulfilled and which they have
transformed miraculously into a wealthy and flourishing democracy: the Jews
have made the desert bloom.
The five countries created in
the aftermath of the First World War by the senior Allied leaders, French Prime
Minister Georges Clemenceau, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and the
president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, meeting in Paris, were
Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. They have all
disintegrated, all of them except Czechoslovakia violently. (Jordan was
established separately two years later by British colonial secretary Winston
Churchill, as he said, “on a sunny Sunday afternoon in Jerusalem.“) Most of the
European states that were the components of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia are
doing well, some of them very well.
If the West had leaders of the
stature of the chief authors of the treaty of Versailles in 1919, it would be
time to meet again with suitable leaders from the Mideast, and reconsider
demarcations between the failed states of the region. The West Bank, as has
been foreseen for the last 25 years in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, should
go to a new Palestinian state after being narrowed somewhat: Israel cannot be
asked to return to a width of only nine miles from the Mediterranean to its
eastern border 30 miles northwest of Jerusalem. Gaza should be deepened very
substantially, and an assured and secure permanent road placed between the West
Bank and Gaza.
The Palestinian state would be
welcome to east Jerusalem as a capital, and a special regime would have to
govern sacred sites shared by different faiths, most conspicuously the Dome of
the Rock, built upon Solomon’s Temple and the second Temple of Jerusalem. As
the majority of the population of Jordan are Palestinians, Jordan could concede
a modest amount of territory adjacent to the West Bank to give the Palestinian
homeland a larger population and greater geographic depth (and give greater
stability to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan by relieving it of some of its
Palestinians).
Iraq has been an almost complete
failure and the Kurds have earned a sovereign state of the Kurdish territory of
Iraq and with the right to receive Kurds from neighbouring countries who wish
to settle there. It is an oil-rich region around Mosul and the Kurds are
resourceful people who would land on their feet quickly. The Shiite majority of
Iraq in its south and east, culminating at Basra, have a religious affinity
with Iran but not a cultural one and they could remain connected to Sunni Iraq
around the city of Baghdad if some kind of confederation could be agreed.
Some percentage of Kurdish oil
revenues could be paid to the emergent Iraqi confederation in exchange for
Kurdish independence. Syria and Lebanon should probably be divided along local
ethnic lines, giving the principal groups a relatively high degree of autonomy
and it would be necessary, for there to be any security, for the surrounding
powers — Turkey, Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and ultimately Iran when it learns
to behave responsibly again — to guarantee these arrangements, with the support
of NATO and Russia, which would sponsor them.
If Canada had shown any recent
aptitude for constructive international arrangements and had maintained a level
of economic growth and military strength and diplomatic innovation adequate to
make it relevant in the councils of the world, as it was during the Second
World War and through most of the Cold War and during the Harper government, it
would be well positioned to propose the opening of discussions towards a
comprehensive regional agreement, as soon as Hamas had been destroyed as a
terrorist operation.
As it is, we bring nothing to
the theatre, and have no diplomats of the stature to make a difference, as
Lester Pearson was during the Suez crisis of 1956. In international relations
as in other spheres, vacuums are unnatural, and all of this will be different
with the regime changes that now appear to be likely and desirable in Ottawa
and Washington.
National Post