JUST KISS AND MAKE UP

Arun Gandhi, the fifth grandson of India's revered icon Mahatma Gandhi, believes he has the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - just kiss and make up. Arun, the co-founder and president of the M. K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence at the University of Rochester, gave his views during an internet forum of panelists for the Washngton Post's "On Faith" page. He claimed that Israel and the Jews are the biggest players in a culture of violence that "is eventually going to destroy humanity."

Gandhi described Israel as "a nation that believes its survival can only be ensured by weapons and bombs." He went on to suggest that "it would be better to befriend those who hate you." Gandhi got part of it right - the only reason Israel has survived thus far is that it has the weapons and the nuclear bombs to defeat the standing armies (as opposed to guerrillas) of its sworn enemies. But Gandhi is out of his ever loving crackpot mind if he thinks Israel can survive by appeasing those who hate it and have vowed to eradicate it.

How can Israel befriend the Saudis who made demands of the Americans which were demeaning to the Israelis as a condition for their attendance at the Bush sponsored peace conference? (Refer to my blog, A LESSON FOR CONDOLEEZZA RICE, 1-13-08) How can Israel befriend the "moderate" Palestinians who will not repudiate repeated vows to destroy "the Zionist entity?" (Refer to my blog, ABBAS AND HIS "MODERATE" PALESTINIANS, 6-23-07) The answer is, it can't.

Here is what Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian Authority's chief negotiator, said on the eve of last December's much ballyhooed "peace" conference at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. Erekat declared that the Palestinians would never accept Israel as a "Jewish state." That non-negotiable declaration makes a mockery out of any hope for a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Why a Jewish state? With the defeat of Nazi Germany, the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust extermination camps were put in refugee centers with no other place to go. No country, including the U.S., was willing to accept them in any significant numbers. Israel became their only hope. Ever since it achieved nationhood, Israel has become a place of refuge for persecuted Jews from Russia and its former Soviet states, Poland, Lithuania, the Arab Mideast and Arab Africa. What if there were to be no Jewish state? Where then would the unwanted Jews in some Western and in all Muslim countries be able to go?

Following a shit storm of criticism, Ghandi apologized for his remarks about Jews and resigned from his peace institute. His grandfather in India, as well as Martin Luther King in our country and Nelson Mandela in South Africa, did change the course of history by nonviolent means. But those domestic tactics just don't work between nations when one side is determined to destroy the other.

Appeasement only whets the appetite of a hateful enemy. British PM Neville Chamberlain, acting on behalf of England and France in an attempt to avert the outbreak of war, appeased Hitler by letting Nazi Germany annex Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland. A year later, Hitler started World War II. The only reason the U.S. and the former Soviet Union did not attack one another was because each had the nuclear weapons delivery systems that could vaporize the other's major cities, industries and military facilities. No kiss and make up there until well after the Soviet empire had self-destructed.

Throughout its brief history, Israel has had only one steadfast friend - the United States of America. The United Nations has been generally and historically unfriendly toward the Jewish state. Most European nations, with their dependence on Arab oil, have been unfriendly toward Israel. Russia, China, Cuba, and leftist Latin American regimes continually side with the Palestinians against Israel.

Kiss and make up? Appeasement? Horseshit! Israel cannot survive without a superior military and its nuclear threat. It cannot survive without access to the headwaters of the Jordan River. It cannot survive without defensible borders and those require that Israel retain parts of the disputed West Bank. Israel cannot survive without a strong and resolute leader like Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu at its helm.

Unfortunately for Israel, oil dependent industrialized nations have long been siding with the Palestinians so as to curry favor with the Jew hating Saudis. In order to survive, Israel cannot afford to be pressured into satisfiying their insatiable hunger for Arab oil by making suicidal concessions to those whose avowed aim is to destroy the "Zionist entity." Nor can the Jewish state afford to cave in to the George Bush-Condoleezza Rice pressure on Israel to finalize a peace accord by making the same suicidal concessions, a political strategy designed to ensure a legacy for President Bush.