By BRET STEPHENS, WSJ, SEPT 6/13
Forty years ago Israel blundered disastrously on the eve of the Yom Kippur War because its military leaders had a concept about the circumstances in which it might be attacked, and the concept was wrong.
Twenty years ago, Israel blundered disastrously by signing the Oslo Accord, because its political leaders had a concept about what it would take to get peace, and the concept was wrong.
Beware of policy makers bearing concepts.
That’s worth pondering as the Obama
In 1973, what Israeli military planners called *Ha’Conceptzia*—the
Concept—was that Egypt would not attack without Syria, Syria would not
attack without Egypt, and Egypt lacked the long-range bombers and ballistic
missiles it would need to retake the Sinai Peninsula. It was a comforting
syllogism that allowed Israel to dismiss accumulating evidence of an
impending attack, including a personal warning from Jordan’s King Hussein,
as nothing more than psychological warfare.
The flaw with the Concept was the Concept: Theory provides vision at the
expense of clarity. It also obstructs thought. Had the Egyptian goal been
to retake the entirety of the Sinai, Anwar Sadat would never have ordered
an attack.
But Israel’s planners broadly failed to foresee that the Egyptians might be
prepared to forgo the hopeless military objective of retaking all of Sinai
for the feasible one of retaking some of it; that Sadat could use limited
military means to land a decisive psychological and political blow. The
Israelis also neglected to take account of the possibility that the
Egyptians could turn the Concept to their own advantage. The Concept made
no allowance for the reality that humans are intelligent and nature is
adaptive.
In that sense, the Concept was like every grand theory that ignores its own
role in reshuffling assumptions and reshaping incentives. It was the same
story with next grand Concept, when an Israeli government determined that
peace was in its hands to give, and that what it chose to give was what the
other side would be willing to accept.
The signing of Oslo, under Bill Clinton’s big shadow on the White House
lawn, is widely remembered as a moment of hope. In fact it was an act of
hubris.
Yitzhak Rabin (who would pay for Oslo with his life) thought he could
deputize Yasser Arafat as his sheriff, so that Israeli soldiers would no
longer have to go door-to-door in Gaza and the West Bank. Shimon Peres
imagined a new Middle East in which Arab states would be falling over
themselves to strike trade deals with Israel. Some architects of the Accord
thought the Palestinians could be bought off on the cheap, with autonomy
instead of statehood, with Ramallah as the capital instead of Jerusalem,
with Hamas permanently suppressed, with the refugee issue taken off the
table. Others believed the Israeli public could gradually be brought around
to concede things they never would have agreed to at the start.
Dissimulation was thus the essence of what came to be known as the peace
process. But the Concept behind Oslo was that Israelis and Palestinians
would accept their assigned roles—that they could be acted upon without
reacting in turn.
Arafat’s assigned role was to become governor of an inoffensive Arab
statelet. He, however, thought of himself as the second coming of Saladin,
the Muslim hero who captured Jerusalem from the Crusaders. The Israeli
public was assigned the role of providing democratic assent to territorial
concessions that previous Israeli governments had said for 25 years would
be suicidal. But the purpose of democracy is to give people a chance
to *contest
*their leaders. And Palestinians were given the role of being Arafat’s
sheep, with no interests, opinions or prejudices of their own. But
Palestinians know otherwise.
Oslo failed for the same reason Israel’s military assumptions 20 years
earlier had failed: It assumed a world in which people had no agency,
enemies had no cunning and circumstances remained static. The world’s not
like that. And while John
Kerry
reanimate the spirit of Oslo before he got distracted by
Syria, the Accord must rank as the greatest diplomatic debacle in modern
Mideast history.
Until now, that is. The Obama administration has given up on exacting some
tangible price on Bashar Assad for using chemical weapons, in exchange for
a promise by Russia that it will intervene to remove those weapons.
And so it begins again. We substitute the Concept for reality. We imagine
that those to whom the Concept applies will behave as we expect, or demand,
or wish. We neglect how the existence of the Concept changes incentives. We
lull ourselves into thinking that the logic of the Concept is the way of
the world.
And then the Concept blows up in our face. Don’t expect Barack Obama to pay
a political price for the latest installment of peace in our time.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324665604579078954043715792.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond
Thx Salubrius for your informative comment, particularly as regards what Woodrow Wilson understood and meant in speaking of the concept of self determination.
I am aware of the Soviet involvement, not only in guiding Arafat to rebrand his PLO from a terrorist organization to a liberation organization and to create a faux identity as a unique society with its own history and aspirations, distinct from their Arab brethren, which amounted to a distinction without a difference.
The Soviets intuited correctly that the liberal West would fall for the rebranding and distinct society idea. I wonder if the Soviets ever imagined just how far the West would fall for this.
The Soviets intervention was not altruistic of course. Rather it was in furtherance of their own hegemonic aspirations in the region which would in their grand plan unseat or at least diminish U.S. and Western influence in the region and thus advantage Soviet interests at the expense of Western interests. This was evident, not only by Soviet machinations behind and on the scene vis a vis standing with the Arabs-Palestinians against Israel, but also by the Soviets arming anti-Israel nations and the Palestinians in respect of their terrorist efforts.
A growing number are seeing the execution of that historical grand Soviet plan for establishing hegemony in the region by replacing or diminishing Western hegemonic influences in Russian leader Putin’s recent moves in respect of Syria and of course their arming the Iranians and continuing to sell them nuclear technologies and equipment.
Thx again for your informative comment. One more thing. I like the positive sentiment pseudonym you have chosen for yourself.
@
Bill Narvey Said:
Soviet Russia had a major role in attacking Israel politically and ideologically using its “dezinformatsiya”, the largest branch of the KGB. According to Major General Ion Pacepa, the change in this situation since Gorbychev is a myth. [See his recently published book “Disinformation” and also his article “Russian Footprints” in the National Review Online] Since 1950, according to the late Eugene Rostow, the Soviets have been seeking hegemony over the Middle East as a stepping stone to hegemony over Western Europe and found it could exploit Arab hatred of the Jews to carry out its goal. Its major weapons, he said, were Arab hatred of the Balfour Declaration, the Palestine Mandate, and the existence of Israel. It relentlessly pushed for Palestinian Statehood by inventing the Arabs living in Israel as a “Palestinian People” and pushing at the UN for resolutions establishing a “people’s” right of self-determination. It also pushed the “Zionism is racism” resolution. This right of the self-determination of a people was brought to the fore in 1918 by Woodrow Wilson as one of his 14 points to be applied to Syria, Mesopotamia and Palestine. But he was talking about decolonization that would not change the borders of a sovereign state. Despite the evolution of the natural law espoused by Wilson into International Law, International Law has never recognized this principle as applying to a requirement for self rule that would change the boundaries of a sovereign state, would violate its territorial integrity. International Law supports this principle only when applied to decolonization, not to secession. Legal commentators are suggesting that self-determination should also be available for secession as a remedial last resort when a “people” internal to a state have been subject to severe injustice. The Narrative of Perpetual Palestinian Victimhood is well established as a “poetic truth” [see Shelby Steele’s article in the Gatestone Archive on that] that can’t be dented by facts, logic, nor reason as a result of massive expenditures on propaganda by Arabs and Soviet Russia empowered by petrodollars. It is not hard to see Soviet influence on the left intellectual elite. According to Pacepa, Yuri Andropov thought of them as “soft putty in our hands”.
The progressive evolution of Western morals, principles, perspectives, skills, abilities and capacities to think, to analyze, to draw logical and reasoned conclusions and from there, to formulate concepts to premise and direct action to enable concept to become reality, has in an historical context been a great boon to the advancement of Western civilization in practically all fields of human endeavor.
Those same Western attributes however, have also at times served as a hindrance, if not a self deluded means to a harmful end in the field of international relations. That prejudicial consequential reality has been apparent when it comes to the West’s seeking to conceptually impose its will and turn its concepts into reality as between the West and non-Western peoples whose historical religiously, politically and culturally determined attributes, perspectives, views, interests and national aspirations are foreign and in some instances antithetical, to the West.
That harm has been apparent when it comes to the U.S. led West’s dealings with China, Russia and the Muslim Middle East where Iranians, Arabs and many non-state Israel-Jew hating entities including Hezbollah, Hamas and Palestinians remain avowed enemies of Israel. Though no Muslim enemy nation of Israel has since the Yom Kippur war, sought to attack Israel militarily, they have relentlessly done so politically and ideologically. That includes Egypt and Jordan which have peace treaties with Israel that have held as cold peace deals so far.
If one examines the differing, competing and conflicting mindsets between the West including Israel and the Muslim Middle East, including Palestinians, one will immediately recognize that what the West and Israel see as failures in respect of the Oslo Accords and now Obama’s position on the current Syrian crisis, concern over the use of chemical weapons as failures.
From the perspective of the Muslim Middle East and Palestinians however, the Oslo Accords have been a huge success in that the benefits and concessions they have won and get to keep because they are not held to account by the West or Israel for their virtually perfect record of breaches, brings them ever closer to their achieving their goals without having to give up practically anything.
The Oslo Accords in brief laid out a strategic staged plan for the establishment of a Palestinian Interim Self-Governing Authority in the West Bank and Gaza that would then provide a basis to proceed to further stages leading to a permanent settlement based on Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338.
The Palestinians have reached that final status stage and given up few, if any of their expectations and demands. They have been enabled because the West and Israel have ignored that reality, keeping their eye on fulfilling the concept and thus not held Palestinians to account.
Similarly, though Western experts charge Obama as failing in his foreign policy as regards Syria and in particular his stated goal of removing Syria’s chemical weapons from Assad’s hands, the Assad regime and its Russian supporters see it as a victory against the U.S.
The bottom line is that success or failure is determined in the eye of the beholder.
Why is the Israeli government continuing the charade. Why don’t they annex Y & S. The PLO has never amended their charter which calls
for the destruction of Israel.
The OSLO peace process failed because it was a charade. Brezhnev had to persuade Arafat to give up the slogan that the PLO would annihilate the Jews or drive them into the sea. He told Arafat, when Arafat demurred, that if he pretended to renounce violence and pretended to seek peace, the West would shower him with gold and glory. Ceaucescu, added that Arafat would have to pretend over and over again. Look at the facts. More Israelis murdered after OSLO than before. The PLO rejecting without comment offers of almost all the territory it sought. Are they not consistent with this concept? In fact it is not a theory. It is based on a factual report by Major-General Ion Pacepa, the highest ranking defector from the Soviet bloc during the Cold War. It was based on his personal knowledge. Brezhnev was right. According to reports, when Arafat died, his Swiss accounts totaled $6 billion. That is a lot of gold. As for glory, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Soviet Russia’s action was a part of its strategy discussed by the late Eugene Rostow in a 1980 paper “Palestinian Self-Determination”:Possible Futures of the Unallocated Territories of the Palestine Mandate. Soviet Russian desired to establish a hegemony over the Middle East in which its major weapon was exploiting Arab hatred of Jews, the Balfour policy and the existence of Israel. As a part of this policy it promoted at the UN the evolution of the natural law concept of majority self-determination to International Law — see the International Covenant on Civil and Political rights granting them to “peoples”, and invented the “Palestinian Arab People” designation for the small part of the Arab people residing in Palestine. (It also referred to Judea, Samaria as a “colony” and the Jews as colonialists.) However the International Law adoption of the concept of a people or nation’s self determination as required by natural law and now Internation Law never got anywhere except for decolonization. Where it required unilateral, secession without consent of the sovereign state from which it is seceding, it has not been accepted by International Law. This is made clear by the Helsinki Final Act of 1975. Where there is a tension between self-determination of a people through secession and territorial integrity of a sovereign state, territorial integrity always wins. That is why it is important for Israel to show it asserts sovereignty over Judea and Samaria and to traverse the claim of the so called “Palestinians” of inalienable rights of self-determination. By doing that it can avoid being pushed by other states who then would be unlawfully interfering with Israel’s internal affairs. It is noteworthy that the UNGA in Resolution 3236 has already accepted the Arab claim. It has no legal effect, but a great effect on world public relations.