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. More ends must be bent over backward 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.
Hamas or Abbas, whichever the peacemaker chooses will surely make him an ass.
But peacemakers don’t fancy details. They like the 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 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 was otherwise going well.