NEWTON, Mass. – One might refer to retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Ralph Peters as a military Renaissance man. The strategic analyst for Fox News has authored 29 books and novels, including “Cain at Gettysburg,” which earlier this year earned him the W.Y. Boyd Literary Award for Excellence in Military Fiction from the American Library Association.
A Pennsylvania native of Welsh and German descent and the son of a coal miner and unsuccessful businessman, Peters is also a vocal supporter of Israel whose career success has been colored by Jewish formative influences.
“I started reading about Maimonides and other Jewish figures,” he told JNS. “And when I was at Penn State becoming a writer, Jewish teachers took extra time with me –they saw something.”
In an Oct. 23 briefing in Newton, Mass. organized by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) in memory of General Counsel David Wolf, Peters urged over 200 attendees to renew “the effort to make Israel’s case to the American people.”
“American soldiers have been out in the Iran and Iraq world, and for the last dozen years, they have heard Arabs say they have no problems with America, but just with Israel,” he told the crowd. “It starts sinking in. They start believing that Jews are using America. It’s not epidemic, not virulently active, but it’s there – the question of ‘Why are we supporting Israel?’ ”
Peters said CAMERA’s “work exposing dishonesty wherever it is found in the media is absolutely vital.”
His talk, he admitted, was not one laden with solutions.
“I don’t have answers,” he said. “I’m just trying to lay out the problem; the smart people here have the answers. I don’t have a crystal ball. I have a military experience, a pretty good track record of analysis, but I may get it wrong, too.”
One thing Peters is certain of is the need to protect Israel, which he linked to the West. “Israel geographically is in the Middle East,” he said. “But in every other respect, it is about 20 miles off the coast of Florida.”
Peters denounced those who associate Israel with Western imperialism.
“They were fighting with homemade weapons against tanks and modern arms,” he said of Israel’s battle for independence. “There are few David and Goliath stories in history that are so inspiring.”
Israel is hated because it is a success story, and its neighbors share humiliation over watching the Jewish state ascend from a collection of kibbutzim to what it is now, Peters said.
“Who started with less than the original Zionist settlers in Israel, not least of which the starving wretched refugees of the Holocaust?” Peters asked. “What did they have in 1947 and 1948, and look at what Israel is today. What a stunning triumph!”
Apart from the Arab mindset, dysfunctional borders are a major contributor to Middle East instability, Peters told the crowd.
“To understand the upheavals in Africa, the Middle East, and other areas, you have to understand where we are in history,” said Peters. “This genuinely matters. The borders of the Middle East were largely drawn at the Versailles Conference, amid arguments over who gets what. They only make sense if they’re drawn in Fontainebleau or in Europe somewhere, but not in the Middle East. They either pushed people together who didn’t want to be together, such as in Iraq, or pushed them apart, such as with the Kurds.”
European powers, “sometimes malform, sometimes deform, and sometimes reform the globe, for up to 500 years,” and their decisions “cannot be undone in one or two generations,” Peters explained.
But Peters believes that Arab radicals killing other Arab radicals is not necessarily a bad thing for the U.S. and Israel, since it means they aren’t killing Israelis and they aren’t killing Americans. Israel, he said, has more room to breathe with Egypt’s new military government than it did under the Muslim Brotherhood-aligned Morsi regime.
Peters does worry that the U.S. is being manipulated by Iran, through its new apparent willingness to negotiate concessions on its nuclear program.
“It is not enough for the Iranians to smile and say nice things in Geneva,” he said, referring to recent nuclear talks with the West. “[Iranian President Hassan] Rouhani said he wanted to see change in three to six months, and our president missed a chance to say ‘great, then we expect it in three months.’ You’ve got to call their bluff.”