02 Haziran 2010, Çarşamba
saat: 11:27
Zionist leaders' day-to-day
experience and their own nationalist
ideology gave them no reason to
expect Muslim Middle Easterners, and
especially the inhabitants of Palestine, to
greet the building of the Jewish National
Home with anything but intransigent and
violent opposition. The solution to this
predicament was the Iron Wall - the
systematic but calibrated use of force to
teach Arabs that Israel, the Jewish "stateon-
the-way," was ineradicable, regardless
of whether it was perceived by them to be
just. Once force had established Israel's
permanence in Arab and Muslim eyes,
negotiations could proceed to achieve a
compromise peace based on acceptance of
realities rather than rights.
Zionist military thinking focused on how to
build, train and equip an army capable of
not only protecting the Yishuv and then the
state of Israel, but of delivering painful
preemptive or retaliatory blows against
Arab enemies. The core idea was not to
avoid war, but to insure victories of such
vividness and consequence that Arabs
would come to regard Israel's existence an
immutable, if unpleasant, fact of Middle
Eastern life. Once that attitude was
instilled, the objective was to combine the
stick of coercion with the carrot of compromise
to achieve negotiated peace
agreements.
Zionism's use of
violence against Arabs was traditionally
conceived as a pedagogical device to
convince Arabs of the Jewish National
Home's indestructibility, and then to
persuade some among them to negotiate
mutually acceptable deals based on the
alternative of suffering painful defeats.
It is also worth noting that, once
defined in this manner, there is no limit on the measures Israelis can imagine are
justified in taking against it. After all, when survival is perceived to be at stake, there is
neither need nor rationale for thinking
about consequences or how to calibrate the
use of force to foster positive outcomes or
reduce the political fallout of military
action.
Ian Lustick - ABANDONING THE IRON WALL: ISRAEL AND "THE MIDDLE EASTERN MUCK" (MIDDLE EAST POLICY, VOL. XV, NO. 3, FALL 2008)
