A Proper Place for Appeasement
The Government of Israel is busy: suggesting negotiations over Shebaa Farms with Beirut’s new Hezbollah-dominated government; using a German mediator to release to Hezbollah a terrorist who killed an Israeli child by smashing her head with a rifle butt; using a Turkish mediator to offer Syria the Golan Heights; and using Egypt to establish a cease-fire with Hamas that allows the terrorist group to hang on to Gilad Shalit and reasonably claim a victory for violent revolution.*
The Government of Israel is busy: suggesting negotiations over Shebaa Farms with Beirut’s new Hezbollah-dominated government; using a German mediator to release to Hezbollah a terrorist who killed an Israeli child by smashing her head with a rifle butt; using a Turkish mediator to offer Syria the Golan Heights; and using Egypt to establish a cease-fire with Hamas that allows the terrorist group to hang on to Gilad Shalit and reasonably claim a victory for violent revolution.*
This diplomatic push appears to be an effort to buy a period of calm, rather than a belief that Israel will realize its strategic goals from the negotiations or the concessions. This leads to two questions: what are Israel’s strategic goals, and of what benefit is a defined period of limited calm (other than that it beats living under fire day-to-day)?
Israel’s strategic goals have has been political legitimacy and, “Termination of all claims or states of belligerency… [and the] right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force” – the promises of UN Resolution 242. The corollaries are that Israel cannot fight a war of attrition against larger and less politically sensitive hostile forces, and wars have to be fought on enemy territory.
A period of calm, purchased by ceding to the enemy what it currently demands while knowing that later demands are likely is known as appeasement. Although inextricably tied to Munich, Hitler and Chamberlain’s umbrella, appeasement is not always wrong. Carefully calculated, it might be useful if a country isn’t ready to fight now, but will be later. Serious students of WWII acknowledge that Britain was in no position to go to war in 1938, having failed to squash Hitler in 1936 when it would have been easier. Hitler had used the interregnum to his advantage and Britain had to catch up.
If Israel decides it is not now in a position to fight Hezbollah or Hamas, keeping them quiet may work, as long as the government correctly calculates the enemy’s increased ability and readiness to fight next time and uses the time wisely itself. Certainly Hamas and Hezbollah will be using it to their advantage. Or, if Israel has decided that Iran requires a concentrated effort, throwing bones to the local warlords may provide the requisite time and space to tackle the most pressing strategic problem.
This assumes, of course, that the Government of Israel has made a calculated choice for calculated gain and isn’t swallowing its own peace propaganda.
On the other hand, there appears to be no rational calculation for Secretary Rice’s current obsession with giving away bits of Israel to its enemies. The housing freeze she seeks on the West Bank and in Israel’s capital seem primarily designed to ensure that if the Palestinians ever agree to take the state they have been rejecting since 1947, there won’t be too many Jews there. Appeasement, in that case, is tantamount to surrender.
* An Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman called the cease-fire the result of “the persistence and the resistance of the Palestinian nation and the determination of the brave people of the Hamas movement and other Palestinian organizations against the aggressions of the Zionist occupying forces.” He’s probably not the only one who thinks so.