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editorial: how about a jewish state? Jun. 3, 2003
EDITORIAL: How about a Jewish state?

If yesterday's summit in Sharm e-Sheikh is any measure, President George W. Bush's efforts to create a new Middle East are stalled. There could hardly be a greater contradiction between Bush's clarion calls and bold action for freedom, and the leaders he failed to challenge at that Egyptian resort.

At the same moment that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is being urged to all but tattoo on his arm his commitment to a Palestinian state, the Arab side is not being asked to even hint at its acceptance of a Jewish state.

What is the grand result of the Sharm summit? President Hosni Mubarak pledged that the Arab states would fund only the Palestinian Authority. He admitted, in other words, that organizations that are openly committed to terrorism, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, were still receiving financial support from Arab countries.

It is, of course, encouraging that now, 22 months after September 11, and 33 months after the current Palestinian jihad began, the Arab states have committed to stop the funding of terrorism. It is also nice to hear them say that terror has no justification, no matter what the cause. And it is significant that the Arab states have now participated in the US-led boycott of Yasser Arafat. But isn't Bush's bar being held a bit low?

Why, after all, are there two summits, yesterday's in Sharm and today's in Aqaba? Because Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, the author of the much-lauded Saudi peace plan, could not sit at the same table with Israel's prime minister.

This is progress? This is the new Middle East? Twelve years ago in Madrid, the Saudis and even the Syrians sat with prime minister Yitzhak Shamir, who would not have uttered the words "Palestinian state" under pain of death.

If Bush wants to get anywhere with this, he must stop avoiding and accommodating Arab intransigence and deploy the moral clarity that has been his hallmark.

He must call the Arab world to end the conflict it began, not in 1967, but in 1947, when it rejected the United Nation's partition of this land into "Arab" and "Jewish" states.

Today, the issue is not Israelis who cannot utter the words "Palestinian state," but Arab leaders Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas and Mubarak who cannot utter the words "Jewish state." Like the defunct Cold War, the Arab-Israeli conflict is not symmetrical, but a matter of aggression and expansionism by one side and self-defense by the other.

No non-Muslim nation has ever supported the Arab insistence that Israel is illegitimate, yet the West has continued to tiptoe around Arab aggression, rather than reject it head on.

Let us not delude ourselves. Peace will be produced not by diplomacy, but by an Arab decision to accept not only Israel's de facto existence, but its legitimacy as a Jewish state. Diplomacy that allows the Arab world to dodge this fundamental issue not only invites failure, but could actually set back the cause of peace.

At stake now is not only Arab-Israeli peace, but America's entire war against the terrorist network. Either the war in Iraq was a worthy but isolated purging of tyranny or, as Bush declared on the USS Abraham Lincoln, "a crucial advance in the campaign against terror."

What we see now is a US government that seems to have put Palestinian statehood at the top of its post-Iraq agenda. We are not against a peaceful, democratic Palestinian state, but if this cause is to be integrated into the war against terrorism, its focus must be changed.

The old myth was that the lack of a Palestinian state was what was preventing peace. The new realization should be that Arab acceptance of Israel's legitimacy is peace, and that statehood will be a byproduct of ending the attempt to drive Israel into the sea.

Destroying Israel remains a critical plank of the militant Islamic agenda, and Palestinian statehood has for decades been seen by the Arab world as a means to that goal. If militant Islam is America's target, it should be focusing on destabilizing Iran and demanding up front that the Arab world speak, not just of Israel, but a Jewish state. Then we will know that we are on our way to a new Middle East, rather than more of the same.