The Fragile Ceasefire

Vancouver-It looks, as though the fragile cease-fire brokered by CIA director George Tenet is unraveling and this should come as no real surprise. This kind of headline has been gracing newspaper covers for decades.

Since the truce on June 13th, 8 Palestinians and 6 Israelis have been killed. Going back to when the new hostilities began the numbers are worse still. In total 465 Palestinians and 118 Israelis have been killed.

But the Israelis are once again holding the moral high ground. Instead of retaliating for the bombing of a discotheque they gained more leverage, diplomatically, by not sending in gun ships. This is part of the growing evidence that the search for peace in this region is fruitless. And this just in, there is no real reason or desire to solve this at all.

The first problem in understanding why the region and these two groups, the Israelis and Palestinians, are so volatile we must stop thinking of the region in terms of twenty-first century diplomacy and logic. Rather as former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger described on Charlie Rose the other night, the problem in the area is that they are interacting like nations in the 16th and 17th centuries where religion and ideology super ceded all else.

In a Los Angeles Times article former Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu grasps the reality of any future peace. “We must return to a peace based in the concept of deterrence: a strong Israel that is prepared to defend itself. This concept has protected Israel since its inception, stopped the conflict with two of our neighbors and eventually enabled peace with them to become a reality.”

Netanyahu gets it just right. Peace agreements are but words on paper. But true peace comes from the security of deterring the enemy from action. Indeed, why should Israel negotiate with what amounts to terrorism. Likewise Israel is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination-they have used their conquered territories like colonies. And this last point revels more evidence that neither side is operating in today’s world.

"I reiterated that Israel is adamant in its position not to conduct negotiations under fire," said Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to reporters en route to visit President Bush for the second time in 100 days. "Until there is a complete cessation of terror, violence, and incitement, we cannot move on to the second part of the Mitchell plan, which is the cooling off period."

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