[Mb-civic] The arc of Ariel - James Carroll - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  The arc of Ariel

By James Carroll  |  January 9, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

WHAT IF Europe were so determined to be rid of its Jews that, once 
Hitler's program fell short, it arranged to settle the surviving Jews 
into a ''camp" where they could readily be targeted and eliminated? Call 
that camp Israel. Call the instrument of elimination the aggrieved 
Muslim population for whom the presence of Jews seems an act of 
blasphemous ''occupation" of holy places. And now imagine that such a 
population arms itself with a weapon that will make the completion of 
the anti-Jewish genocide real.

Welcome to the world of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who could be dismissed as a 
crackpot anti-Semite -- except he is president of Iran, a nation dead 
set on obtaining a nuclear weapon, and he defined his program by this 
very scenario last week.

After what happened during World War II, Jews know better than to 
dismiss a horrible prospect just because its horror is unprecedented. 
''Never again" means, also, never again be surprised by what non-Jews 
will do -- or allow to be done -- to Jews. This is the precondition of 
Israeli defensiveness, and of the mostly uncritical attachment that Jews 
who live outside of Israel have to the state. Non-Jews who have taken 
even casual measure of history's habit of anti-Semitism understand that 
unrelenting vigilance against its return is essential. The ferocity with 
which Islamist fanaticism has attached itself to the ancient Western 
myth of the Jew as the demonic ''other" itself reveals how seared the 
human imagination is by this lie.

The plight of Palestinians -- an imprisonment behind barriers 
unilaterally erected by Israel, but also a self-imprisonment in violence 
-- understandably sparks sympathy and rage. But no useful reckoning with 
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can occur unless it begins with an 
acknowledgement of the transcendent vulnerability that Jews quite 
reasonably experience as the ground of being. The fact that Israel is a 
well-armed garrison state does nothing to alter this radical contingency 
-- which is, of course, the reason to continue the move away from 
military responses to political and diplomatic ones -- the ''peace 
process." Israel has been able to maintain its existence within a sea of 
Arab hatred only by arming itself, and fighting back when attacked, but 
time in the nuclear age has run out on that strategy.

Iran may or may not fulfill its nuclear ambition, and even if it 
obtained the weapon, Tehran (like other nuclear powers) would more 
likely use it as a source of deterrence (especially against the United 
States) than as an ultimate suicide bomb.

But the increasing availability of fissionable material, as well as 
hyper-destructive chemical and biological agents, requires a new 
approach to ''national security," whatever the nation. In any reckoning 
with Middle East conflict, just as anti-Semitism is the old fact of life 
that must be perennially taken into account, such WMD proliferation is 
the new one.

Thus, negotiations and agreements that defuse hatred must replace 
belligerence that exacerbates it. Policies (from the drawing of borders 
to the distribution of water) must be shaped, above all, with a view to 
depriving extremists of their recruitment slogans. Only the deliberate 
empowering of moderates will trump the madmen. Security is properly 
defined as Israel's unchanging absolute, but nothing has changed more, 
in the new era, than how such security can be achieved. Peace has become 
the ultimate realpolitik.

 From a sense of transcendent vulnerability, to honed defensiveness, to 
reliance on brute force, to recognition of the limits of force, to the 
search for an alternative -- such is the arc of Ariel Sharon's career. 
No sentimentalist, the old warrior was lately motivated by his grasp of 
the new situation. A proper succession, empowering moderates within 
Israel as well as outside it, will keep the Sharon arc moving in the 
direction of peace.

Security for Israel requires justice for Palestine. Washington, 
meanwhile, must respond to Israel's transition by moving quickly to 
repair its own terrible mistakes. No one has done more to empower the 
extremists in the Middle East than George W. Bush.

The war in Iraq, above all, is pouring the fabled oil on fires all over 
the region. The ranks of suicidal nihilists swell larger every day.

Proliferation of the weapons that make those nihilists a 
world-destroying threat is encouraged. The cooperative international 
coalition that alone could check such trends is undercut.

Look no further than Iran to see what Bush has wrought, and see what it 
means for Israel.

Bush has cut the cannons loose. Where is the surprise that they are 
lining up, first, against Jews?

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/01/09/the_arc_of_ariel/
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