Following the Hamas rockets came an Israel incursion into Gaza in the last month of 2008 and first month of 2009. Entitled crudely “Operation Cast Lead,” it destroyed scores of arms-smuggling tunnels, dozens of ministry buildings and offices, police stations, military targets associated with Hamas, and several Hamas officials.
The result was a huge uproar from the United Nations and other bodies, widespread demands for a cease-fire, and pervasive denunciations of the “disproportionality” of the Israeli response. The New York Times, the Economist, and Time all treated the conflict as an opportunity to tote up the number of claimed civilian casualties on the Gaza side. It was pointed out that the some four hundred Gazan civilians lost exceeded by a factor of one hundred the civilian deaths in Israel that provoked the incursion.
When Israel withdrew after twenty-two days amid Hamas’ claims of victory, the United States promised some $900 million for Gaza, to be channeled through the United Nations. Since Hamas continues to control Gaza and to intimidate UN officials, who persisted in taking the Hamas side in the conflict, the chances of keeping the money out of Hamas’ clutches seemed dim.
In exchange for expending a few million dollars on missiles, the jihadist group (or its Iranian sponsors) would eventually gain three times as much money from the United States ($900 million) as it has reportedly received from Iran. A week later some seventy countries and international organizations convened in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh and pledged an additional $4.48 billion, over $1.5 billion more than the Gazans had requested. Their cup runneth over. Again, the donors stressed that the money would all go to the Palestinian Authority, to Fatah rather than Hamas. But Hamas controls the territory, so it will extort a large proportion of the funds, regardless of contrary intentions. The clear lesson is that terrorism pays and pays. The donors will predictably get what they pay for. So what else is new?
Certainly this sequence of “Peace Now and Then War” was nothing new. It followed the previous even more avid pursuit of the Peace Now agenda by the Clinton administration, when Israel agreed to abandon 95 percent of the territories, financed a new PLO militia to keep order, and committed to a new Palestinian state and a divided Jerusalem. The world was euphoric again, in time with the Nobel Prizes awarded both to Arafat and to Yitzhak Rabin in 1994 for allegedly achieving peace. The result was four years of intifada — suicide bombs and deadly attacks. But this, too, was nothing new.
Similarly, after the 1967 war, in which Israel won a sweeping six-day victory, the country sought peace by proposing to give up its gain of territory. The result was repeated attacks by Nasser’s Egyptian army at Suez and then the Arab — Israeli War of 1973, desecrating Israel’s holiest day, Yom Kippur. With U.S. support, the Israelis managed to avoid defeat, consolidated their control of Sinai, and established thriving new settlements there. This, too, was nothing new.
Then in 1977, the supposedly bellicose Menachem Begin and the right-wing Likud Party displaced Ben-Gurion’s Labor Party in Israel for the first time. The world was appalled. Around the globe and in Israel itself opinion leaders condemned the Israeli voters who, by electing a “former terrorist” to confront the urbane and civilized Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat, had effaced every moral distinction between the Arabs and Israelis. With Begin in power, war was believed to be inevitable.
The result, however, was again “ironic” and “baffling.” Peace broke out. Not only did Sadat agree to talks, but he actually traveled to Israel, addressed the Knesset, and aroused the wild acclaim of Israeli crowds. As the wise and courageous Harvard professor Ruth Wisse observed in her authoritative book, Jews and Power, “The Israeli Hebrew press ran Arabic headlines to welcome the visitor, soccer fans proposed Israeli — Egyptian matches, Israeli radio played Egyptian music. The people of Israel ‘fell in love with the enemy.’” Kenneth Levin of CAMERA pilloried the phenomenon in his book, The Oslo Syndrome , which treats Peace Now as a counterpart of Stockholm syndrome hostages who become infatuated with their captors.
In the Camp David negotiations that followed, the reputedly pugnacious Begin succumbed to the Peace Now spirit. Under pressure from Sadat and then U.S. president and peace paladin Jimmy Carter, Begin gave up the Sinai and expelled the Jewish settlers. Israel might permit 15 percent of its population to be Arab, but the newly friendly Egyptians stopped well short of allowing a small but prosperous Jewish presence on their territory.
In conversation with Sadat, the former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir epitomized the Jewish stance, subordinating the pain of loss of Israeli soldiers to the pain of inflicting military losses: “We can forgive you for killing our sons, but we will never forgive you for making us kill yours.” It’s nice rhetoric, but in the usual liberal stance, she was elevating her own moral feelings above the practical effects of her actions.
As Wisse writes, “This point had been made long before by the foremost exegete Rashi… in his commentary on the passage of Genesis 32:4… ‘Jacob was very afraid and he was greatly distressed… lest he be killed by his brother Esau, but he was even more ‘distressed’ that in self-defense, he might have to kill Esau…’ Whereas Rashi was expounding this high moral principle for his Jewish audience, Golda Meir was admitting it to an antagonist whose political traditions interpreted her confession as weakness….
“Four years earlier, when Golda Meir had been prime minister, [Sadat] had coordinated with Syria the attack on Yom Kippur…. If he now came to Jerusalem to regain the territories lost by Egypt, it was not out of regret for having killed too many Jews but with the realization that he could not kill enough to defeat them.”
Even so, his treaty with Israel, however favorable to his country, outraged the Arab League, which maintains a genocidal posture against Israel as its raison d’être. The league moved its headquarters out of Cairo to Tunis. Its hostility to Sadat continued until his assassination two years later by Hamas precursors from the Muslim Brotherhood.
But this was nothing new. When King Abdullah of Jordan expressed his willingness to negotiate a treaty with Israel in 1951, he was assassinated by family members of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, at the entrance of the al-Aqsa Mosque in the Holy City. That ended Jordanian moves for Peace Now. And this, too, was nothing new.
CHAPTER NINE
Games of War and Holiness
Robert Aumann, now a Nobel laureate economist, fled Frankfurt with his parents in 1938 just two weeks before Kristallnacht. A wealthy textile tycoon and an Orthodox Jew, the elder Aumann left everything behind in his flight to New York and, suddenly poor, had to scrounge for work. His son gained a clear notion from his father of the fragility of wealth and power.
Having earned his doctorate in mathematics at the age of 25 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Aumann became one of the founders of the Center for the Study of Rationality at Hebrew University, which is perched on Mount Scopus overlooking Jerusalem, and affords glimpses on good days of the mountains of Jordan and the Dead Sea. In 1999, Aumann became the founder and first president of the Game Theory Society. He has taught at Stanford, Princeton, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Berkeley, New York University, and at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. He gains his insights as the leading living practitioner of the most austere and abstract of sciences: the game theory excogitated in a great synoptic burst by John von Neumann.