Mideast Peace: Is Partition the Answer?
I recently posted something on my Facebook wall about hoping the new Washington administration succeeds in its effort to kick-start Mideast peace initiatives.
I don’t know if I truly believe in any lasting regional peace — but there’s always hope.
John, a Facebook “friend,” posted back:
There will never be peace as long as Arabs and Israelis live side by side and as long as you continue to think along Western diplomatic and democratic lines. Split everyone up and build borders. That’s what will do it.
I was put off. I messaged back: “Clearly, we sit on opposite sides of the political fence.”
John begged to differ. His claim was that he wasn’t more to the right than I was on the political spectrum, but that he believed common dialects are key to getting along. You speak Hebrew and I speak Arabic? The marriage will never last, in John’s book, if we attempt to share common quarters.
This made no sense to me. So I rang John up to chat about his theory. Dr. Myhill is a Haifa University linguist with a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania. He has has written books on language, religion, and national identity and how they tie together.
We talked. And here’s what I understood:
John advocates solidifying pre-existing zoning — taking indigenous populations and drawing borders along language lines in order for people to get along. Take Europe as an example: post-WWII, populations were more or less stabilized when cordoned along dialect and religious lines and things have gone pretty smoothly since. This doesn’t account, however, for burgeoning Arab-world emigration to Europe in recent years. That’s on Myhill’s theoretical “to do” list.
To me, this sounded forced ghetto-esque.
Not true, Myhill argues. Rather, dialect boundaries enclose naturally drawn lines of self-determination and religious freedom for all national groups. What’s a national group? “It’s about spoken language and … religion. ‘Arab’ isn’t a national group — it’s a super-conglomerate of many national groups.”
Yeah, right. Good luck on this onee.
As long as a person, or peoples for that matter, envy or hate another, there will be violence. It is unity of thought, goals and direction that builds solidarity, not necessarily a border, or a landmark based on tribal/cultural sameness.
Then there’s that little problem called the Koran. Good luck.
I now live in Florida but I was born and raised in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. A language war has been raging with greater and lesser intensity since the British defeated the French in the 1800′s. The British allowed the French to retain their language and cultural institutions. Both cultures flourished but in different directions.
In the 1960′s the Quebec French (who vastly outnumbered English speakers) decided they wanted to be “masters of their own home” and a movement was started to separate Quebec out of Canada. There was terrorism, murder and rioting by the French nationalists and lots of anguish on the English side causing many of the English to pull their families, their businesses, and their money out of Quebec, Montreal especially.
The situation is less volatile today, a sort of uneasy peace. But it’s like a dormant volcano; you never know when…
So, I agree with Ms. Freid though the implementation of her ideas mught just be a tad difficult.
There is another major festering problem which we in America are facing at home and that is the growth of Spanish. I have nothing against Hispanics. I am an immigrant to this country too. But I know that as Spanish grows as a language of use in America – especially by governments – America will become weaker.
The basis of Ms. Freid’s piece is that multiculturalism fragments a society. Yes it does. And it’s happening here in America, right under our noses.
We must have a constitutional amendment enshrining English as the ONLY official language of the United States of America.
I think that other than providing income for op – ed peices or permanancy at an academic institution, this whole issue, its causes and panaceas is a giant waste of time. Up until the mid 19th century peoples in Europe lived in principalties/Duchies or minute kingdoms. Not only did they speak the familiar language of the larger geographic area they also spoke their own kingdom specific dialect. In bavaria they spoke German + bavarian in Verona to take it down one more step they spoke Veronese, unique to the city and its surrounds. did this stop wars and conflict NO. There are so many other causes such as Religion, Resources, Living space that will ensure the continuity of conflict between peoples.
What is new however is the “Peace Industry”. This new industry I submit ensures continued conflict by no longer allowing conflicts to be resolved militarily. The world stopped Israel from winning in Gaza and expelling Hamas, they did the same with Hizbollah in 2006. This has ensured that no agreement between Israel and the fatah Palistinians or Israel and Lebanon can be reached. The Peaceniks are in the business of ensuring continued conflict, there must be good money to be made there.
There will never be peace in the middle east. The Palestinians don’t mind living in squalor and killing Israelis and the Israelis have learned to live with not quite being safe. The rest of the Arab states have no interest in absorbing the Palestinians and they are useful pawns to them in any case.
The Iranians represent a wild card and will no doubt nuke Israel if they get the chance. They’ve said it in print that a few dead Arabs is an OK price to pay to wipe out Tel Aviv.
The West doesn’t believe in killing people when you have a war which, of course, makes war un-winable.
dmgold:
“The world stopped Israel from winning in Gaza and expelling Hamas, they did the same with Hizbollah in 2006. This has ensured that no agreement between Israel and the fatah Palistinians or Israel and Lebanon can be reached. The Peaceniks are in the business of ensuring continued conflict…”
BINGO!
Preventing Israeli victory/HAMAS surrender prevented peace. Peace comes when the good guys beat the bad guys and the bad guys say “Uncle”.
Although HAMAS’ surrender would only be a “hudna”, a truce made to deceive Israel so HAMAS buys time to re-arm. This is war as was fought by Muhammad.
Alas and alack, I fear that the simple directness and sanity of this proposal would ensure its failure.
Unless…
We should do the same thing in America. Mixed societies suck. I’m not in the KKK or anything and I have very diverse friends. But we’re ignoring simple human evolution. Humans naturally don’t like outsiders and prefer to socialize with people that are similiar to them. I saw this basic primal instinct play out on my first day of highschool. It was my first day of 7th grade and I made my way to the huge cafeteria for lunch. And to my shock all the arabs in the school sat at one table. All the blacks sat at their own table. All the hispanics sat at their own table. And the girls and boys seperated themselves as well mostly. There was no racism or sexism. That’s just what people naturally did when given the freedom to sit and socialize with the people of their choosing. And mind you we all grew up in a very diverse and integrated upper middle class neighborhoods in Northern Virgina where there’s virtually zero racism. I’ve never even heard anyone say the N word or any other racial slur except maybe once or twice and it was never in a hateful context. And I also noticed the effects of race mixing in my neighborhood when I was growing up. My neighborhood used to be all white with a couple of really nice asian families. And every day all the kids would run around each others yards and up and down the street. And we had a very stong neighborhood watch force and nieghborhood get togethers every weekend and frequently during the weekdays as well. We’d grill food and the grownups would drink beer while the kids ran around playing hide and seek and stuff. It was a surburban paradise. Great environment to live, raise kids and grow up in. Then a lot of the white families started to move away for one reason or another and almost always the new neighbors were hispanic, arab, black, whatever. And all of a sudden there was no more kids running around. There was no more wide open front doors. And there was no more nieghborhood cohesion and socializing. Everyone just kept to themselves and did their own thing now. Which is tragic in my opinion. And it wasn’t just the white people that locked their doors. Everyone did. There was no racism involved. It just happened naturally. It’s hard to socialize with people who are fresh off the plane from the Congo who barely speak English. Or the Afghan family that dresses their daughters in giant tents and generally keeps to themselves. And that’s what I see happening across the country repeatedly and I can understand why it can lead to conflicts in more turbalent parts of the world. Diversity just isn’t natural and it never will be. People simply get along better if it’s an all white or an all hispanic or an all black community. And it isn’t the evil white peoples doings. People of all races want to live amongst their own kind. That’s why the Chinese tend to create “China towns” no matter where they immigrate to. They don’t want to live in non-Chinese neighborhoods. Now I’m not saying we need to enforce segregation again or anything like that. But maybe they should take these kinds of basic facts into consideration when they create some kind of housing or immigration legislation or as you mentioned even in foreign policy.
That worked so well in Gaza, huh?
The analogy with Europe post-1945 would be valid, if the Islamic totalitarians, who are largely controlling Middle Eastern culture, were as soundly defeated as were the nationalists in Europe. An overwhelming military victory over the ideology of Islamic Totalitarianism, accompanied by an uncompromising demand for unconditional surrender by all of its supporters, including the fall of every Islamic government, remains the prerequisite for peace in the Middle East. Only then can the educational reforms needed to end generations of violence begin.
See my article “‘No Substitute for Victory’: The Defeat of Islamic Totalitarianism,” in The Objective Standard:
http://www.theobjectivestandard.com/issues/2006-winter/no-substitute-for-victory.asp
John David Lewis, you have a fan.
The following is a letter I had printed in the S. Florida Sun-Sentinel while Israel was at war in Lebanon in 2006:
Hizb ‘Allah has given Israel the pretext to launch the current offensive in Lebanon and Hamas has given Israel the pretext to launch the offensive in Gaza. It is high time for surgery on the cancer inflicting the Middle East – and the world.
Although it may be late for action in the war against radical Islam, tomorrow would be even later. It is critical for Israel to see these military operations through to the end. They must ignore the whimpers from the left about the poor Lebanese or about “disproportionate” response to clear acts of war by Hamas (the government of the Palestinian Authority) and Hizb ‘Allah (members of the government of Lebanon) perpetrated on sovereign Israeli territory. Nobody seems to be whimpering about the countless innocent Israeli victims of these Islamofascist terrorists. Israel must attack Hamas and Hizb ‘Allah until they are obliterated. Hamas and Hizb ‘Allah and their supporters and enablers must be made to realize that Israel will exist forever. Hamas and Hizb ‘Allah must be made to have no hope, no dreams, and no ambition of ever seeing Israel disappear. They must be made to accept Israel and surrender or be destroyed.
Don’t buy into the rhetoric that “there’s no military solution”. In World war II, the USA and her allies crushed Germany and Japan and that was the end of the war. We beat them first and diplomacy came second. Those two countries went on to become modern productive liberal democracies – and our friends and allies.
Don’t swallow the “land for peace” canard either. Yasser Arafat was offered more land than he could ever have hoped for – including East Jerusalem. He refused and he started the second Intifada instead. Israel left Lebanon in 2000 and they got Hizb ‘Allah. Israel left Gaza and they got Hamas. These terrorists don’t want land. They want Israel wiped off the map and replaced with an Islamic theocracy “from the river to the sea”.
We are in a war against radical Islam and no war was ever won by negotiation. Wars end with the victory of one side and the defeat of the other.
Hamas and Hizb ‘Allah must be anihilated, period.
P.S. Thank you President Bush for your unwavering support of Israel.
Perry Birman
#11, what you said.
I thought the best overall solution to the “war on Terror” would be making a list of mosques that preach Jihad and support terrorism. Then after EVERY terror attack, randomly select a mosque and flatten it during Friday Prayer service.
The Imam’s depend on the take from Friday Prayer service to put bread on the table. Publish the target list and those Muslims that are in no real hurry to hook up with their 97 virgins will go elsewhere to pray, and tithe.
That means the Imams that don’t preach Jihad will get richer, while those that do get poorer or dead. Destroy the mosques on a tit for tat basis and even the most rabid Imam will find the part of the Koran that covers relationships with people of the book and study it for pointers on non-Jihad sermons.
This plan requires withdrawal from the GCIV, which is a desirable goal in it’s own right.
The constant meetings and negotiations between each new president or prime minister that comes along every few years, trying to achieve peace in the Middle East is a joke. Most people know that. The governments of Israel and America knows that. There will never be peace between Israelis and Arabs because Islam does not accept a non-Moslem entity in their midst. There will be peace only when every last Jew in Israel is dead. Period.
The Arabs suffer from a version of the natural national chauvanism/patriotism which animated the European masses prior to and during World War I. That war crushed such a spirit, to the extent that each potential belligerant remained on the sidelines as long as possible until actively attacked despite the obvious and nation-fanatical threat faced by all.
It is probable that the Arab spirit of “nationalism” will have to experience a similar Armagedon before the deep habit is broken. If Egyptians experience Saddam Hussein’s defeat as a humiliation this is just a symptom of such thinking, that kind of thinking that must be broken.
It is unfortunate that this will probably not happen since the Arabs are incapable of inflicting that kind of damage themselves (neither honor nor technical competence enough to animate such a fight), and the dominant cultures – Us – are now sick and entirely unnatural in their passive-aggressive efforts to avoid such an obvious remedy.
Meanwhile the Leninists plot and gobble sheep, or attempt to gobble sheep, in whatever dark parts of the globe. Seems ominous, perhaps, or just a comedy. I guess the problem is, once we discover which it is, it’ll be too late to do anything about it.
This is pretty solid reasoning for requiring English language and a thorough grounding in traditional civic institutions for permanent residency, let alone for citizenship. If it’s impossible to have a cohesive union otherwise, but be doomed to balkanization and internecine conflicts, then actual effort to require a unitary culture and language is warranted.
We should do the same thing in America. Mixed societies suck. I’m not in the KKK or anything and I have very diverse friends. But we’re ignoring simple human evolution. Humans naturally don’t like outsiders and prefer to socialize with people that are similiar to them.
Oddly enough neither I, nor anyone I know, would agree with you on this. I kind of suspect you are KKK. But you are certainly a racist.
Mussolini was not democratically elected as the originator of this ludicrous and utterly pointless “plan” suggests. He seized power in a coup d’etat.
Hitler’s rise was somewhat more democratic, but not quite what people think of when they use the word “democratic.” The Nazi held about a third of the seats in the parliament. He was appointed to the chancellorship on the understanding that all other positions of power in the cabinet would be held by non-Nazis. Soon after achieving the chancellorship Hitler subsequently seized real power undemocratically.
Getting back to the core thought here, that people of different languages can’t form a political entity: Canada. (English and French.) Belgium. (Flemish and French.) China. (Mandarin and Cantonese and others.) Spain (Castillian and Catalan.) India. (Hindi, English and about a dozen more.) Any square block of New York City.
It would also be worth considering that people who do speak the same language don’t always get along. The Union and the Confederacy. Italians and other Italians. Germans and other Germans. Iraq and Kuwait. On and on.
So we have here a pointless plan, based on false assumptions and buttressed with historical ignorance.
It would also be worth considering that people who do speak the same language don’t always get along. The Union and the Confederacy. Italians and other Italians. Germans and other Germans. Iraq and Kuwait. On and on.
So we have here a pointless plan, based on false assumptions and buttressed with historical ignorance.
I don’t think this was offered up as any kind of solution for total world peace. It’s like wearing a seatbelt. You may still get killed in a wreck but your odds of surviving are a lot greater when you wear one. And the plain fact is that language does tend to have a high correlation with culture. The deeper the linguistic gap, the deeper the cultural divide (as a general rule).
Let’s come back down to the real world. The Jewish people have been trying to live in peace with those who follow allah. The only way peace works with those who follow allah is through power.
That is why Israel exists today. Israel has the power to keep Hamas, and Hizballah from murdering every one of them.
You want peace between Islam, and Israel? Then build a big wall, defend it, and support Israel. Trying to play both sides to keep the oil ticks happy will not work.
Over.
Tcobb:
I don’t see that language is any more a factor than religion, color, disparities of wealth or general disparities of power.
In fact our starting point here is Israel, which exists because people with whom they shared a common tongue — German Jews were highly assimilated, likewise French Jews and others — wouldn’t stop murdering them.
It’s not much of a theory if one can come up with dozens of plausible alternative explanations.
You’ve overlooked the elephant in the living room: Iran.
Remove US influence, and Iran will simply get the bomb,and use it as blackmail to take over the Shitte states in the Gulf and Iraq, use their patsies to take over Gaza and Lebanon, and cause a Shiite/foreign worker uprising to annex Saudi’s oil region (leaving the Saudi princes penniless).
The problem will then be solved. Israel will then have to chose to be annexed or annihilated.
This is tongue in cheek of course, but the Arabs are still tribal in thinking: Iran thinks as an empire.
First anything like this must be tested in the one place that defies all theories: The Balkans.
Lots of luck there where a common language would not help the varieties of ethnicities, religions and political views that form a nasty and overlapping hodge-podge of admixtures going back centuries. It is hard to get coherent Nations when you don’t have coherent boundaries due to intermarriage and crossing cultures… often in the same neighborhood. The Balkans would still need about four times the number of Nations that grew out of the old Yugoslavia and still have strangenesses and major problems. Check out the assassination of Arch Duke Ferdinand… not the events after it but those leading up to it and you will get an idea of how things are there. You can go across three side-by-side river valleys and reliably find five ethnicities, four languages and three religions.
In the middle east here are the people you must convince to have a Kurdish state: Turks, Assyrians, Arabs. These are the ones that made sure there wouldn’t be a Kurdish State… that is the way they wanted it because they remember the last time the Kurds really got going with just one famous leader. Their neighbors don’t want it and Turkey purposely cut up the plan that was proposed to start just what the ever so wise theorist put forth. Not Europeans. Check out the treaties involved and where they started and where they ended and you will see the hands not of Europe but the locals.
Good luck on that linguistic state theory because it has some major potholes a mile across and five miles deep before you even get close to central asia or africa.
The solution is simple, but few are willing to say it: exterminate the terrorists and anyone who gives them quarter. The Palestinians should be offered two choices: total surrender and total disarmament or total extermination. No hudnas shall be accepted. Peace will come only when every last member of any terrorist organization is either dead or in custody.
It’s the language, of course, that’s why Arab Muslims get along so well with Arab Christians (not!) where there are still some left (Iraq, Bethlehem). Some day I’ll rewrite Ogden Nash’s “A drink with something in it” where the key ingredient in all these perceived problems — language? territory? bad rulers? poverty? colonialism? is that thing called the Submission cult. Islamic totalitarianism? Is that as contradistinct from Islamic pluralism? Which of the four schools of Sunni jurispridence or profs at Al Azhar advocate the pluralistic kind? Or is it too uncomfortable to say that the cult as it stands is the problem?
People of different languages came and built USofA. Some held on to their languages for a generation or two, some made sure to speak only English so that the kids learned it well. It worked out.
“Myhill suggests a state-by-state solution. Snag support among moderate Sunni leaders in Iraq, establish secret ties with the Alawite in Syria, prop up a separate rebel government in Sudan, and put together teams of Maronite-led supporters to partition Lebanon. Repeat the partition recipe in the remaining Arab states according to native dialect.”
This must be an April fools joke. “ties with the Alawite”? You mean Al Assad and his tribe? Hilarious.
A Christian Maronite minority responsible for breaking up Lebanon? Over Nasrullah’s dead body. That’ll go down real well…
This is blog contribution is so much garbage. Freid must be naive for swallowing this stupidity.
#12 and 24:
Could not agree with you more on your posts.
We are in a war against radical Islam and no war was ever won by negotiation. Wars end with the victory of one side and the defeat of the other.
The is no solution to radical islam except wiping them out, by whatever means are necessary. The meeting yesterday between the mullah obamaham and Bibi tells Israel all they need to know, or just adds more, final weight to the truth that this administration is ready and willing to completely abandon Israel. This WILL NOT satisfy the muslims who have been brainwashed from birth that Israel and every Jew is bad and needs to be killed. Nothing will satisfy the arabs except complete and total world domination by Islam under an Islamic caliphate.
We are at war with Islam and there is a winner and a loser in any war. Peace with Islam cannot exist as any “peace” that islam has obtained has been through bloody and violent conquests throughout Islamic history. Islam will offer a Hudna, a TEMPORARY truce good for the maximum of ten years. During the Hudna, Islam is free to still attack those they have a truce with at any time. A Hudna is strictly used to buy time, to re-arm and reorganize. Israel’s only option is to lay waste to all of Iran’s nuclear facilities and as much of Iran’s military as possible. Screw the international opinions. Israel can deal with that AFTER Iran has been destroyed. While Israel is at it they will have to take out Syria and other Islamic states. Israel is on her own and needs to take care of Israel. The only tactic that has EVER stopped Islam was war, and that is where this is at.
There is no peace within islam, and with islam there can be no peace.
The basic problem in the idea of ‘attacking Islamic totalitarianism’ (or whatever you want to call it) is that there aren’t very many clear targets. The only case I can think of which it might work in the long run is Iran, because Iran is a basically stable state which has been taken over Islamic totalitarianism. But in the great majority of Arab states, the real problem is that the government only gives passive support to Islamic fanatics (more or less allowing and even encouraging them, as long as they limit their aggressiveness to external targets) and if you throw out the government, the next government will do the same thing, because the entire state is an artificial modern creation which doesn’t command any loyalty or dedication. Throwing out Hamas in Gaza would be okay, but it would just turn Gaza into the West Bank, a political non-entity, a perpetual political basket case (not to say that this wouldn’t be an improvement, but it wouldn’t be a solution). And in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Indonesia, outside interference just means that the outsiders will have to be fighting the fundamentalists rather than a weak and uninspired government doing the fighting (as is happening in Afghanistan). The only long-term solution is building real nation-states out of these areas, as in Turkey, Bangladesh, and Malaysia.
This is not to say that force should never be used, but there’s a limit to what it can accomplish in the long run. And if force is used too many times in stupid ways, then a lot of people become suspicious of the use of force at all. Consider 9/11 and the US response to it. The US suffers a huge terrorist attack at the hands of Saudis and Egyptians. It’s clear that the governments of these countries have been passively encouraging hatred of the West as a means of diverting attention from their own inadequacies. Does the US take strong action against these governments? No, because they think that the governments are their ‘friends’. Does the US take strong action against Iran, a strong and stable nation-state and the prime example of institutionalized Islamic totalitarianism in the world today, which could plausibly be ‘redirected’ to a more stable form of international behavior? No. The US attacks Afghanistan and Iraq, two ridiculously artificial creations of Westerners with no political or ethnic coherence, and gets involved in hopeless adventures in ‘nation building’, where the pieces to build nations don’t even exist. And when this predictably results in failure, the US has used up its allowed quota of rage in response to the 9/11 attacks and people aren’t willing to support further interventions.
And to Michael Reynolds–please learn a little more history before trying to participate in discussions like this.
Can’t hurt to break up Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran. And certainly a large Kurdish state would be a monkey wrench in the Islamist putsch.