For perhaps a quarter of the world’s population, President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem on December 6 was humiliating. Just for that reason it makes Middle East peace more probable. More than President Jimmy Carter, who brokered the Israeli-Egyptian peace deal of 1979, President Trump is likely to be remembered as the American president who contributed most to peace.
Wars end not when the loser is defeated, but rather when the loser is humiliated. Throughout history, as I argued in a 2016 survey of ancient and modern wars, losers have fought on until they lack the manpower to fill their depleted ranks. Typically that occurs after 30% of military-age men are dead, as in France during the Napoleonic Wars, the South in the American Civil War, or Germany in the Second World War. The losing side will not abandon hostilities until all those who want to fight to the death have had the opportunity to do so — unless it is humiliated before the physical exhaustion of its resources has run its course.
That is why the use of atomic weapons against Japan well may have been an act of mercy. The American fire-bombing campaign had already wrecked most of Japan’s cities and killed far more civilians than perished at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Japan might have sustained far more damage in a conventional resolution through bombing and an eventual invasion. Atomic weapons humiliated the Japanese by displaying the incomparable superiority of Western technology and the pointlessness of further resistance.
There are some defeats whose memory is too painful to bear. As an executive of Bank of America, I spent considerable time at its Charlotte headquarters. My Carolina colleagues needed only a Bourbon or two to lapse into obsessive rehearsals of Civil War battles which, by rights, they should have won. They sounded goofy, but that’s what happens when you sacrifice nearly a third of your young men.
For the Palestinian Arabs and many other Muslims, the many defeats that Israel has inflicted on Arab armies — in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973, as well as in smaller engagements subsequently — are too painful to bear. How is it possible that a Jewish population of only 600,000 defeated five Arab armies in the 1948 War of Independence? Or that Israel crushed the combined might of the Arab countries in a few days in June 1967? Palestinian Arabs refuse to accept their past humiliations, believing rather that the Jewish presence in the region is a temporary aberration, and that the Jewish State will be eliminated before long. Daniel Polisar reviewed some 300 polls of Arab opinion in a 2015 survey, and noted that a full 80% of Palestinian Arabs believe that the Jews have no rights to the land whatever.
Even if the Jews have the Mediterranean coast, they do not have Jerusalem, their ancient capital and the holiest of Jewish sites, the Arabs console themselves. They do not have it because the nations of the world refuse to say that they have it. To state the obvious, namely that Jerusalem is and will remain the capital of the State of Israel, is a humiliating dictum. If the so-called micro-aggressions now abhorred at American universities are pinpricks, the declaration that Jerusalem is Jewish is a stab in the heart.
Israel, to be sure, is more powerful than all its Arab neighbors put together, and in extreme circumstances has between 100 and 300 nuclear weapons, according to the defense agency Jane’s, roughly on a par with Great Britain. The Arab strategy to destroy Israel is indirect. Israel is ringed with missiles aimed at its critical infrastructure and population centers, including 150,000 in the hands of Hezbollah. Anti-missile systems such as the short-range Iron Dome neutralized primitive ballistic missiles from Gaza during the 2014 conflict, but Hezbollah has thousands of precision-guided missiles that are harder to intercept. The objective is to draw Israel into a conflict where the Jewish state causes massive collateral damage in order to suppress missile attacks, and the “international community” reacts with horror and forces a “settlement” on Israel, requiring a withdrawal from the West Bank. That would give Israel’s enemies firing positions closer to its national airport and largest cities. Eventually the debilitating effect of encirclement and rocket attacks would make the Jewish State unviable, or so the Arab side believes.
By fostering the hope that Israel might be defeated and eliminated, the world community encourages the Palestinian Arabs and their sponsors in Tehran and Ankara to pursue a long-term war strategy
This is a dodgy strategy at best, but most Palestinian Arabs simply cannot bear to resign themselves to a small and mediocre state on the border of a far more powerful Jewish neighbor. It should be remembered that the Jewish population accepted a far smaller state in 1948 than they have now in order to gain independence, and would have stayed within its borders had the armies of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon not attacked the infant State of Israel. The Jews simply wanted a state, even a small one with a breadth of just 15 kilometers at its narrowest point. If the Palestinian Arabs had wanted a state, they could have had one from President Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Ehud Barak in July 2000.
So intimidated is the world community by Muslim anguish over the State of Israel that it humors the delusion that Israel can be destroyed, specifically by refusing to acknowledge that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. By fostering the hope that Israel might be defeated and eliminated, the world community encourages the Palestinian Arabs and their sponsors in Tehran and Ankara to pursue a long-term war strategy.
President Trump has changed all that, by acknowledging Jerusalem as Israel’s de jure as well as its de facto capital. The humiliation this will occasion in the Arab world cannot be underestimated. But it is the sine qua non of peace. Before they are ready to make peace, the Palestinian Arabs will have to drink the bitter draught of defeat to the dregs, and admit to themselves that their problems are not due to the depredations of imperialists, but are of their own making. The Jews have been doing this for 2,600 years, since the fall of the First Temple in 587 B.C.E. Taking responsibility for their own failings, in fact, is one of the secrets of Jewish success. In the short run, Trump’s declaration may provoke the occasional act of violence. In the longer view, he has indicated the only possible path to peace.
In the combined territory of Israel and the West Bank (but excluding Gaza) there are 6.7 million Jews (60%) and 4.5 million Arabs (40%). This makes it possible to create a single secular state for Jews and Palestinians – maybe called Canaan, rather than Israel – which would eventually become a haven of peace and development in the ME. Gaza would then become an independent Arab country, eventually linked to Egypt. The only barriers to such a solution are psychological.
Myriam Obadia https://www.rt.com/news/383777-israel-russia-capital-jerusalem/
That’s simply not true: How many evangelicals do you know? Personally, I know hundreds, and I work with evangelicals every day. The history of Israel is the inner life of the evangelical Christian. It includes apolcalyptic hopes, to be sure. So does Judaism. I want to see a successor of David on the throne of Israel (but I’m not holding my breath).
Germany wasn’t humiliated in 1918: the war was fought mainly on French soil, 1945, for sure. "True peace" is the "true Scotsman" fallacy. But as it happens, people tend to respect those who defeat them.
De-humanizes? Piffle. Read the article. I argue that the Palestinians should act like Jews and accept the humiliation that arises from their misdeeds. Read "Lamentations."
David Goldman
I am totally lost for words. Totally flabbergasted. I had Yiddish friends at University. In fact ‘Gold’wise, one was a Goldman, another a Goldberg and another a Goldstein!
I am a Buddhist. They taught me that the God of Abraham is the God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Were they lying to me? And why then the inter-faith dialogue between or among the religious leaders of the 3 Abrahamic faiths? Why the charade, if that were so, of a quest for religious peace?
And they too commented that the Americans killing of the Native Red Indian tribes was like the Jewish holocaust, an act of genocide. Were they also wrong?
Or what they thought of in University would subsequently be ‘brainwashed’ and their minds ‘re-hard wired’ like in ‘1984’ so that they might up like you – with an inability to have an open mind and a clear clean whiteboard to think and analyse logically and rationally?
"Born again’ Evengelical support for Zionism is a double edged sword Mr. Goldman, many Orthodox Rabbis in Jerusalem would agree with this assesment. Historically it was the Muslims who brought back Jews into Jerusalem after they had been banished by the Romans for 600 years (reinforced by emperor Constantine — post converstion to Christianity) with a brief exception when the Zorastrian Persians took over the city i.e. until Heraclius defeated them and restored the status quo until Omar’s conquest. I would prefer to take the long view — the Jews owe the Muslims — meanwhile — the Evengelicals are waiting for Jesus to slaughter the Jews should they opt not convert during the fun filled rapture days. Antagonizing your immediate neighbours is never a good policy.
this view is wrong and morally disgusting. Wrong because humiliation does not always work the way the author says. Think of Germany, humiliated in WWI and ready to fight thirty years later. Morally disgusting because it highlights a condition in which the weaker party is prepared to give up his rights for a cessation of hostilities. True peace requires, instead, mutual respect.
The best commentary by far on this subject. The "humiliation" has to extend to radical Islam as well. However, in these days of lightening war when defenses like air cover can be denuded in days, losing 30% manpower is no longer mandatory.
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But No country has retained a parmanent place as it’s capital for 2600years. Capitals of countries can change from one place to another for various reasons. the Acient isreali nation was founded on palestine’s territory, when the jews came out of Egypt. However people are more concerned that Trump’s decision can result in a spate of violence that can endanger even the survival of jerusalem. Again one still wonder whether it is Trump or the UN that should have given this recognition.
New ways of obliterating hapless civilians, usually other Muslims?
Magical thinking, Mr Musa. It’s the same fantasy that Arab governments have been feeding their peeps for decades: Get rid of the Jews and pan-Arabism will erase 1,500 years of our divided, faction ridden history.
One of our great presidents Abraham Lincoln said, “We cannot escape history.”
We couldn’t and neither can you.
David Goldman: I get that you write for the Asia Times. I don’t, so permit me to say that without an interlocutor having some skin the game, I generally don’t engage.
Few of your readers from that part of the world have much skin exposed here. Easy it is to mouth or virtue signal anti-Israel or worse platitudes. As Machiavelli observed, “Men are always willing to die when the battle is distant.”
David Goldman: Some years ago a study calculated the number of Asian (but non-Japanese) civilian deaths per day that were attributable to Japanese military occupation and that occurred in the year preceding the Missouri surrender.
The number was overwhelming. It made clear that even if one put aside the likely US and Japanese casualties entailed in any proposed invasion, the two US bombs saved hundreds of thousands of innocents.
Paradoxically, the bombs were a blessing.
Andrew Keith sarcasm, it was a joke, I disagree with the author that anyone needs to be humiliated
Marc Gunn: You are one sick human being.
This is one of the worst pieces of drivel ever written, anywhere, at any time. In addition, it entirely dehumanizes the Palestinians. No surprise there, dehumanization of the Palestinians is a Zionist tradition going back well over 100 years.
The author should hang his head in abject shame.
Frank Calzone To be fair, he didn’t say he was a professor of reality.
Ibrahim Musa does anyone understand a word of this gibberish?
Frank Calzone;.The Biblical story of the descendants of Abraham and his genealogy, back to the original hermaphroditic Adam, created by God, is one mythical account on which the Israelites base all their claims to the lands of Canaan (Modern Palestine). Science based anthropology and modern DNA tests superimpose more credible narrative accounts of a much older "Out-of-Africa" migration of both humanoid giants and ape-like ancestors of modern humans, into the Middle East. Therefore, those tribes with more African pedigrees, everywhere, are the original aborigines, among the settlers. Of course, superior military might science and technology allows for temporary assertion of ethnic dominance of settlers over aborigines, through wars and strongest,globally. One World Government based on full human-rights admitting good governance ordinances, crafted democratically, would guarantee the much desired world peace, if separation of religions and government (secularism) is made a global imperative. There must be no compulsion to worship any other human mythical God, by humans who are permanently deluded in believing that they are superior to the rest of humanity, especially based on racism. Only
one humanity, established on the aboriginal Africans now remains on planet Earth. Let’s keep the peace!¡¡¡√√√