Seeker Blog

Is there anyone on earth as habitually ill-served by their leadership as the people who inhabit the Arab world? — Andrew J. Bacevich, reviewing Six Days of War for The Financial Times, 2002.

“The United States is the enemy. The United States is the hostile force behind Israel. The United States, O Arabs, is the enemy of all peoples, the killer of life, the shedder of blood, that is preventing you from liquidating Israel.” — Voice of the Arabs radio, 1967.

“O soldiers, 300,000 fighters of the People’s Army are with you in your battle, and behind them, 100 million Arabs. . . . Strike the enemy’s settlements, turn them into dust, pave the Arab roads with the skulls of Jews.” — Hafez al- Assad, dictator of Syria, 1967.

Military historian and CFR fellow Max Boot isn’t optimistic about near-term success of the “peace process”.

…many Americans believe that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which has been raging in one form or another for 60 years, is overdue for resolution.

But if measured by the length of other tribal and territorial disputes throughout history, there is no reason to think that the Arabs and Jews will soon beat their swords into plowshares. Consider just one such conflict, pitting the Scots against the English. The divide between the two nationalities — with similar religions (first Catholic, then Protestant), ethnic origins, languages and political systems — should have been easily bridged. But the Scots and English spent centuries killing one another.


…It is instructive to contemplate the virulence and length of the English struggles with the Scots (and also the similar, more recent battles with the Irish), given that their cultural and religious differences are trivial compared to those separating Israelis and Arabs. Attempts to end such conflicts before both sides are thoroughly exhausted are likely to have no more success than the Treaty of Northampton, which was supposed to end the Anglo-Scottish dispute in 1328. The only exception is if outside powers commit massive military force to bring peace, as happened in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s. But that’s unlikely to happen in the Holy Land.

While there is plenty of evidence that most Israelis are tired of today’s war, there is little sign that their enemies are likely to give up anytime soon. Jihadists speak of their struggle to eliminate the “Zionist entity” as the work of centuries. Even if many ordinary Palestinians privately long for peace, their preferences are unlikely to prevail over those of the gunmen. Hard as it may be to accept, we have to confront the possibility that the Arab-Israeli conflict may not have a “solution,” at least not in the foreseeable future, and that trying to create one represents a triumph of hope over experience.

As it happens, I am “reading” Michael Oren’s Six Days of War for the third time [via audible.com audiobook]. The review certainly reinforces ones understanding of Arab hate - some of it natural, but much of it stoked and cultivated by Arab potentates for the past 60 years. It is possible that Israel only exists today due to the incompetence of those despots, with the aid of the Soviets. BTW, we consider Oren’s book sufficiently important that we actually keep a copy aboard Adagio.

…It is hard for rational people to understand the origins or cause of the madness of the present-day Palestinian body politic, which prefers the delusionary vision of a world without Israel to the real-world possibility of a nation sitting beside Israel. As Six Days of War demonstrates masterfully, the wellspring of that madness lies very, very deep within Arab political culture. — John Podhoretz, National Review, 2002.