THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX

Excerpted from From Jerusalem, Volume 12, Number 2, May 2007,

iscouraging times in Israel these days. Kassam missiles are raining down on Sederot and the western Negev. I was thinking about the situation of Jews and Arabs in the country now—on this Jerusalem Day 40 years later—and getting nowhere but depressed. So I was pleased to run into our friend Paul Raboff, village poet and sometime political thinker. He argues that in order to get unstuck you need to think outside of the box. And here is the box, as he sees it:

Peace? Yes, indeed, says Paul. American, European and Israeli policy for the past 60 years has been to seek peace between Israel and the Arabs. This pursuit of the unattainable, he argues, has crippled the foreign policy of all concerned. Because if your goal is peace you do things that are bad for you, don't do things that you should be doing, and lose out every time because the other side is absolutely not interested in making peace with the Zionist entity, a position it has made abundantly clear in every negotiation we have held since 1948.

            So, thinking outside the box means, he says, abandoning the central premise that you want peace above all and are working for it. LIBERATION DAY: Let us free ourselves of illusion, forget this  position called "peace" forever. Put it out of our lexicon. Instead, Paul suggests, the central policy should be the defense of the Jews. We need to be doing anything and everything necessary to guard the safety of our people and be not at all concerned with the consequences of this policy on an enemy population. This will lead to drastic consequences for the other side.

            We need first and most of all to cut off the supply route that feeds the Gaza Strip, which means going back into the Philadelphia Corridor—the corridor between the bottom of the Gaza Strip and the Egyptian Sinai—making it impossible to tunnel through there (it's do-able technically). We also need to eliminate the Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Al Aksa leadership and the rank and file, physically, and the political level that rules them. If that fails, we apply more pressure: we still supply the electricity and water, and control the food, medicine and commerce to the Palestinian Authority, after all, and can stop them any time we wish. The political repercussions will be severe, international condemnation universal, but we need to take that risk and absorb that punishment because communal catastrophe is the only way to force an enemy to sue for peace.

            It is clear that the government would need to have a full and public declaration of intent, a clarification of policy vis-à-vis international law on fighting terror (which obviously needs to be re-written), and be clear and unapologetic about what it is about to do before starting to do it. So much from Paul.

            Seems a bit rough for me, and I don't think we have a government  capable of thinking outside the box like that, nor do I know what the Americans and Europeans would do to us. Get plenty mad, for sure! So the idea might be politically impossible. Which means we stay stuck. But friend Paul has thought outside the box, presented a different way of thinking about and dealing with the problem, and I am grateful to him for that.                                   ■