War Fever

"Holiday time, ladies and gentlemen... Holiday time, when the summer calls the toilers of all countries for an all too brief spell from the offices and mills and stiff routine." So began a Winston Churchill radio address in August 1939, a final effort to rouse the indifferent Western publics to the coming dangers. The tramp of armies across Europe was already audible, while in the rest there was the "hush of suspense, in many lands... the hush of fear."

Since I first heard those words (in a college lecture, the spring of 1974) they have fixed in my mind every August: the sudden break between the world of summer, sun, sand, chilled white wine and the suffering that lurked just ahead.

This summer more than most, for a war is just around the corner. The final thin barrier in front of it comes in the unlikely form of German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, who as of this writing is trying to convene talks between Shimon Peres and Yasir Arafat in Berlin. Maybe that city will concentrate the minds of the leaders the way Camp David and Wye River Plantation did not, but I am not hopeful.

Israel will start the war, believing that what it is now experiencing can hardly be called peace, and that the risks of a swift knock-out blow against the Palestinian political and military infrastructure are minimal. Ariel Sharon was not elected to make peace: in the majority Israeli view, the Palestinians got a good offer from his predecessor Barak (most of the occupied West Bank and Gaza, though sliced up by Israeli settlements, checkpoints, highways built for the use of the Jewish settlers, etc.) and didn't take it. That offer has been pulled off the table.

It is an historical truism that the most dangerous time for an unpopular regime is when it is in the midst of reforms. Invariably, the expectations of the oppressed rise more rapidly than can be accommodated. While Israel is a thriving democracy for its Jewish citizens and a passable one for Israeli Arabs, it is simply a brutal occupying power for most Palestinians. The Oslo peace process raised hopes that these Palestinians would soon acquire what every United Nations resolution and every American negotiator had led them to believe would be theirs once they had recognized Israel-a viable state of their own. That hope has now been aborted, and instead they face an intensified state of siege. Any reader of The New York Times' accounts of what it is like to live with Israeli soldiers preventing travel from one village to the next, or bulldozers leveling homes and orchards to make way for roads servicing the new Jewish settlements, cannot be surprised at the ferocity of Palestinian anger, or at the horrible terrorism.

And no one who thinks through the impact of the Palestinian suicide bombs can be surprised that Israel is readying more intense military measures to put a stop to it. "This cannot go on," wrote Charles Krauthammer after the explosion at a Jerusalem pizzeria killed more than a dozen innocents. What he urges-indeed what many voices in the American media have been laying the groundwork for in the last weeks-is a military solution, a "lightning strike" at the Palestinian leadership and armed police, followed by the building of a "wall of separation" ridding Israel of the Palestinians for good. Israel would keep the parts of the West Bank it wants. Others urge Israel to strike and maintain the occupation. The idea is that one day, maybe, more compliant Palestinians will sign for a peace on Israeli terms.

But what if the war doesn't end there-what if, like so many other wars, there are unforeseen escalations and consequences? Not, of course, a defeat for the Israeli army: the poorly trained and underequipped forces of all the Arab states combined are no match, and the Arabs know that.

But would the Arabs in the region just watch passively while an Israel flush with American armaments humiliated them once again? Perhaps not. Guerrilla groups could fire some rockets from Lebanon. Iraq might still have some scuds, which might be loaded with biological or chemical warheads. Libya has some rockets from North Korea. Non-Arab Iran is working toward getting missiles of its own. And the Muslim lands do have some semblance of the oil weapon, which even in moderation could damage the Western economies already tumbling into recession. None of these actions could promise the Arabs victory, but they could ensure the spread of the chaos and deny Israel its clean "surgical" victory over the Palestinians. Terrorism against Americans would rise.

So far as I have seen, Washington Times editor-at-large Arnaud de Borchgrave is the only America-based commentator to have thought critically about any of this; the rest are either silent, or egging Israel on to do whatever it "must" do. But the coming war could ignite fuses that lead to outcomes we haven't considered. The alternative, unpalatable as it may seem to both sides, is a peace process leading quickly to a viable Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza. Joschka Fischer can't bring this about, but the United States has the power to do so.