Why Israel fights - drawing the line

In large measure, the Oslo process failed because the international community allowed Palestinians to continue to act as victims, rather than as responsible peace partners prepared to exploit the extraordinary circumstances they enjoyed for creating a state. Those circumstances included virtually unlimited international political and financial support, and the willingness of a majority of Israelis - induced, in part, by a justifiable guilty conscience - to consider previously unthinkable scenarios, like ceding part of Jerusalem to Yasir Arafat.

Imagine what the Tibetans or the Kurds could have done with that level of political goodwill and foreign aid. Indeed, billions of dollars in international aid have gone to the Palestinian Authority. Perhaps the greatest defeat the Palestinians inflicted on themselves was to lose the patience of at least part of the international community and, most of all, the Israeli guilty conscience.

Yet many continue to indulge Palestinian rejectionism. Astonishingly, Israel still needs to prove that it offered a credible and contiguous Palestinian state at Camp David in July 2000, and not, as Palestinian leaders put it, a series of “Bantustans”. What doubt remained from Camp David should have been dispelled five months later when Israel accepted President Clinton's proposals - ceding almost the entirety of the West Bank, all of Gaza, and three-quarters of the Old City of Jerusalem. The Palestinian counter-offer was suicide bombings.

The tendency of much of the international community to excuse every Palestinian failure has helped convince Palestinians that victimisation - even when it is self-willed - affords immunity from responsibility.

Many foreign journalists with whom I've spoken in recent weeks accept the Palestinian argument that the rocket attacks from the 1967 Gaza border into sovereign Israel are legitimate, or at least understandable, given that Israel continues to occupy the West Bank. Yet that argument ignores the historic Palestinian failure to exploit the Gaza withdrawal, which created the first sovereign Palestinian territory.

Had the Palestinians shown the most minimal effort at statebuilding - for example, applying foreign aid to rehabilitate refugee camps - the Israeli public would have supported a return to the negotiating table. Instead, the Palestinian national movement proved again that it is more keen on subverting the Jewish state than on creating a Palestinian state. And so one more opportunity for a negotiated end to the conflict was lost.

In conversations I've had over the years with Palestinians, invariably my interlocutor would offer a version of the following: “You and I, we are little people. The ‘big ones’ are only interested in themselves. They don't care if we suffer.” I used to find that sentiment moving, an attempt by Palestinians to create a common humanity with Israelis. But now I see it as an expression of self-induced helplessness, precisely why the Palestinians and the Lebanese have allowed our common tragedy to reach this point.

Israel's attack on Lebanon, holding it responsible for what occurs in its territory, is not a violation of Lebanese sovereignty but an affirmation of it. And in targeting the democratically elected Hamas government, Israel is telling the Palestinians that there is a price to pay for empowering the theology of genocide. If the only alternative to a corrupt Fatah that Palestinian society can generate is a non-corrupt Hamas, then Palestine will become a pariah. Israel's policy, then, is to stop patronising the Lebanese and the Palestinians and relate to them as adults responsible for their fate.

Some in the Arab world are beginning to understand this. In an article published in the Kuwaiti newspaper Arab Times, the editor-in-chief, Ahmed Al Jarallah, wrote:

This war was inevitable as the Lebanese government couldn't bring Hezbollah within its authority and make it work for the interests of Lebanon. Similarly leader of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas has been unable to rein in the Hamas movement. Unfortunately we must admit that in such a war the only way to get rid of “these irregular phenomena” is what Israel is doing. The operations of Israel in Gaza and Lebanon are in the interest of the people of Arab countries and the international community.

The war, then, is not only inciting Islamists, but may, potentially, embolden moderates. The extraordinary Saudi - along with Egyptian and Jordanian - condemnation of Hezbollah marks the first time in any of Israel's wars that a significant chunk of the Arab world has publicly blamed Arab aggression for starting hostilities. This could create an opening for a tacit Israeli alliance with moderate Arabs against the Islamist, and particularly Iranian, threat.

Just as we need to be resolute against the pathologies of the Middle East, so we need to be open to its changes. The responsibility of the people of Israel is not only to be on the front line against terror but to be on the front line for reconciliation. Not only to help stop evil, but to help empower the good.