Taiwan’s rejection—for the fifteenth time in a row—by the agenda-setting committee of the General Assembly of the United Nations last Wednesday may well be seen, before too long, to have been a turning point. After all, who can believe that Taiwan will be turned down another fifteen times?
Chinese diplomats are nervous. They don’t want Taiwan even on the agenda, because they fear, correctly, that an open discussion might not go their way. They know that no one believes on principle that Taiwan should be excluded. Other countries are simply afraid of China.
How long can China continue to intimidate otherwise free-thinking nations? The answer is, not indefinitely.
Consider India. In an article on the op-ed page of the Times of India, Ramesh Thakur, formerly a senior vice rector of the U.N. University in Tokyo, wrote:
The biggest and longest running scandal is the way in which Taiwan has been banned from the U.N.. Taiwan is refused membership, is not granted observer status, and does not figure in the U.N.’s statistical databases.
Concluding that the exclusion of Taiwan “has little to do with the merits of the application and everything to do with the geopolitics of China as a permanent member of the Security Council,” Thakur asked:
Where does this leave all the fine talk of democracy, human rights, and self-determination in Kosovo, East Timor, and elsewhere? Taiwan is better credentialed than most of them. Its population of 23 million is almost the combined total of Australia and New Zealand, and bigger than scores of U.N. member states, including East Timor (under one million) and Kosovo (over two million).
To our shame, official jaws in Washington have been clenched tightly shut with respect to this issue, except when reiterating hoary formulas whose authors, with a handful of exceptions, are long dead.
The Bush administration portrays Taiwan’s increasingly audible demands as no more than local political posturing and manipulation, for which their elected president is to blame, and resolutely declines comment on the merits of Taiwan’s case.
Some former officials, however, are talking sense: Michael Green, for instance, Bush’s former top Asian aide, now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He was recently quoted as saying:
For the U.S. side, we need to recognize the issue of identity in Taiwan is not a political game, it’s not a tactical move in Taipei, it’s a very fundamental issue, not at all unique to its 23 million people…. Look at Korea, Japan, the national identity is at the top of the agenda in every country in Asia and there is no reason why Taiwan should be any different.
Thakur and Green are absolutely right. The issues and processes they describe will not disappear or cease simply because we and China wish they would. We are dealing with nationalism. Difficult as it may be, we need to think ahead.
If somebody actually inflicted hell on them as a result of their support for Hamas, you might be right. Big if. Israeli food shipments is not my idea of hell, although I’m sure the Arabs will do their best to claim they were poisoned.
I don’t mean to darken a glimmer of hope, but I fear that Palestinians have deeply imbibed the dealth cult poison to the point that harming Israel is far more important to them than bettering their own lives.
I have the same concerns as those voiced here. One never knows whether one’s hope is a justified hope or wishful thinking. I have my doubts, but I also would have doubted the Sunni Awakening and the turnaround of Iraq.
It is interesting to consider the analogy to the Sunni Awakening. The question is really how deep the death cult insanity has infected the collective consciousness of the Palestinians in Gaza. The Sunnis in the Awakening eventually determined that the lives of their families were more important to them than their animus toward America. The Palestinian animus toward Israel is deeper, and perhaps qualitatively different, rooted in racial hatred. Also, al-Qaeda in Iraq was led largely by foreigners. These are significant differences.
I just can’t shake the feeling that there must be a silent majority of Palestinians who still care more about their families than about destroying Israel. And maybe the fear of losing their wives and children, in the midst of this conflict, will remind them. Maybe.
Here’s to hoping you are right!
Ahithophel’s remarks are sound and soundly expressed. But it isn’t just the Palestinians who are getting a snotful of what it means to elect a terrorists leadership. The world is given the clearest possible view of Israel’s dilemma.
She evacuates settlements, she ends the occupation of Gaza, only to provide a Palestinian leadership sworn to obliterate Israel, with a platform wherefrom to pound Israeli villages with rockets.
Hamas has given the conflict unprecedented clarity. It has removed the last layer of ambiguity. Reasonable people have never had a more unclouded view of the issue. And that some fault Israel nevertheless, even as Hamas yet insists on its right to shoot into Israeli villages, shows the naked perversity of those supporters. That too is to the good.
I agree with Ahithophel, and with nacl’s corollary that the “Hamas way” disambiguates the Israeli position like nothing before ever has. I will even argue (and some will call me Pollyanna for saying this) that the same logic applies to the Oslo Agreement and the Gaza disengagement. Both proved disastrous policies in execution, but having tried them in earnest, Israel really disarms all but the most biased critics.
Peace, generosity and goodwill have been tried in every imaginable scenario, and failed, failed, failed. The status quo remains war and Palestinian misery. Surely this must be sinking in even with the brainwashed Palestinians. After all, there are Palestinians old enough to remember how good life under true Israeli occupation really was before the PLO “liberated” them. How many years of Soviet-style mismanagement did it take before East European Joe Average noticed that life in the West (for all its capitalist evils) was far nicer than life in Krakow or Bucharest? Even Arab self-deception must have its limits when repeatedly confronted with unavoidable, illusion-shattering facts.
East Europeans were never voluntarily Communist. The Red Army imposed Marxism on them. Arab culture is much deeper rooted. And Arab-Islamic supremacism will never countenance Israel. That doesn’t mean the Jews can’t deter their enemies indefinitely but it ought to sober them out of any illusions about coexistence.
Who was it that said that diplomacy must be given a chance to fail? I will echo some of the fine points made above. I consider myself more hawkish than your average American and would read news reports of Hamas rocketing and subsequent Israeli non-response in virtual disbelief, bordering on frustration. However, given that Israel is a democracy and it has a politically liberal populace, perhaps taking 8 years of rockets on the chin and engaging in failing peace talks is the necessary step to generate the political will to finally hit back with a whole lot of angry.
The clarity thing is big I think. I was going to mention it as such, but some fine Contentions veterans beat me to it. That was Krauthammer’s point when the disengagement had just been completed. People can argue that pulling out of Gaza was a mistake because all it got was terror in return, and they may well be right. But it may turn out for the best in the long run. Hamas has squandered too much (undeserved) good will with their attacks and intransigence (and their Iranian patronage). We can thank clarity for that.
Outstanding comment Ahithopel and kudos to Commentary for posting it.
I decided to read the Hamas Charter this weekend, and I’ve been posting the link on the various wacky-left sites (like tpmcafe) that I go to to drive myself crazy.
as others have noted, Jew-hating is not something the Palestinians can just give up. it is their way of life. the problem with all negotiations up to now is that each side had different aims. we foolishly thought that the Pals wanted peace too. they don’t. make no mistake: they want to destroy Israel. this isn’t my cockeyed opinion, it’s written in black and white in their governing document!
speaking of tpmcafe.com, their head self-hating Jew, MJ Rosenberg, has just written a post about how “he knew all along” that Barack Obama was just waiting for 1/20 before he started changing American policy toward Israel. post and comments at http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/01/06/obama_addresses_gaza_hes_fired_up_ready_to_go/index.php
what do you all think about this? do you think Obama’s going to desert one of our closest allies to placate his friends at moveon.org and DailyKos?
As the disengagements were not based on an absence of clarity regarding enemy
intentions, but on an alliance of internal political and claimed military exigencies,
clarity will not preclude a repetition on the West Bank and in Jerusalem. There has
never been a right wing consensus in Israel capable of withstanding prolonged stress.
There is certainly no basis for attributing lasting clarity to the present government
in any case, nor do substantial elements of the electorate (Arabs, Haredim, leftists)
place a premium on it. Clarity is likely to be overvalued.
Unfortunately, one or two more episodes like the UNRWA school destruction will have Israel’s only friend, the USA, preparing to step on her neck, and once more resetting the game board for the Arab world which created this genocidal weapon and camouflaged it as a culture/nationality.
And all the clarity engendered by the orc-like behavior of Hamas will vanish.
To echo what many have said above, especially Diane (#6), I often think of Czeslaw Milosz’s description of his own awakening to the evils of communism:
“The actual moment of my decision to break with the Eastern bloc could be understood, from the psychological point of view, in more ways than one. From outside, it is easy to think of such a decision as an elementary consequence of one’s hatred of tyranny. But in fact, it may spring from a number of motives, not all of them equally high-minded. My own decision proceeded, not from the functioning of the reasoning mind, but from a revolt of the stomach. A man may persuade himself, by the most logical reasoning, that he will greatly benefit his health by swallowing live frogs; and, thus rationally convinced, he may swallow a first frog, then the second; but at the third his stomach will revolt. In the same way, the growing influence of the doctrine on my way of thinking came up against the resistance of my whole nature. ”
At some point the Arab world must come to terms with what it is doing to *itself*.
Maine’s Michael,
If you were assigned to subdue a sector where the population had been turned into human shields for enemy combatants rocketing your country, what exactly would you do?
Diana in comments #6, writes of:
Exactly ten years ago I wrote COMMENTARY a letter, which it published, in response to an article by Douglas J Feith. I pointed out that it was necessary to attempt Oslo, though it might fail, for the reasons Diana stated.
If Oslo and Gaza had not been attempted, would Israel’s situation, vis a vis the Palestinians and the world, be better or worse? The Palestinians could not be in a worse fix than they are nowadays. Israel on the other hand would surely now be terribly issolated.
However hot the anger today in the Arab street, among anti-Semites and the Left, the world’s establishment figures, and it is they, the rational people, who run things, understand Israel’s dilemma and, even if only tacitly, support her.
Furthermore, Israel at home is whole. That is not a small thing. Without Oslo, and the disengagement from Gaza, Israel would now be tearing itself to pieces. Instead virtually all Israelis know that the conflict continues DESPITE sincere Jewish efforts at a fair settlement.