Essays

Can War Resolve the Middle East's Conflicts?

by Larry DeWitt
August 5, 2006

This is the unedited version of a "letter to the editor" published in the Baltimore Sun newspaper on August 5, 2006. Its topic is the Arab-Israeli conflict and the war in Lebanon.

The current conflict in Lebanon is not a prelude to World War III, as Newt Gingrich rather grandiosely suggested recently. It is something in a sense more depressing than that. It is just another in an endless series of more-of-the-same. It is just the latest flare-up in a conflict that has been going on more or less continuously since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

Creating the state of Israel in the midst of an existing Arab population was lousy nation-building–a virtual formula for endless conflict. But it was a mistake that probably had to be made, as the nations of Europe failed in their duties to provide a welcoming homeland for the Jewish diaspora.

So here we are: on the one side a Jewish state whose disproportionate military power allows it to often act like a bully against its neighbors; and a set of neighbors who use terrorism to endlessly attack Israel. Those of us who are neither Jewish nor Arab find it hard to find anyone to respect in this conflict. When politicians like Robert Ehrlich and Martin O’Malley join together behind a banner proclaiming “Baltimore Stands With Israel,” those of us who do not pander for a living find this simplistic unity on this complex issue to be little short of vulgar. No, not all of us in Baltimore find this conflict to be so facilely one-sided.

The costs to America and to other nations for this conflict–monetary costs, political costs, human costs–have become unbearable. It is time to fix this mistake in the same way we created it: the United Nations must convene an international conference, devise a fair two-state solution, and impose it on the Middle East, whether the nations of the region like it or not.

The parties themselves show no prospects of ever resolving their differences on their own. So we shall have to resolve matters for them. This is probably the only way the Palestinians will get a fair-shake and a viable state; and it is the only way that Israel can become a truly innocent victim of terror campaigns, in defense of whom the international community can then unite behind efforts to eradicate any remaining anti-Israel terrorist groups. But this cannot happen until there is a fair two-state solution in place which people can recognize as fair.

It is time for the nations of the world to say to the various parties in these conflicts: “Enough!”