It Takes a (Democratic) Village

So what will it take to end the decades of conflict between the Israelis and its Arab neighbors?

Let’s first recognize the problem: For decades, we’ve assumed it’s an issue of land. But is that really so? If land were the issue, Yasser Arafat would have at least negotiated former Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s 2000 offer at Camp David to convey virtually all of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem to the Palestinians — everything Arafat had demanded prior to then. Also, other Arab nations that have no land disputes whatsoever with Israel would not challenge Israel’s very right to exist.

Well, you may conclude, it’s a clash of religions then. But if this were so, we would expect to see Jews exploding themselves in Arab flea markets.

Why have we assumed that the conflict stems from land and religion? Because that’s what the Arabs have told us. And so we’ve spent decades trying to resolve the conflict along those lines, always ending in failure or questionable results at best.

We need to view this conflict through a different and correct frame.

But what is that frame? It is recognizing that the pain between Arabs and Israelis is the result of the Arabs’ own ruthless and corrupt hold on their people. In short, it is dictatorship vs. democracy.

Close your eyes and imagine a war today between the United States and Canada, England and Spain or Australia and Japan. But the notion of war among those countries is absurd, you say. Why? Because all of these countries are democracies.

The first order of business of any democracy is prosperity for its people. Indeed, unless a government can show that it has improved its citizens’ lives, those citizens will vote it out. By contrast, the first order of a dictatorship is power and maintaining it. To do this, you have to control the media, bribe your generals, whip up religious fervor, create secret police forces and foment hatred against outside enemies, real or imagined.

Where democracies seek stability and growth, dictatorships crave enemies, and see prosperity as a threat. These differing agendas are at radical odds with one another and cannot coexist. And so there can be no true peace in the Middle East until the Arabs shed this craving — and democratize. This is the problem. Despite the media portrayals, we will discover that Israel was never the problem at all, not even a part of it. It has been just a victim of the Arabs’ problem.

Many might claim the Arab culture runs too deep, that several generations must pass before one can even talk of democracy. But history is a continuous series of surprises. In 1945, the Japanese shed centuries of brutal rule by emperors, whom they had revered as gods. It soon became one of the most prosperous of democracies. In 1988, you could not convince anyone that the entire Soviet empire would collapse in the following year. But it did.

Until now, Israel and the United States have at best urged Arafat to curb hate in the media, mosques and schools, and to provide a social infrastructure. But this is asking Arafat to provide all the benefits of a democracy, while letting him continue a dictatorship. It’s a self-contradicting agenda.

This is why Israel recognizes that the entire Palestinian infrastructure must change. We cannot expect meaningful progress in the Mideast while the Arabs continue their suppression and manipulation of information. Unless we replace these dictatorships with democracies, they will forever inflict pain. Dictatorships are like mosquitoes in a swamp: You can kill many, but unless you clean out the swamp, they will come back.

If we truly want peace in the region, we need to discard our framing the conflict around land and religion. We should instead ask ourselves the far more difficult question of how we can foster democracy in the Arab world. It will be hard work, but this is the reality we must face if we want the lasting peace that we now see among our world’s great democratic nations.