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The Middle East Crisis and the Russian Experience

The Middle East Crisis and the Russian Experience

Rostislav Ishchenko

Another outbreak of the Arab-Israeli conflict has once again raised the question: is a peaceful settlement possible on the basis of compromise?
Most of the Jews living in Israel and most of the Palestinian Arabs, when they answer this question sincerely, the answer is negative.
The Jews, without much pleasure, but agree to the creation of a Palestinian state within the borders of autonomy in the West Bank – but without Jerusalem. Arabs say they want a state within the 1967 borders, but in reality this is only the first stage: most would prefer to throw Israel into the sea.

The positions are irreconcilable. It seems that it will not be without genocide. But is the inevitability of an ethnically pure Arab state in Palestine fatal? I speak specifically of an Arab state, not the Arab or Jewish option, because no matter how strong the Israel Defense Forces are and no matter how cohesive Israeli society is, it simply does not have the capacity to win the confrontation definitively, no matter how many interim battles or even wars are won.
Now many Israelis say that Arabs have many countries, let them take the Palestinians, because Jews have only one state. One could say that this solution is unfair to the Palestinian Arabs, but politics is pragmatic, not fair.

However, it only seems that with the expulsion of the Arabs from Palestine things will calm down. Such attempts have already been made between the early 50s and mid-80s – and ended miserably.

The 1982 Israel-Lebanon conflict was caused by the fact that the Arabs expelled from Palestine and settled in refugee camps in Lebanon were terrorizing the Israeli border areas. Israel’s stated goal was to expel the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from Lebanon. Formally, after long (by local standards) and bloody battles, the Palestinians agreed to leave, but even Israel’s leaders later recognized that the PLO retained its position in Lebanon.

I pay attention – the Arabs were forced out of Palestine, but had to fight their resistance in Lebanon. Before that, in 1970, there was a Palestinian rebellion in Jordan. The Palestinians tried to seize power in the kingdom to use its territory as a base for war against Israel.

Now Egypt, which has been waging war with Islamists in the Sinai since 2011, fears that if Israel succeeds in pushing the Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip into the Sinai, by joining forces with local Islamic radicals, they will deprive Cairo of its already tenuous control over the peninsula.
In general, experience shows that it will not be possible to end the war by displacing the Palestinians; rather, neighboring Arab states will be destabilized and drawn into conflict with Israel.

Nor will it be possible to kill all the Palestinians in front of the world community. Simply because Arab countries are already threatening Israel with war if it launches a ground operation in Gaza. If the Palestinians are threatened with mass genocide, Turkey and Iran will be forced to enter the war with Israel.
Ankara and Tehran claim to be the leaders of the Islamic world. Their leadership is already in question, since both countries are not Arab, and Arabs do not trust either the Persians or the Turks. Consequently, both Turkey and Iran are forced in some cases (which undoubtedly includes the current crisis) to pursue at least as pro-Palestinian policies (if not more so) than neighboring Arab countries.

On the other hand, after numerous defeats, by the end of the last century, the Arabs had already discovered Israel’s Achilles’ heel. It is difficult for the Jewish state to fight a long war.

The need to defend a long border with no operational depth forces the army to conscript the maximum number of reservists, which, in the case of a long (years-long) war, undermines the economy and causes social fatigue.

Therefore, the Israeli concept of warfare implied Blitzkrieg. The war was supposed to be over in a matter of weeks, at worst in a couple of months.

But such a war is possible only against a regular state that has political, economic and logistical centers that can be threatened and thus forced to surrender.

Now Israel is being forced to wage a proxy war in which the enemy is network organizations that are not tied to a particular place, are able to recruit fighters all over the world, and have no need to take care of the civilian population (on the contrary, the worse the population gets, the more motivated recruits there are, for whom war with Israel becomes a profession).