Ribbity wisdom

The Frog has a brilliant essay up today on the problem with Israel's Left. While this topic has been the subject of countless articles and op-ed pieces in recent months, this one has a simple ring of on-the-money about it. They're fighting for the last peace.

It's a well-known accusations that unimaginative generals have caused their own downfall by fighting the last war. One of the most striking examples in recent history was France's impenetrable Maginot Line, a series of concrete bunkers designed to provide France with the upper hand in trench warfare. The problem was that the Germans were one step ahead, and had prepared themselves not for trench warfare, but for a Blitzkrieg, a 'lightening war'. The results for France were disasterous: long years of German occupation.

So it is when you fight the old peace. The Olso Agreement was based on the idea that Yassir Arafat and his cronies would act like Anwar Sadat, warrior turned peace-maker. All you had to do was to give him the right incentive, and he would crush the Palestinian extremist groups and provide you with a stable border. While this assumption was true of King Hussein - another warrior turned peace-maker - it was totally mistaken with regards to Yassir Arafat. Even though Arafat made it clear, merely days after his coronation in Gaza, that he regarded the peace agreement with Israel is a stop-gap measure, the Labour Party continued to praise him and to forgive him. Who can forget Peres's embarrassing verbal acrobatics as he tried to explain to an increasingly doubtful Israeli public that Arafat was a true partner for peace, and the shameful Orwellian expression "victims of peace" coined by the Labour government to explain away the fact that Arafat's return hailed a rise, not a fall in Palestinian terror.