Have you read Saul Singer's magnificent column in yesterday's Jersualem Post yet? This one might get framed and put up on my wall. It's that good. It's that timely. It's that important.
What is the "third way" that presents a hope of success?
IN THE American case, the "third way" is actually the road that President George Bush was on but seems to have abandoned. The original Bush Doctrine simply and effectively drew a bright line between the pre- and post-9/11 worlds: henceforth, state support for terrorism (especially when combined with the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction) would be punishable by regime change.
Operationally, this meant that the West would transform nukes and terror - a rogue regime's favorite insurance policies - into liabilities worth jettisoning, as Libya did in 2003.
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BUT WHAT is the "third way" available to Israel? Here the task is even trickier, since it involves changing the conceptions that have dominated our thinking for over a decade. Both the negotiations-based Oslo mind-set and Ariel Sharon's unilateralism were built on the idea that the Arab-Israeli problem could be addressed in isolation. Both failed because they attempted to pretend away a wider reality.
That reality is that the "Arab-Israeli conflict" is just the century-old opposition of the Arab world to Israel's existence. For decades, the plan has been to use the creation of a Palestinian state as the excuse for the Arab world to drop that opposition. Over time, however, means and ends have become so confused that the root cause of the conflict has become almost completely obscured.
Rather than the world continually demanding that Israel prove its existential desire for peace, it is time that Israel and the countries attempting to broker peace demand that the Arab world prove its acceptance of Israel. Our prime minister should make a simple standing offer to negotiate unconditionally with any Arab leader who, like Anwar Sadat, is willing to come to Jerusalem and to host Israel's leadership in his capital.
The fact that even Arab leaders who are formally at peace with Israel would currently balk at this offer is a sign of how unripe the Arab world is for peace. The reason has nothing to do with the Palestinians, but the state of the wider jihad against the West.
Of course, look what happened to Sadat, and then Israel ended up without the Sinai and with a peace that was colder than a witch's, er, toe. But perhaps that wasn't the inevitable outcome. The problem, as I see it, is that the West's increasingly evident timidity about taking on the jihad threat full force is making the Arab world even less ripe for peace.
