Dangerous game of brinkmanship
Make no mistake about it; this is the last call for a two-state solution. Trying to squeeze more improbable concessions from the Palestinians won’t cut it. Palestinians have nothing left to give, except for the shirt on their back. When you have nothing, you have nothing to lose. You don’t engage a people who have nothing to lose in brinkmanship, that game where a political leader, seeking advantages from his adversaries, creates the impression that he is willing, and more than able, to push a highly dangerous situation to its furthest limits.
The game is not just perilous but precarious, for in forcing your opponent to back down and make absurd concessions — Israel is the “homeland of the Jewish people,” Israeli occupation troops should be allowed to stay virtually indefinitely in the Jordan Valley, Palestine’s bread basket, and yes we want affirmation that the moon is a big blueberry-stuffed muffin — your threats had better be propelled by progressive escalation.
Brinkmanship may have been a term coined in earnest by John Foster Dulles, US Secretary of State under President Eisenhower, to describe the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, but Bertrand Russell, the late British philosopher, compared it to the Game of Chicken, in which two drivers rush headlong, at full speed, toward each other on a collision course where one must swerve before he dies in the crash. The one who swerves first will be called “chicken,” or is said to have “chickened out.” The 1962 Cuban missile crisis is one such striking example where two superpowers took a crisis to the brink but one knew when to back off.
But brinkmanship is a slippery slope where — should you not have an exit strategy — you will back yourself into a corner from which you can’t wiggle out. Kim Jong Un, the untested leader of the impoverished state of North Korea, who had disavowed his country’s armistice agreement with Seoul and improbably threatened to rain down missiles on the American mainland, became a player last year in this dangerous game. It is unclear why the impetuous 30-year-old had opted to do that at the time. Some analysts advanced a pedestrian reason: Kim Jong Un was making an effort to have a better negotiating position with the US and South Korea. Others, blithely sourcing Freud, were convinced the Supreme Leader was “compensating” for his “inferiority complex,” or perhaps “projecting” his firebrand grandfather, Kim Il Sung, founder of the republic, who plunged the Korean peninsula into a war that in the 1950s killed as many as five million people, including more than 35,000 American troops.
Brinkmanship can be an exhilarating game to play, if you are of that mindset, but unless you know what you are doing, things can spin out of control and culminate in a deadly fracas for the country you lead.
Heck, ask any Arab about that — any Arab in touch with his modern history. On May 22, on the eve of the June War of 1967, Gamal Abdul Nasser, Egypt’s then popular president, rolled the dice and played. After demanding that UN peacekeeping troops leave Sinai, he stationed a garrison in Sharm El-Sheikh and announced a blockade of the Straits of Tiran — a blockade announced but not actually enforced by actual ships from the feckless Egyptian Navy. Nasser, unaware of the dangers ahead, soldiered on, not knowing that he had just given Israel an incontestable casus belli. “The Jews have threatened war,” he declared. “We tell them welcome, we are ready for war.”
It was all brinkmanship, of course, for Nasser had no serious intention of initiating hostilities. Lest we forget, his Vice President Zakariah Muhedin was already on his way to Washington to negotiate a settlement of the crisis. As the Arabs talked of war and prepared for peace, Israel prepared for war and talked of peace. Miles Copeland, the CIA station chief in Cairo wrote in his book, The Game of Nations: The Amorality of Power Politics (1969): “After all, the Israelis had been rehearsing their assault for years, and never again would they get such favorable circumstances in which to launch it.”
You play a game of brinkmanship and you get trapped in a world of mirrors — unless you are adept enough at its rules. Netanyahu appears to think he is. Truth be told, the man does not take Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, seriously as a threat. He has the US in his corner and he is convinced that there is nothing the Palestinians can do about it. Abbas leads an occupied people whose economy is dependent on foreign donor funds, much of it from the US.
On that one he is wrong. For starters, the conflict now is not between Israel and the Palestinians but between Israel and Palestine. Beyond going to the ICC, Palestinian leaders could rally support from the Arab world, the Islamic world, the Third World and the European world to put Israel in the dock, as apartheid South Africa had been put in the dock in the 1980s.
Or, as a last resort, to respond to Israel’s game of escalating brinkmanship, the top leadership of the Palestinian Authority could — not an altogether outrageous move as it would seem at first blush — pack up, lift anchor and sail away, leaving Israel the responsibility of ruling over the West Bank as an occupying power, which it has always done, albeit under a different guise, Palestinian Authority or no Palestinian Authority.
Palestinian leaders then will regroup as a government in exile, not unlike the Algerian government in exile in the late 1950s, and conduct their diplomatic struggle against the Zionist entity from there. Where they are positioned now, under the thumb of Israeli and certainly under US diktats, leaves them hamstrung, dependent and, well, not of much help to the cause of their people.
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