The Middle East will not be at peace even if Israel were to suddenly withdraw to the pre-1967 borders, dismantle its settlements, return the Golan Heights and do everything else its enemies desire.
All of those things might buy safety from rockets, but peace requires much more than that. Israeli generosity in peace will be a very powerful contribution but not sufficient. The other requirements are beyond Israel’s power to give.
In Gaza, peace requires an end to low level civil war for power among Hamas, PLO, Fatah and various movements of martyrs and Jihadis. That is also true of the West Bank.
If these factions cannot come together in friendship to one another in their own towns in a time of war, what hope is there that they will overcome their mutual distrust and hatreds at any other time? Instead, their internal power struggles would be more violent. There are many examples of this kind of degeneration around the world.
It is futile to think that peace will automatically bless the Middle East if Israel turned into an angel of conciliation. The biggest self-deception among Arabs is that Israeli occupation is the sole cause of all troubles in the Middle East. In fact, it is a cause among several other seemingly more intractable ones.
The real causes derive from the mutual hatreds of the people living in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and the region’s other countries, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Further causes reside in the corrupt and venal nature of the regimes in those countries.
It is as if factions within those countries hated one another more than Israel. In the Palestinian territories, the slightest lulls in battles with Israel bring rival militias onto the streets in bloody clashes for power. Whichever faction dominates temporarily, it governs poorly and lines its pockets with both hands.
In Lebanon, Christian and Sunni inhabitants are already complaining at the influx of Shiite refugees in their neighborhoods. Some fear that Israeli bombs might follow but there is also loathing of their co-citizens. It has been customary since the peace of the 1990s to brush these sectarian tensions, even hatreds, under the carpet and to pretend that Lebanon would flourish if only Israel trod more carefully. But the hornets are out of the nest now.
In Syria, a tiny Alawite clan minority (of Shiite faith) controls the majority with an iron fist. The lid is on the pressure cooker and it could burst regardless of Israel.
In Saudi Arabia, the princes live in fear of a religious establishment that is as obscurantist in Sunni terms as their shortsighted Shiite counterparts in Iran. In Egypt, the mostly secular elites seem more out of touch with their own people than with the White House.
All of these societies have significant forces of internal instability, which they must themselves resolve to create foundations for peace in the region. This is not just a matter of installing American style democracy or creating a disciplined “New Middle East� where nobody lobs rockets at Israel.
The solutions lie in the hearts and minds of the ruling elites of those nations. If they place their people’s economic and social needs above their own avidity for power, it will be much easier to find peace within their nations, achieve armistice with Israel and enjoy their rightful place in the world.