The Case of Martin Indyk

by Hugh Fitzgerald (May 2010)
 


Does he think a forced Israeli surrender would sate, or whet, Arab appetites?

That the United States, not merely a Great Power but at present undisputedly the greatest military power on earth, would push around a tiny country, the most imperiled and permanently imperiled country in the world, and as it happens the country of people who constitute the most persecuted tribe in human history, that the United States would treat Israel not merely as bad as, but even worse than, Great Britain and France treated Czechoslovakia in 1938, is intolerable. That it does not understand that the Gulf Arabs, and Egypt, and Jordan, have their own independent reasons for fearing Iran and wanting its nuclear project stopped, and that they need not be bribed, least of all by throwing Israel to them as the very wolves they, in their sheeps’ clothing, pretend not to be, is not understood.

But even though such treatment, the treatment that if it had its druthers the Obama Administration would mete out to Israel – and will if it can get away with it – is morally unacceptable. What makes it “worse than a crime” because it is, in Talleyrand’s famous phrase, a “mistake,” is that it makes as little geopolitical sense as does the “strategy” or “stratergy” that supposedly requires Israel to make concessions. For it is claimed that the American “strategy” for dealing with the Muslim world is working. It is not. It is confused, it is idiotic, it is wasteful, it is wrongheaded, it is failing. It fails to alert Infidels to the meaning and menace of Islam. It ignores the instruments of Jihad that really count – the Money Weapon, Da’wa, and demographic conquest. It keeps minds fixated on a few Muslim countries, whose futures should be a matter largely of indifference, and keeps us from focusing on the Infidel lands that are in one way or another most immediately imperiled. Iraq and now Afghanistan, are part of, not a “strategy” so much as a kind of desperate casting-about for a way to deal with a problem it cannot properly define and so has proven incapable of arriving at tactics, or strategy, that make sense (and that problem is Islam). It has become expedient instead to blame our failures on Israel.

Islam is the ideology, religious, political, economic, the Total Belief-System of more than a billion people, some of whom do not take the texts and tenets quite as fanatically to heart as others, but you need not be the most fanatical of Muslims to be hostile to non-Muslims, even murderously so, as the behavior of a great many Muslims, supported or at least never opposed by a still larger number of Muslims, all over Muslim-dominated lands, has shown.

Now comes Martin Indyk, one more of those Middle East “experts” who, having spent decades, his entire professional life, on the matter of bringing “peace” – that is a “peace treaty” which will in turn provide the “solution” to what is so inaccurately and incompletely called the “Arab-Israeli conflict,” – and repeats the whole business, in a bullying key. He, who has not the slightest understanding of Islam, and thus cannot possibly understand the very subject – the Middle East – in which he is supposedly an expert, and about which he has spent a lifetime of reading and writing position papers, and attending meetings, and solemnly listening to the leaders of tribes with flags, and strutting about in Israel, taking himself, and perhaps being taken, very, very seriously, cannot grasp the nature of Islam and does not realize that there is no “solution” to the war that is made by Muslims on Israel, just as he, and many others, write about, promoting the Obama Administration’s Party Line on the Middle East, and the need for “peace” –  which always means nothing more than a treaty, one that according to which Israel will be held, and will hold itself, to scrupulosity fulfill whatever promises it makes, and those promises always involve tangible assets, real things such as land, and water, concessions not to be undone, while on the other side the promises always involve such things as halting terrorist attacks, or other hostile activities such as warfare by other means, including participation in, support of, even deliberate promotion of, every conceivable anti-Israel activity short of war. In every single case when Israel has signed such agreements or treaties, the other side, the Arab Muslim side, has pocketed the Israeli concessions, and never observed even one of the solemn commitments that were undertaken. Sooner or later, they are broken or never observed in the first place. And that should surprise no one, for it is perfectly predictable. Muhammad’s agreement or treaty with the Meccans in 628 A.D. at Hudaibiyya was broken by him, on a pretext, after 18 months, though the “treaty” – not a “peace treaty” but like all such treaties between Muslims and non-Muslims, mean merely to be a “truce treaty” meant to be broken by the Muslim side when it becomes stronger, just like Muhammad, that Model of Conduct (uswa hasana), that Perfect Man (al-insan al-kamil) did with the Meccans in 628, an agreement, and a breaking of the agreement by the Muslims, that has inspired great admiration by Muslims down the centuries, who have never hidden their gloating at this act of deception and trickery by Muhammad, and held it up as a model.

But does Martin Indyk know any of this? I don’t think so. I think he has spent the last twenty or thirty years involved with Arab-Israeli stuff and not bothered to learn what Islam is all about. It’s incredible. Or, rather, it would be incredible if the same thing could not be said of all the others – of Aaron Miller, with his breathless repeated “fourcoreissues: securityJerusalemrefugeessettlements” and Dennis Ross, with “settlementsJeruslamerefugeessecurity” as his fourcoreissues, and Richard Haass, with those fourcoreissuesa being “ Jerusalemsecuritysettlementsrefugees” –well, you get the idea, and you too can be a Middle East Expert For The American State Department, ignoring Islam and rearranging the order of those “fourcoreissues” as you will, so n choose k and do-si-do, and don’t step on your partner’s toe.

And Indyk, Ross, Miller, and Haass are just four of the best known, and not necessarily the most ill-informed, State Department peace-processing horseman of the claimed apocalypse, that is the apocalypse that will presumably happen if the Israelis do not make that “treaty” with the “Palestinians.” But Israel has the peace, the only peace that it can live with. Any further concessions, any further surrenders of control over territory now in its possession – territory to which it has a perfect right under the terms of the Mandate for Palestine, a Mandate the terms of which continued to be relevant and applicable to the part of Judea and Samaria seized by Jordanian army units in the 1948-49 war and won back, by force of arms, by the Israelis eighteen years later. And that claim is reinforced by other claims, once well understood and universally applicable, about the right not to be forced to give up territory to an aggressor state that has used that territory to launch attacks, especially if there is no reasonable belief that such attacks would never occur in the future. In fact, the ideology of Islam makes it a certainty that, absent an overwhelming, and overwhelmingly obvious, more powerful Israel, there will be open warfare against it. Islam demands it. It is intolerable that the Infidel nation-state of Israel, whatever its borders or armistice lines, should continue to exist, and it is time for Israelis and those outside of Israel who claim to grasp the nature of the problem, to recognize this, to express it, not to shy away from it.

Is Martin Indyk capable, at this late stage in his life, of recognizing that he missed the whole thing, missed Islam, never understood the Middle East, was focused on trivia, on the passing parade of peace-processing?

No, I don’t think so. He has given no signs of being capable of that.

But what do you think? Why don’t you look over all the works and days of Martin Indyk – I’m heartily sick of doing it, and of having to bother with such people – and tell me what you think.
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