By Niram Ferretti, L’Informale

“Hell is truth seen too late”, wrote Thomas Hobbes in The Leviathan, his philosophical political masterpiece. Few are those who, like Martin Sherman, have the insight to see clearly enough the shape of truth in relation to the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the boldness to say things that not so many wish to hear, for truth can be too harsh or even unbearable at times, but hell, present and future is even worse.

Ministerial adviser to Yitzhak Shamir, lecturer in Political Science, International Relations and Strategic Studies at the Tel Aviv University, Martin Sherman was the first academic director of the Herzliya Conference. He is the founder and executive director of the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies whose declared aim is to “Confront, contain and counteract the ‘intellectual surrender’ to the dictates of post-Zionist political correctness often reflected in the conduct of official Israeli policy-makers and in the content of official Israeli policy-making”.

L’Informale met him in Israel.

Daniel Pipes was here in Israel a few weeks ago in order to introduce to the Knesset the Israeli Victory Caucus. You have embraced this new and refreshing initiative. However, between you and Pipes there are some minor differences. In my opinion, the main one is that you don’t see, as he does, that if there will ever be a Palestinian state, Arab-Muslim animosity towards Jews and Israel will cease as a consequence of it. Would you like to elaborate on this?

As you said, I certainly warmly embrace Daniel Pipes’s initiative for Israeli victory. I think that he is quite correct about the fact that the previous policy paradigm of continuous Israeli concessions has proved disastrous and instead of Israeli concessions satisfying Palestinian appetites it has only whet those appetites for further concessions. In principle, on a conceptual level, I strongly endorse Daniel’s initiative and hope it will be the beginning of a paradigm shift in the approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This being said, as far as the idea of the Palestinian state goes, I think it is very important to understand that the context here is very different from the one that prevailed in the West in the aftermath of the Second World War after the defeat of Germany and Japan. Germany was not surrounded by a group of Teutonic nations and Japan was not surrounded by a group of Nipponese nations. If you want to take another example, Ireland was not surrounded by a group of Gaelic nations that could keep sending in insurgents, initiating incitement and undermining any arrangement that the victors might have imposed upon the defeated party. This, in my opinion, is also the miscalculation that America made in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Palestinian state, as are Afghanistan and Iraq, would be surrounded by groups of Muslim, Islamic nations that could always undermine any arrangement made with the victor. If, after an Israeli victory, the Palestinians, who as they see themselves part of the Arab-Islamic world, were to set up some kind of state, they will …read more

Source:: Israpundit

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