Excerpted Reply by Norman Podhoretz
Reply of Norman Podhoretz in January 2002 Commentary to my own letter and those of others (relevant excerpts): http://www.commentarymagazine.com/letters.html#I * * * * * In the meantime, an authentic Churchillian note is sounded by Allen Weingarten when he declares (in a formulation that actually comes not from Churchill himself, but from Douglas MacArthur) that "in war there is no substitute for victory." But at the risk of seeming to contradict myself, I confess that I cannot envisage what victory would look like in this context. If Mr. Weingarten means the reoccupation by Israel of all the territories it captured in the Six-Day war, he is kidding himself, since the United States and the rest of the world would never permit this. Yet even in the almost inconceivable event that the world were to turn a blind eye to reoccupation, Israel would then become unviable as a Jewish state with a democratic government unless it were-in Ron Unz's words-to "develop a consensus for killing or expelling millions of Palestinians." Again, on the even more dubious assumption that the world would turn a blind eye to such a policy, I agree with Mr. Unz that the Israelis themselves would be incapable of going down that path. On the other hand, I disagree strongly with Mr. Unz about the alternative scenario he draws (one, incidentally, that is very popular among many Arabs). I do not accept that Israel will wind up as another Crusader kingdom, "collapsing under continual Muslim pressure and flagging ideological commitment." It would be foolish to dismiss this possibility altogether, and Mr. Unz makes a strong case for its realization. But I am still convinced that if the Israelis can hold on tight against the forces he specifies, the day may yet come when the Arab world will call off the war it has been waging against the Jewish state since 1948. |