Josef Joffe, the publisher and editor of the German Weekly Die Zeit, research fellow at the Hoover Institution, and distinguished fellow at the Stanford Institute for International Studies, has a cover article on Israel in the current issue of Foreign Policy:
Those who think that the
Middle East conflict is a “Muslim-Jewish thing” had better take a closer look at the score card:
14 years of sectarian bloodshed in Lebanon; Saddam’s campaign of extinction against the Shia in the aftermath of the first Gulf War; Syria’s massacre of 20,000 people in the Muslim Brotherhood stronghold of Hama in 1982; and terrorist violence against Egyptian Christians in the 1990s. . . . Hamas has bigger ambitions than eliminating the “Zionist entity.” . . . . [plus the Iran-Iraq war, Wahhabi oppression in
Saudi Arabia, 100,000 killed in intranational strife in Algeria, Pakistan as "an explosion waiting to happen" etc. etc.]
The existence of
Israel cannot explain the breadth and depth of the Mukhabarat states (secret police states) throughout the Middle East. With the exceptions of Jordan, Morocco, and the Gulf sheikdoms, which gingerly practice an enlightened monarchism, all Arab countries (plus Iran and Pakistan) are but variations of despotism — from the dynastic dictatorship of Syria to the authoritarianism of Egypt. . . .
[T]he notion that 5 million Jews are solely responsible for the rage of 1 billion or so Muslims cannot carry the weight assigned to it. . . .
Israel is just a strip of land in the world’s most noxious neighborhood, and the cleanup hasn’t even begun.
Joffe concludes that "[f]ar from creating tensions,
Worth reading in its entirety.