Subscribe | UPI Odd Newsletter Subscribe NEW YORK, June 13 (UPI) -- Okay, I've kept my mouth shut long enough. It's time for the Joe Bob Briggs Plan for Peace in the Middle East. You should listen to me. I'm not a Jew. I'm not an Arab. I'm not one of those wacky hard-shell Babtist types who think we need to support Israel so that Jesus can come back and destroy the world. I'm also not one of those Vanessa Redgrave types who thinks the PLO is a charity for orphans. Advertisement I've been to the Middle East, and I think they're all insane. Most of them anyway. They remind me of my cousins in the Ozarks who think the Trilateral Commission is poisoning the headwaters of the Arkansas River so they can destroy the alligator gar population. Fortunately my cousins never roam more than 30 miles from their birthplace, whereas in Israel and Palestine -- and let's throw in Lebanon and Syria as well -- we've got conspiracy theorists with weapons in every household. It's like a Kentucky blood feud being worked out on a GLOBAL scale. Advertisement I've been studying this thing for 20 years now, ever since I was trapped in Beirut with some other American cowboys who all would have been better off writing about chili cookoffs in Tucson, and the pattern to the conflict is so simple, and the way to disrupt it is so obvious, that you're gonna think I'm naive when I say this. The following pattern has happened at least 30 times in the last decade: (1) There's a lull in the action. (2) Somebody in America says, "Let's make a peace plan." (3) The Israelis have a screaming debate about whether it's time for a peace plan. (4) The Palestinians have fistfights about whether it's time for a peace plan. (5) The evangelical Christians in America put heavy-duty pressure on the United States to not give away a single inch of Israeli land. (6) A date is set for the two sides to meet. (7) The Palestinians blow something up. (8) The date is changed. (9) The Palestinians blow something bigger up. (10) The meeting is canceled. (11) The Israelis blow up some Palestinians. (12) America gets all upset. It's time for "restraint," America says. It's time for "concessions on both sides," America says. Advertisement (13) "We told you so," say the American Christians. (14) There's a lull in the action. (15) Start over at 2. Now. If you've been paying attention, you'll notice that the Palestinians don't just go around suicide-bombing willy-nilly. They suicide-bomb at specific times and places. They have their suicide bombers ready, but they only use them when something happens. Among the things that can happen: (1) A peace conference is scheduled. (2) An Israeli politician makes some major concession, like closing settlements or releasing prisoners. (3) A Palestinian leader says something favorable about a partition plan. This is because the rednecks like chaos. Organizations like Hamas will always be with us, just like the Ku Klux Klan will always be with us. There will always be a missing-gene club where brain-damaged lowlifes can gather in the woods and try to establish some blood-thirsty racial purity scheme with bombs and rifles. You can spy on them. You can infiltrate their organizations. You can put them in computers. You can raid their arms caches. You can clap them in jail every time they make an illegal left turn. What you can't do is kill their grandmothers and their children. Every time you do that, they win 50 new recruits. We Advertisement learned that at Waco. Israel is a civilized modern country, and even they have a few loose-cannon extremist gun nuts who want to wipe out every non-Jew between the Mediterranean and the Euphrates. And yes, some of these people were embittered by losing THEIR daughters and grandmothers in street attacks. The difference between Israel and Palestine, fortunately, is that the Mossad keeps their headcases under control. It's a classic revenge cycle, but in this case it's one- sided because Israel is a full state and Palestine is a half- state, and when you have that kind of loose structure, the warrens and cubbyholes will teem with rats. Arafat couldn't control it. Abbas can't control it. And Israel can't control it. Their latest recipe, ordering the army to "completely wipe out" Hamas "from the lowliest member to Shiek Ahmed Yassin," is destined to litter the ground with so many dead cousins, uncles, soccer teammates and neighborhood grocery store clerks that each guided missile launched from a helicopter is like a spraygun planting hate seeds in a rocky soil where the plants will grow up lean and mean. What's amazing at this point is that, each time we start a peace process and then the country breaks into violence, people seem SURPRISED by it. The New York Times says, "Just when things were looking good . . ." Advertisement Listen up, people. IT'S THE PEACE PROCESS ITSELF THAT TRIGGERS THE VIOLENCE. It's a direct cause-and-effect relationship. As soon as a peace plan is even RUMORED, Israel should automatically go to Level Hot Orange Terrorism Alert. The idea that people are still shocked and amazed when a bus blows up three days after something positive happens is IN ITSELF AMAZING. Hamas and Hamas types want total bloody victory -- they want the Jews pushed into the ocean. Any peace initiative is, to them, a defeat, and is more dangerous than simple day-to-day miserable status-quo limbo. Three things infuriated them in recent weeks: (1) A new Palestinian Prime Minister, Mahmoud Abbas, was praised by the world community as a beacon of peace. (2) A Middle Eastern summit meeting was held in Jordan and attended by President Bush. (3) Ariel Sharon himself said that he supports the creation of a Palestinian state and the withdrawal of the Israeli army from Palestinian cities. Any one of these things, standing alone, is enough to nuke a disco. All of them coming together, with a "road map" to create two nations that coexist, was the signal for Hamas to dial up every available martyr checked out on an explosive vest to report to the clubhouse. Advertisement And when they did start killing Jews, everyone reacted as they'd hoped. Ariel Sharon turned from weary compromising statesman to scorched-earth hawk. President Bush stopped talking about "restraint." The helicopter gunships took to the air, and the terrorists were blessed with 30 innocent civilian martyrs. It was necessary, said Sharon and Bush, because Mahmoud Abbas isn't strong enough to jail the Hamas members. Abbas instead wants to negotiate a ceasefire with them. He's in the same position Arafat was in for 20 years. Nothing is changed. He has to negotiate with them because there are too many of them. What he has to do, let's face it, is LIE to them. He has to get them to stop killing long enough to get a Palestinian state in place, and the only way he can do that is to tell them that the Palestinian state is a temporary arrangement, and once that's set up, he'll continue the struggle to get back all of historical Palestine. That's the only message they want to hear. Anything short of that is telling them, "Blow somebody up." There's a better way. It would take statesmen. It would take heroic men and women. It would work like this: Advertisement Once the peace process begins, all killings go unavenged. The victims are mourned. Warrants are issued for the killers, but only as a police matter. The model here is Gandhi, not Ben-Gurion. The goal is to save millions of lives in the future by ignoring the cruel inhuman deaths of a few today. On the day after an attack, the nation would worship, not kill. "But Israel has a right to defend itself!" Yes it does. It can exercise that right. No one is going to step in to stop Israel from doing that, least of all the United States. According to this plan, Israel would voluntarily abdicate that right for a time. Israel would say "Today we break the cycle." "But the Palestinians should do the same thing!" They should but they can't. They've got Timothy McVeighs on every street corner, and it only takes one. They won't have the apparatus to root them out until they become a nation. It's like living on a remote farm with a homicidal maniac in your house. You have to tell him what a nice man he is until the area is built up and the sheriff puts in a sub-station -- then you can bring in the SWAT team and get rid of him. Advertisement Israel would abase itself for a few months in order to have peace for many years. On the first day of the peace talks, if 17 people are killed at a suicide bombing in a shopping mall, the negotiators would be sworn to continue. They can condemn the bombers. They can search for the ringleaders. But their overall message would be, "We know this was not an act of the Palestinian people. This was the act of a criminal gang. We need to hurry the peace process so you can clean up your country." The second thing Israel would have to agree to do is refrain from issuing loaded challenges to Abbas designed to make him lose face. In a region where the spoken word carries incredible power, you can't be constantly screaming "Condemn the terror! Condemn Hamas! Condemn it all! If you don't, we'll know you're a liar!" Yes, he's a liar. He has to be a liar. He has to appear strong among his own people even when he's weak. He has to convince a deeply divided society that he loves all of them, even the crazies. He can't be constantly undercutting his political future by making his own people think he's a traitor or a collaborator with the Israelis. He has to be a public Iron Man -- while he collaborates with the Israelis. Advertisement Ask him to condemn the terror privately. Don't ask him to make speeches about it. "But you're asking Israel to be passive so that these killers can establish a powerful state that can then operate terror against them continually." Not at all. Once the state is established, it will be easier to control the terror, not harder, especially with the United States' new get-tough policy with any Middle Eastern leaders who harbor criminals. Once a real Palestinian government is in place, it will be held to the same standard as any other nation that plays footsie with terrorists. "You have no right to ask Israel to stand down! We are the victims! We are the targets! We have no suicide bombers of our own!" Israel must stand down because Israelis have the more mature civilization. Israel must stand down because they've advanced farther along the path of modernity than the Palestinians have. Israel must stop acting like a Ph.D. candidate in morality demanding virtue from a 9-year-old child. The common wisdom is that "both sides must compromise." Actually it's not even true. If one side compromises enough, the compromise can cover both. It's the whole principle behind "turn the other cheek," which Jesus popularized, but which scholars have noted was not original with him. It came from the ancient rabbis. Advertisement * Joe Bob Briggs writes a number of columns for UPI and may be contacted at [email protected] or through his Web site at joebobbriggs.com. Snail mail: P.O. Box 2002, Dallas, Texas 75221.
