PEACE, THE PRELUDE TO WAR 

By Prof. Paul Eidelberg 

Has the desire for peace given Israel peace? Has it not resulted in Israel’s truncation, humiliation, and emasculation? Has not the desire for peace, uttered ad nausea by Israeli politicians, rendered this country increasingly dependent on distant America and thus more vulnerable to war?  

That anyone should expect peace from Arab regimes invariably ruled by force and fraud is a question for a psychiatrist. Consider. 

Did England and France’s desire for peace transform Germans or their leaders into doves? Germany, remember, was the home of European humanism and rationalism, of science and philosophy. Are Muslims more humanistic than the nation that produced Kant, Schiller, Heine, Planck and Einstein? 

Did the desire for peace save Czechoslovakia? Was it not peace-lovers like Neville Chamberlain—the Peace Now advocate of the 1930s—who precipitated the bloodiest war in human history, including the Holocaust? And did not those puerile pacifists malign Winston Churchill as a “warmonger,’ just as their counterparts in Israel today defame critics of Oslo as “enemies of peace”? 

But let me address lovers of peace who are nonetheless skeptical about the so-called peace process: 

Suppose you expressed no desire for peace! Suppose you declared: “I do not desire peace with Janus-faced Arab despots who luxuriate in oriental splendor while their people live in abject poverty.” Do you have the courage of your convictions? 

Suppose you declared: “I do not desire peace with Arab tyrants who deprive their people of liberty and use them as cannon fodder to make war—yes, and who thereby violate the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” Are you manly enough to proclaim such an attitude? Then let me remind you of how Ronald Reagan, by calling the Soviet Union the “Evil Empire,” placed its rulers on the defensive and precipitated the demise of that tyranny. With his example before us, suppose our critics of the “peace process” were to say: 

“I do not desire peace with tyrannies, that is, with regimes ruled by evil men. I do not want to dignify their regimes and thereby foster the designs of the wicked and perpetuate their oppression of ignorant masses.” 

“I do not seek peace with liars and scoundrels lest I foster cynicism among my countrymen. I prefer to arouse in Arab villains fear rather than allow them to disarm us with professions of peace.” 

Is it not wiser to prepare for war than to hobnob with warlike men? Do you think this will make Arab dictators more bellicose? Did Israel’s 1979 peace treaty with Egypt make that dictatorship less militant? Then why is Egypt, a regime threatened by no one, engaged in an unprecedented military buildup? Why does Egypt’s state-controlled media, in violation of that 1979 treaty, vilify Jews and Israel more than ever before? 

I ask the cult of peace: “What makes you think that people in general are peace-lovers like yourselves? Why is violence the dominant theme of the entertainment industry? Why do blacks murder blacks almost every day in America’s capital from which its president preaches peace to the Middle East? 

Why did Muslims and Christians slaughter each other in Lebanon—100,000 in thirteen years? And why should Palestinian Arabs who supported Saddam Hussein’s rape of Kuwait, another Arab country, live in abiding peace with Jews in Israel? In other words, if Arabs can’t live in peace with each other, why do you expect them to live in peace with Jews?

Are not such expectations a sign either of abysmal stupidity or an autistic escape from reality, or perhaps a form of secular mysticism, but in any case a mental disorder? 

We boast of being “modern” and “progressive,” of living in an Age of Reason. Computer logic, statistics, empirical facts—this is the stuff of scientific and business affairs. So let’s be scientific and businesslike by looking at some facts about war and peace. 

There have been more than 1,000 wars in the Western world alone in the last 2,500 years. This means that peace is little more than a preparation for war. But from this it follows that peace treaties are only lulls before the storm—and those lulled by those treaties are our most vociferous lovers of peace! 

And so, the next time a democratic politician talks “peace,” dare to denounce him as a fool or a knave! Dare to say you do not support politicians who desire peace with tyrannies. Dare to call those professors of peace promoters of war.