Kant on Perpetual Peace and the Seeds of Another War

Two hundred years ago, an essay entitled “Perpetual Peace” by German idealist philosopher Immanuel Kant argued: “no peace treaty may be deemed valid that contains within its provisions, the seeds of another war.”

This seemingly prosaic conclusion and aphorism should be remembered well by all parties at the United Nations, European Union, Russia and State Department, (‘the Quartet’) who recently dropped on the desk of President George Bush their “Road Map” to a permanent two-state solution to the Israel-Arab conflict.

While the overt objective of the “Road Map” was peace, at close range, however, it revealed not a recipe for peace, but simply the inflexible demand that Israel evacuate the territories that the Arab nations twice used as jumping-off points to drive the Jewish State into the sea, and a call for the occupants of those areas to temporarily reduce the murder and maiming of the Israeli population.

The specific number of killings, cripplings and dismemberments that will need to be tolerated as a sign of good will was not spelled out, which leads many to wonder, and for good reason: Was the Quartet interested in peace or the destruction of Israel?

In addition to the routine murder of Jews that has taken place as far back as the 1920s, ignored is the basic rationale for the occupation. Attention also has yet to be paid to the state of war that continues against Israel by Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iraq, refreshed each decade since 1948.

Conveniently overlooked was the Palestine National Council’s Covenant calling for the annihilation of the State of Israel, a document that can be overturned only by a two-thirds majority vote at a conference called specifically for that purpose. No one person, organization or combination thereof can nullify this instrument of annihilation that justifies, perpetuates and glorifies terrorist organizations such as Hamas and the Islamic Jihad.

Yet, the Road Map’s designers directed that Israel release mass murderers into its population as a sign of goodwill. In the meantime, Arab Palestinian children continue to be indoctrinated into a culture that teaches them at an early age, in school and through TV, to turn themselves into human bombs that will take the lives of as many Israeli Jews as possible.

Moreover, the quartet has yet to justify its call for an ethnically cleansed, or “Judenrein” (the Nazi parlance for “free of Jews”), Palestine, which would prohibit Jews from their 3,000-year homeland and birthplace of their most sacred religious heritage.

The U.N. itself, may very well be the primary source of this relegation by isolating Israel as the only one of its 191 members not permitted to sit either on the Security Council or its regional committees, while tyrants and their regimes are permitted to sit on all committees and even chair its Committee for Human Rights. The major stumbling block, a 57-nation Islamic voting block buttressed by the myriad of dependent micro-mini state appendages, dominating the U.N., impell “Old Europe” to bend a knee to its calling.

Bringing the impact of that point into sharper focus were recent wire reports that but 64 of the 191 U.N. member states — barely 30 percent — had submitted reports on steps they have taken to implement sanctions against al-Qaida and Afghanistan’s former Taliban rulers. According to Heraldo Munoz, Chile’s U.N. ambassador and head of the committee monitoring the sanctions reporting, “Individuals or entities associated with al-Qaida are believed to be active in some way in a significant number of states that have not yet submitted a report.”

Are the U.N. and Quartet emulating the eight bewildered leaders of the June 2003 Evian summit, whose actions rivaled those of their predecessors 65 years earlier who formulated the infamous, Munich agreement? The modern sooth-sayers are choosing the same rocky route laid out by Chamberlain and Daladier (whose effort to appease Hitler and Mussolini in the fall of 1938 caused within a year not “peace in our time,” as declared by the British Prime Minister, but World War II).

Tragically, the Quartet’s current Road Map, contains no element of peace, but rather a detour far more perilous to Middle East and world peace than its Munich counterpart. To borrow an unrelated descriptive phrase from the London Telegraph, many believe that the project “has the inert momentum of stupidity.”

What has been bothering the Arab world is not the Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria, the West Bank and Gaza, but those that comprise Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem — in essence Israel.

As Cynthia Ozick has put quite succinctly in a Wall Street Journal article: “A Palestinian ethos of figment and fantasy has successfully infiltrated the West, particularly among intellectuals, who are always seduced by novelty. We live now with an anti-history wherein cause and effect are reversed, protection against attack is equated with the brutality of attack, existential issues are demoted or ignored — ‘cycle of violence’ obfuscation all zealously embraced by the State Department and the European Union.”

Hardly noted is the fact that the last people indigenous to a sovereign Palestine before the conquering armies of foreign lands were the Jews, who ruled the nation through their kings, customs and laws for a thousand years until exiled by the Romans in 130 CE. And though a parade of conquerors then ruled and laid waste to this piece of land until the defeat of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, the League of Nations returned it to the Jews at a time when other Middle East lands were for the first time to be identified as independent nations of Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon.

To ask if Israel has the right to exist among these newly created nations is like asking if the bible or history itself has the right to exist.

The first step for peace places the ball in the U.N.’s court. To deny Israel its turn on the Security Council and the opportunity to participate with other nations on the international body’s regional committees is to brand the Middle East democracy a non-nation among nations, granting terrorists a license for the acts of barbarism against that nation’s citizenry.

The time is also past due for Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iraq to sign a peace treaty and normalize relations with Israel, rather than make another nebulous promise, and for the negation of the terms spelled out in the Palestine National Council’s Covenant.

With these imperative, preparatory steps taken, Israel, the United Nations and European Union could have confidence in the words of an Arafat-free Palestinian and an Arab League for a perpetual peace, less the seeds of another war. Mr. Blum, a former officer in Israel’s War for Independence has been closely associated with regional events for well over a half century.