Israel and the Arab-Israeli Conflict | Page 36

30 Israel and the Arab-Israeli Conflict
Israel , Bahrain , Morocco , and the UAE , giving new meaning to a full sense of peace , coexistence , and ever expanding cooperation both on the governmental and people-to-people levels .
Israelis desperately want to lead normal lives , and they have demonstrated their willingness time and again to endorse farreaching , even potentially risky , compromises in the quest for peace .
Israelis , however , have learned the painful lessons of history . Peace without secure and defensible borders is tantamount to national suicide . And who knows better than the citizens of Israel , who include Holocaust survivors and their families , as well as refugees from communist lands and Arab extremism , how dangerous it can be to let one ’ s guard down too quickly , too easily ?
Are Israelis simply to ignore , all the more so after the unspeakable tragedy that befell them on October 7 , Iran ’ s repeated calls for Israel ’ s annihilation and its ambition , sooner or later , to acquire weapons of mass destruction ; Syria ’ s death toll in its civil war and subservience to Iran ; Hezbollah ’ s arsenal of tens of thousands of precision-guided missiles in Lebanon capable of reaching just about every spot in Israel ; and the blood-curdling calls heard in Gaza and elsewhere for “ martyrdom ” and the Jewish state ’ s end ?
Our world hasn ’ t been terribly kind to the naïve , credulous , or the self-delusional . Despite the doubters at the time , Adolf Hitler meant exactly what he said when he wrote Mein Kampf , Saddam Hussein meant exactly what he said when he insisted that Kuwait was a province of Iraq , and Osama bin Laden meant exactly what he said when , in 1998 , he called for killing as many Americans as possible .
Israel lives in a particularly rough neighborhood , where , it is said , a country is either at the dinner table or on the dinner menu ! To survive , it has had to be courageous on the battlefield and at the peace table . It has passed both tests with flying colors .
Israel is about much more than conflict and conflict resolution .