Jerome Slater

Nonintervention and Human Rights

Long a part of the theory and practice of international politics, the principle of nonintervention has traditionally admitted few exceptions. Recently, however, arguments have been advanced that seek to expand the grounds for armed intervention to include a wide range of situations in which violations of human rights have occurred. This paper argues that although in principle the moral justification for intervention to protect human rights is broader than defenders of a strong principle of nonintervention, such as Michael Walzer, are willing to allow, the practical constraints on armed intervention are such that it can never be more than an exceptional remedy for human rights abuses.

Lost Opportunities for Peace in the Arab-Israeli Conflict: Israel and Syria, 1948–2001

during which both the Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Syrian negotiating processes collapsed, it appeared that the overall Arab-Israeli conoict was anally going to be settled, thus bringing to a peaceful resolution one of the most enduring and dangerous regional conoicts in recent history. The Israeli-Egyptian conoict had concluded with the signing of the 1979 Camp David peace treaty, the Israeli-Jordanian conoict had formally ended in 1994 (though there had been a de facto peace between those two countries since the end of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war), and both the Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Syrian conoicts seemed on the verge of settlement. Lost Opportunities for Peace

The Two Books of Mearsheimer and Walt

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walts controversial book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy 1 (hereafter, Israel Lobby), is one of the most important foreign policy works of our times. It can be understood, in effect, to be two different books: one on the U.S. foreign policy process concerning the Middle East in general and Israel in particular, the other on the substance of those policies. The books central argument that the Israel lobby dominates the U.S. Middle East policy process has attracted almost all the attention of the critics, and while many of the criticisms are overstated or even vicious, the argument is indeed problematic in several ways. Unfortunately, the controversy over the Mearsheimer/Walt argument about the power of the Israel lobby has resulted in a general ignoring of their more important “second book,” the far-ranging and mostly compelling critique of the substance of U.S. policies in the Middle East.

The Superpowers and an Arab-Israeli Political Settlement: The Cold War Years

From about 1950 until the end of the cold war in the late 1980s the Arab-Israeli conflict became entangled in the global rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. The prevalent view in the United States was that the Soviet Union sought to exploit the Arab-Israeli conflict in order to drive the West from the Middle East and secure its own domination over the area. From this perspective, Soviet ambitions were antithetical to the prospects for a settlement of the conflict that would protect the legitimate security interests of Israel, Americas principal regional ally. For these reasons the United States ignored various Soviet proposals for mutual superpower disengagement from the Middle East and sought to exclude the Soviet Union from diplomatic efforts to end the Arab-Israeli conflict. In some ways American policy succeeded: the Soviets became increasingly less influential in the Middle East from the early 1970s onward, and the United States was able to unilaterally mediate partial Arab-Israeli disengagement agreements in the mid-1970s and the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty in 1979. However, the price of this success was high. The argument of this article is that American policy was based on misperceptions about Soviet interests, objectives, and behavior in the Arab-Israeli conflict. As a result of these misperceptions the cold war was exacerbated, there were several near-confrontations between the superpowers, and most importantly opportunities to reach a comprehensive settlement of the ArabIsraeli conflict were squandered.

A Palestinian State and Israeli Security

In the aftermath of the 1991 war against Iraq, the prospects for a final, comprehensive settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict are mixed. The conditions have never been more favorable: the offensive military capabilities of Iraq, the regions most powerful and radical state, have been eliminated, thus removing the main security danger to Israel; the prestige and leverage of the United States is at its peak, not only with Israel but also with the leading Arab states; the Soviet Union is clearly committed to a political settlement and is prepared to work cooperatively with the United States toward that end; the major Arab moderate states of Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia are genuinely committed to a compromise political settlement; and Syria has steadily moved toward a more moderate position, now indicating it will accept a settlement of the conflict if it gets the Golan Heights back and there is an acceptable resolution of the Palestinian problem. The Palestinian problem is still the crucial one. Despite the fact that Palestinian support for Saddam Hussein has had a disastrous effect on their political standing and leverage with all the major actors in the region Israel, the moderate Arab states, and the United States -there is widespread recognition of the fact that a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian problem remains the sine qua non for an overall settlement. Few if any Arab states can or will agree to the permanent Israeli occupation of Arab lands and the repression of Palestinian nationalism. But major obstacles to a settlement remain. The prospect that the Israeli gov-

Just War Moral Philosophy and the 2008-09 Israeli Campaign in Gaza

The 2008–09 Israeli military campaign in Gaza, commonly known as Operation Cast Lead, is best understood in the context of Israels “iron wall” strategy. During the 1930s, the strategy emphasized the need for overwhelming military power to break Arab resistance to the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine; since the creation of Israel in 1948, it has continued to be at the core of Israeli policies in the overall Arab-Israeli conflict. From the outset, the strategy has included attacks on civilians and their crucial infrastructures. Such attacks violate the just war moral principles of discrimination and noncombatant immunity. In addition, Cast Lead violated the just war principles of just cause and last resort, which state that wars must have a just cause and even then must be undertaken only after nonviolent and political alternatives have failed. Israel did not have a just cause in 2008–09, because its primary purpose was to crush resistance to its continuing de facto occupation and repression of Gaza. Further, Israel refused to explore the genuine possibility that Hamas was amenable to a two-state political settlement. Thus, the iron wall strategy and Operation Cast Lead, in particular, have been political as well as moral failures, undermining rather than serving Israels genuine long-term security needs.

Opinion: Netanyahu, A Palestinian State, and Israeli Security Reassessed

Nearly one hundred years ago the nationalist movement of the Jewish people-Zionism-was founded in Europe. The core principle of Zionism was that two thousand years of European anti-Semitism left the Jews with no other choice but to found a state of their own, within which they could survive and build normal lives, free at last from the murderous rampages that had periodically decimated Jewish communities throughout Europe. Given this history, perhaps no other nationalist movement in history has had a stronger claim to a state of its own. The problem, though, was that there was no obvious place to build such a state-no land, that is, large enough to accommodate a state, but yet not already claimed and inhabited by another people. Perhaps if the Zionist movement had been open-minded about the location of the prospective state, some solution might have been found. After a brief period in which the Zionist leadership was prepared to consider any reasonable location, however, it dropped its flexibility and insisted that only the land of ancient Palestine would do. Therein lies the tragedy that has led to seventy-five years of terrorism and war between the Jews and the Palestinians-and which, if an overall settlement is not reached, could escalate into far greater violence than anything in the past. As powerful as was the Zionist claim for a Jewish state, its claim to Palestine