Peace Plans for Skeptics — or Doomsday some day

It is often said that, in contrast with the Arabs, Israel can never allow itself to lose even one war – since a single lost war could mean her destruction and would mean another catastrophe of Holocaust proportions.

But unless the region has an arrangement for peace and security, how will wars ensnaring Israel not go on taking place until Israel sooner or later loses one of them?

For instance, it could take only one Iranian (or even a prospective Egyptian) nuclear bomb. Or one trafficked rogue bomb. Or, basically, any single lost war – and in a possible lethally reinforcing conjunction with any domestic and West Bank uprising – of any kind.

This is the core reason Israel requires long-term peace and security from the region – like the one based on the Arab League peace plan, which could be built on only as the launch, not the conclusion, of negotiations toward peace.

It would also have the (happy) side effect of serving as the best, and most powerful and realistic, regional counterweight to Iran, even with hopefully the less need of this with Ahmadinejad soon gone..

The Arabs and Iranians have long had basic — existential, at any rate — security with adjacent states ; none are at any existential risk. They do not need President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry.

The ultimate heart of the matter is that it is not the Arabs, but rather it is Israel, which requires peace and security. It is the Israelis, and not the Arabs, who ought to be most overjoyed that Obama and Kerry are trying so relentlessly to jumpstart the movement to long-term peace and security between Israel and the rest of the region.

It is Israel that Prime Minister Netanyahu, soon after assuming office, notably called “the most threatened state in the world.”

This is not only the best but actually the only means of guaranteeing that there will never be a Holocaust-scale catastrophe for Israel and, over the long term, to make ironclad her peace and security in the many coming decades in which could occur potential catastrophic losses in nuclear attacks, uprisings, and land wars.

Without the work of close advocates for Israel and peace such as Secretary of State Kerry, there will remain an ever-present risk of an unconditional disaster. Not to Iran. Not to the Arab world. But to Israel – which is forever alone, and intensely vulnerable, outside any framework of regional security and peace.

It is a framework that has been ignored for more than a decade.

But it could be explored– easily, with no commitment and no risk.  So it is a no-brainer–a no-brainer compared to the only alternative of relentless and unremitting  grave–lethal–existential danger.

Explored with no commitment, at no risk, and with the following as the only alternative–

–grave and never for a single-second uninterrupted existential danger– not only today, but tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, next decade, and forever.

A version of this was just published, with thanks to its fine Editor, in the excellent community newspaper The Jewish Advocate.