The Middle East has exploded again. On Passover, a suicide bomber detonated himself inside a busy hotel in the town of Netanya and 22 people died. A few days later, in response, the Israelis launched a major offensive intent on destroying Yasser Arafat’s rule over the Palestinian Authority. This has exacerbated the violence of the 18-month long Intifada.
There has been some debate about whether we should be sitting on the sidelines with General Anthony Zinni performing a Quixotic task — trying to broker a peace deal — or instead send troops to the region to either keep the peace and separate the two sides, or aid the Israelis in rooting out certain terror groups whom we have a long-standing grudge against, including the PLO itself. As tempting as it would be to go after these criminals, this fight is not our fight. If we were to re-insert ourselves into this war, we would once again have to be prepared for numerous casualties for an effort that even our presence may not be enough to change.
What we are seeing in the Middle East is a blood feud. The Palestinians complain that the Israelis are choking them economically, and the Israelis focus on the latest round of suicide bombings. However, the fight settles down to millennia of grudges and recriminations, mostly centering on one issue: land. The land that the Palestinians and Arabs say they want is the land they lost in the 1967 war, but in their heart of hearts they would be ecstatic if they could drive the Israelis into the ocean and be done with them. They feel that the land is theirs — after all, it had been part of several Muslim empires since 700 A.D. — and that the Israelis are merely squatters. The Israelis see the land as their kingdom that was taken from them by the Romans after the revolt of 70 A.D.

Second, we could find ourselves thrust into a general Mideast war, which would be detrimental for us and our own mission. We found ourselves in a nightmare situation when we intervened in the civil war in Lebanon in the early 1980s (fomented by the PLO), culminating in a 1983 bombing of a Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 soldiers. We need all the troops we can find if we are going to continue on our planned campaign against Saddam Hussein. With our troops so far-flung as they are already, we risk spreading ourselves too thin to focus on our own problems.
Finally, we don’t exist to clean up other nations’ messes. The fighting over the West Bank has been exacerbated by the fact that unless it’s in their own national interests, the other Arab nations haven’t lifted so much as a finger to help the Palestinians, less it be to help the Palestinians kill Israelis. The refugees living in what now are cities over the sites of the original UN camps, were refused entry to Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. Jordan even controlled the West Bank until it lost it in the last great gamble — there was a golden opportunity for a Palestinian state, yet Jordan did nothing.
We once thought of ourselves as the world’s policeman. We can’t be the world’s parent, not when we have our own job to do.