Take this article to the bathroom because it isn’t short; neither is the situation simple. I know that many people are very upset. I have tried to take this into account but I am still going to call this one as I see it as fairly as I can with sensitivity to peoples’ feelings but without sugarcoating it either. I have spent a lot of time on this document trying to do my best to achieve this objective. It is also my challenge to tell you stuff here you won’t read elsewhere, not easy when the topic is 24/7 on all news channels.
There is no change in my opinions or positions but the situation itself has deteriorated and raised difficult issues amid a search for harsh solutions to restore certain balances.
Imagine what would happen if a Jewish terrorist from Israel would walk into a dining room at the Forum Hotel in Amman, Jordan while 250 Arabs from the region (most of them elderly and tourists) were sitting for the feast on the last day of Ramadan, and that this fellow blew himself and others up and reduced the room to rubble. I suspect there would be a jihad against Israel the next day with very strong emotional support in the entire Arab world. It is not difficult to remember the almost universal revulsion at what Baruch Goldstein did to people kneeling in prayer.
This should give people an idea as to how violated Jews around the world felt after the suicide bombing at the Passover Seder. The one ritual celebrated by the vast majority of Jews is the Seder. It is the only time of the year that GlobalThoughts publishes a sermonette on a religious topic for people specifically to use and it has proven to be a popular and useful feature. For some people, it is the only useful thing posted here.
The ironic thing is that the first night of Passover is biblically known in Exodus as the Night of Watching – meaning that God watches over the Jewish People that night. People leave their doors wide open as a show of that trust because they are Believers. The only people that are supposed to come through that door are either poor people who want to eat or Elijah the Prophet bringing the Messiah. So it causes a bit of a crisis of belief, as well as overall shock over the dishonor of it all, that such a thing should happen on such a night.
To Jews the attack represented an attack against them as Jews more so than an attack against Israel. There is a feeling that their attackers mock the Jewish religion and that there is just something rotten in society that permits this. The mob that destroyed Joseph’s Tomb the minute they got access, for example. This past month, in France, Belgium, Jerusalem and elsewhere, synagogues have been targets by Islamists. The Saudi press published blood libel and were forced to admit it. At the end, the only blood mixed with matzah was on the floor of the ballroom of the Park Hotel in Netanyah.
At the hotel in Miami where I spent the holiday, there was usually a crowd of people standing in the lobby watching CNN to see the latest details, because the first 3 days of Passover this year were a sabbath holiday and people would thus not turn on the TV in their rooms. The left-wingers wanted to bulldoze Ramallah to the ground and let the people leave town. The centrists wanted to kill the entire city of Jenin and leave no one alive. The right-wingers – well, you get the idea… Jews and Israelis feel this is now a war for survival just as America felt after 9/11 when the normal rules of the game were suspended.
The Americans are surprisingly more sympathetic to the Israelis than you might expect. Even the Arab governments understand something profound is going on here. Suicide bombing threatens the entire future of the civilized world because if this tactic is allowed to work against Israel, it will be used all over the place. It was used on 9/11. It is a tactic for which no defense has been created and which to some extent relies upon the sympathies of the society which breeds such people via its media and public opinion. America and Israel realize that they cannot change segments of public opinion that refuse to be influenced; the only hope will be to restore deterrence by making the society (in this case the Palestinians and the broader Arab public that supports them) convinced that the tactic will bring upon them so much destruction that it is counterproductive so yes, this campaign is directed both at the terrorist infrastructure as well as the Palestinian spirit. The Europeans have yet to agree that appeasing the likes of Arafat only encourages more such attacks followed by more retaliation and even more attacks. However, that last sentence is proved by events of the past several years; meetings with Arafat only gave him the green light to follow up with more attacks. At this point, very few people need any additional proof of Arafat’s complicity in terrorism as a form of resistance. That he is involved is not the issue; the only question is whether or not you believe that what he is doing is terrorism.
Within 24 hours, Americans and Jews were treated to the Passover Massacre, then a few hours later we watched Geraldo Rivera at the Arab League summit in Beirut interviewing the political liaisons from Hamas and Islamic Jihad telling him that Israel should be pushed into the Sea, and then the next morning every newspaper had the Saudi Arabian and Iraqi ministers kissing in Beirut on their front page – a slap in the face of Cheney who had just visited the region to put together a war effort against Saddam Hussein. It all lent a real feeling that we were all being given the collective finger by the Arab World who were once again being manipulated by Arafat and Hussein.
WAS THIS PREDICTABLE? YOU BET.
I know it’s tiring to read from me that this was all predictable. But I am running a good track record and here is an excerpt from what I wrote February 5, 2001 in an article titled Israel’s New Government: Endurance Test Begins:
There has been a real deterioration in the security situation for Israelis; they are agitated and changing patterns of behavior. There is consensus that things have gone out of control and must be contained; the old guard is being brought back one more time to fix what Bibi and Barak wrought. Peres will not be a moderating force now; it will be a united front meant to shake Arafat down and perhaps drive him out. Peres will provide cover for Sharon now.
Peres and Sharon will team up to shake Arafat down. The Israeli consensus is that Arafat is mostly useless and that the Palestinian Authority (PA) is no longer viable. Arafat and the PA is not distinguished from the other Palestinian factions meaning that there is no longer a reason to back Arafat against the other radical factions. Arafat and his cronies are not likely to continue to enjoy Israeli financial support. The sanctity of “Area A” territories is no longer a given especially as the Palestinians attack Israelis from territories given to them under Oslo; Israeli forces will probably begin to make raids into that zone although they are not likely to attempt to reconquer those territories. The army generals are chomping at the bit and the propaganda campaign to label everything coming out of the PA as “Terrorist” is the setup.
It’s gonna be a real nasty brawl. The Arabs in the territories are poor, hungry, angry and armed. They are also getting more sophisticated militarily with more Hizbullah operatives now working there. The Israelis are doing a good job of keeping a lid on money going in and so far very little of Arab pledges (or so-called martyr’s payments) have been paid. Yet all Palestinians know they must not let Sharon and Co. get the better of them, put them back in their cages and turn back the clock. They must give the Israelis hell to show Israel that Sharon and the military have no magical solution to this security problem. On the other hand, if they don’t scream “Uncle” soon and have the Israelis loosen the reins, they may go under by force of their own weight and infighting. Only a cessation of the violence will bring food and normalcy to real people. The Palestinians can make Israelis miserable and try to get Israeli public opinion to shift and abandon Sharon; the Israelis can bring the Palestinians to their knees. There is an imbalance here and the question is how it plays out. What wins out –– Palestinian momentum built on Israeli weariness from a war of attrition or decisive acts by Israelis determined to reassert control? The test is set.
WHAT IS REALLY GOING ON?
Very few people know what is actually going on (myself included) but most people feel the television coverage is slanted against their point of view. Jews feel CNN is biased against Israel; Arabs feel ZNN is the Zionist News Network. So Jews are gravitating toward Fox News, and Arabs prefer Al-Jazeera. As I wrote a year ago, people are more interested in watching news and discussion that validates their opinions than in really being informed or dissecting analysis. The BBC is no friend to Israel but I still think their coverage is the best.
My sense is that the “bullshit war” for the Israelis has been replaced by a fairly serious campaign; no more bombing empty buildings six times over with 3 hours notice. Except for the fact that the Israelis keep calling Arafat irrelevant and isolated and yet he is constantly on TV giving interviews (is this any way to run a war?). I wonder what Sharon is holding in store for him because I am sure he is not thrilled with having made him the most popular man in the Arab World today. Intelligence service heads do not want Arafat to be exiled because it will only give him more freedom and Peres does not want Arafat to be killed by Israel. As best I know, the American government is not pressuring Israel at all and the Bush Administration is very disciplined and supportive with Powell out there making statements as part of a good cop bad cop routine. In private, Powell is telling Arafat that this is his last chance to survive.
This operation was agreed to in advance and it will be a short reoccupation followed by withdrawals in scope (depending on how much the Palestinians decide to negotiate) with buffer zones. The plan was devised by Boaz Ganor, director of the Herzliyah-based International Institute for Counterterrorism, and has been the one most favored by Sharon over the past few months. American Jews and Israelis vastly support this campaign because they are fed up with ceasefires, repeated incursions into the territories that don’t produce results, and simply feel that vital interests have been threatened and must be dealt with no matter what anyone else thinks. The Americans knew how to tell the world to stand aside while it went all the way to Afghanistan to kick ass and the Israelis are not going to sit by and have people suicide bombing every day in their country just because the Americans, Europeans and the UN are protesting. So far the intelligence collection has been excellent and the Israelis are going to be following up, collecting weapons and turning back the clock to undo what Oslo gave away. They have been doing a better job than expected of running this campaign and managing such things as PR. Sharon seems to know what he is doing and his actions appear to be measured overall.
Why the Israeli indifference to what the rest of the world thinks? The Europeans, UN and Vatican have never acted to protect Israel or Jews against harm and their criticism carries no weight because it smacks of appeasement and kowtowing to economic interests over all. There is also intense intimidation at work, something never reported in the media. The Vatican is afraid of retaliation by Moslems in Bethlehem where they are being squeezed almost out of existence — how else would they be expected to deny reality where 100 militants are holding 100 civilians and clergy as human shields in the Church of the Nativity and the Israelis are very carefully walking on eggshells trying to control the situation. Imagine if it were Jews inside a synagogue with Arab troops on the outside… The Vatican and Europe said nothing when Joseph’s tomb was ransacked or an ancient synagogue in Jericho was destroyed a few years ago. In 1948, the city of Jerusalem was shelled for months by Christians and Moslems without regard to its holiness even though in World War II Rome was excluded from bombing because of its history. Why? Because in 1948, Jerusalem was full of Jews. So Jews are not impressed with the Vatican’s protests about Bethlehem.
In Geneva, a UN human rights conference last month was hijacked by Arabs who put Israel on the agenda for more than half of the entire agenda and kicked out all the Jewish delegates from the conference with the use of physical force on the part of their delegates; the European NGO’s did nothing about it because they were threatened that their organizations would be kicked out of their countries if they didn’t agree to it. So they caved in. The world has done nothing to enforce the Lebanese border when it is obvious that Hizbullah has taken over the South, launches raids against Israel and is shelling it daily, and the UN agrees that Israel has withdrawn to the international border and that the Shebaa Farms area does not belong to Lebanon. It is obvious that after Israel withdraws from Shebaa, Hizbullah will just come up with some other excuse.
The seismic shift that has taken place this past month is that the Israelis have decided to try and beat the Palestinians into submission because they feel that the Palestinians were trying to beat them into submission. They are letting them know that they aren’t going out of business anytime soon and that either the Palestinians will come to the table and negotiate without using terror as a bargaining chip or return to a situation which existed in the early 1980’s with Israel essentially running the show in the territories via people of their choosing. The Palestinians have resisted because they felt the offers were insufficient and that the terror instrument was working and lurking beneath the surface was this gnawing hope that Israel could somehow be destroyed, that Israel was morally weak and that a certain momentum was going their way. An imbalance leading to a loss of deterrence existed and the Israelis are trying to restore that balance. Israelis and Jews feel the Palestinians are getting their just deserts (particularly after making an Intifadah instead of continuing to negotiate with Barak after Camp David and virtually forcing Israelis to vote in Sharon). Incidentally, there are quite a few Arabs quietly cheering from the sidelines; they hate Arafat and Palestinians more than Sharon. After all, it was Syria who decided to block the TV signal of Arafat’s speech to the Arab League conference.
Obviously, the majority of Arabs sympathize with the Palestinians just as they do the Iraqis. It is unfair that the sins of leaders have such an effect on the masses and there is thankfully still a feeling among both Jews and Arabs that many ordinary people on either side are reasonable even if the leaders are bastards. But Arafat is a dicey proposition for Arab leaders. Consider that Arabs can legally demonstrate for Palestinians in Israel and the United States but they can’t do so in just about any Arab country. How could demonstrations against Israel be problematic? Clearly, Israel is not the issue. Arab leaders know that Arafat is a regional troublemaker with a 35 year history of tumult and has even stated that he wants to use Palestinians to pressure other Arab regimes through the threat of destabilization to give him what he wants. There is no doubt these people are hoping Sharon finishes him off. If Arafat were running a nation-state in Iraq, he would be fighting Saddam Hussein and that would be really bad for Palestinians. So far, 1,700 Palestinians have died in 18 months of intifada. 1,000 Kuwaitis died on the first day of the Iraqi invasion. So noted Fuad al-Hashem this past week writing in an official Kuwaiti newspaper.
I could tell you with a straight face that Jews today are proud of their army. Not that they are angels, but of the fact that their army could have finished off Jenin in a few days by bombing from the air (which is how the Americans ran their war in Afghanistan and the Russians in Grozny) but instead went house to house to avoid civilian casualties and have done the same in Bethlehem. Those torn up walls in houses make bad pictures but it is also an innovative tactic designed to reduce civilian casualties and save the homes themselves by not blowing them up. It is a miracle that so few casualties have occurred given all this activity. I am skeptical of the claims of “massacres” because I am used to hearing this type of exaggeration and there does seem to be a history of just going out to the media and repeating absurd things enough times hoping it will stick as truth. The Israelis invited this kind of allegation by shutting out the press but they couldn’t possibly expect to cover up such a thing. Arabs who live a few miles from Jenin tell me that there is a humanitarian problem, but they know of no massacres.
Since the day Jews were lynched in Ramallah and their mutilated bodies thrown out the windows of the police station to a raging mob for no reason at all and Hanan Ashrawi sat on CNN repeatedly refusing to show any humanity or admit anything that was going on, I have very little use for PA flaks on the air who just say things. The Palestinians have nobody on TV saying anything that Arafat doesn’t want them to say and they know he will kill them if they say anything they shouldn’t; they are not there to tell the truth. The Israelis have mixed messages out there because it is after all a democracy and anyone can say whatever he wants. Today I saw an Israeli on NBC and BBC accusing his army of war crimes. Imagine a Palestinian on TV accusing the PA of denying civil rights to Palestinians, something we know they do all the time. An Italian cameraman had footage of the lynching and was forced by threat of life to apologize and flee the country; everyone working the territories got the message – either kneel before Arafat or report nothing. The Israelis are blocking coverage from the scene – so do the Americans and British whenever their military acts. The truth will get out in the end, and if there was a scandal in Jenin it will be the Israelis who tell you about it. I read all the gory details about the occupation in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and so do all the Arabs who want to know what is going on. Besides, just today the Supreme Court granted an Arab petition regarding the burial of the dead in Jenin and overruled the army. The system does work. Imagine such a petition elsewhere in the Arab World.
I’m sorry but so many messengers of death came forth from Jenin and hijacked that city that I personally find it hard to be too sad about the current state of that city. When they bombed Jews coming out of synagogues last month, the people of Jenin danced in the streets and gave out sweets. No, I won’t cry for Jenin. Of course, I feel bad about the people of Jenin suffering. At the Passover Seder, when the 10 Plagues of Egypt are read, you take out 10 drops of wine from your cup to show that you reduce your joy at someone else’s suffering and several hymns of praise are omitted on the 7th day of Passover because that was the day the Egyptians died in the Red Sea. So our religion tells us not to rejoice in the death of our enemies. But I would be a hypocrite to condemn the Israeli retaliation against Jenin any more than the 10 Plagues against Egypt or the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah after they got retaliation for evil deeds.
Is it true that Israelis blocked ambulances from clearing the dead or that the Palestinians blocked the ambulances from clearing the dead because they want pictures for CNN? Is it true that Palestinians abused the ambulances by transporting suicide bombing materials in underneath a 3 year old on a stretcher? Is it true that the majority of civilian casualties in Jenin occurred because the Palestinians booby-trapped so much of the city? Is it true that the Palestinians used a 10 year old kid wearing explosives as the bait to ambush the Israelis in Jenin where 20 soldiers died in that one shot? Is it true that the Palestinian Red Crescent tried to smuggle out two perfectly healthy militants by having them play dead on stretchers (until they were caught by the Israelis)? Is it true that Israeli civilian volunteers were outside Jenin offering to donate blood, but that the Palestinians insisted on flying blood in from Jordan (at great delay) because they didn’t want “dirty” Jewish blood? I don’t know, but in the end it really doesn’t matter what I say. More convincing is what some other Arabs have to say about this.
In that article in the official Kuwaiti press entitled “Sharon is more compassionate than Saddam,” Fuad al-Hashem wrote: “I think that the Palestinian people should thank God twice a day for having the Israeli army as an enemy, and for being in a much better condition than we were while facing the Iraqi army and the brutality of its soldiers, which surpasses that of the Jewish soldiers. By comparison, the IDF soldiers and their practice is ‘child’s play.'” According to Hashem, had Ali Hasan al-Majid, the military governor of Kuwait in 1990, besieged Jenin, instead of Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Shaul Mofaz, “it would not have taken him five or six days. Rather mustard gas would have been used. “
One other historical point: When the last brigade of Palestinian fighters attacking Jordan following Black September had their backs against the wall, they preferred to flee to surrender to the Israelis rather than face the Jordanians.
Hamas official Ismail Haniya on March 28: “Jews love life more than any other people , and they prefer not to die.” I see pictures of Israeli soldiers on Sunday mornings eating stuffed cabbages their grandparents bring them so that they can get a good meal before starting the week — how savage can these people be?
Palestinians have the right to say what they want and if they want to call Sharon a Hitler I can’t stop them. But before someone uses the word Nazi, he ought to spend 15 minutes looking at footage taken from the Holocaust. I had to sit through one of these movies a few nights ago and it is so disgusting to have to watch this stuff that it is revolting to the intelligence to have someone compare anything the Israelis have ever done to what the Nazis did. If you want to ever understand why Israel will never willingly go out of business, just watch 15 minutes of one of those films and you’ll get a sense of what it means to be someone who other people want to wipe off the face of the earth, let alone humiliate them. And then to survive the war only to be greeted as a returning ghost that the people who took over their possessions wished would stay dead. Too many people calling people Nazi have no idea what the Nazis did. Whatever it is, the Jews won’t allow it to happen to them again.
SUICIDE BOMBINGS, ARAFAT, AND WHAT IT MEANS IN THE LARGER PICTURE
Let’s examine the phenomenon of martyrdom today in this conflict. The Palestinians in the know cut deals with the Israelis and surrender because they know they can get out honorably. They only send the children out to die because they have indoctrinated them not to know any better. Videos made by suicidal killers are shown in Gaza as public entertainment and in a recent one a mother stands beside her son urging him on to commit his act. Streets and buildings are being named after them. The television doesn’t stop glorifying them. Posters are everywhere. Suicidal killers are not born, they are made. Jews in the Holocaust didn’t become suicidal killers. When the Palestinians love their children more than they hate the Israelis, their children will have a shot at having a life.
This turn toward suicide bombing is a very dangerous thing for the Palestinians and they will pay a heavy price for bringing this into the modern world; the West has never figured out how to deal with people who prefer suicide to surrender. The Americans dispensed with taking prisoners with Al-Quaeda and simply started killing them off after the first month of the war. They dropped the atomic bomb on Japan because they preferred death to surrender. If the current campaign against the Palestinians does not convince them to stop the suicidal killings , I fear that the Western world will begin to justify forms of retaliation that up till now have been taboo.
What about Arafat? Unless the Israelis kill Arafat, either they will be stuck pretending to negotiate with him or this conflict will go on for as long as he is alive. The Israelis will never make a deal with Arafat whom they are convinced is a terrorist bent on destroying Israel, and I believe that Arafat will never make a deal with Sharon (and at this point it doesn’t matter what Arafat thinks because the Israelis have totally written him off). It is two cranky old men in their 70’s who hate each other and each of them has succeeded in getting their countrymen to join the hatefest. Arafat will not stop terrorism because it works for him and because all of the Arab leaders who pass him diplomatic notes via Westerners telling him to stop the violence refuse to say so in Arabic in their own countries. “I’ll take Mubarak seriously when he says it in Arabic on Egyptian television” is what Arafat told a diplomat last December when the diplomat brought him a note from Mubarak telling him to stop the terrorism. The Palestinians cling to him as a symbol, looking backward. He is their cancer who brings them death and destruction. If God is a Jewish God who hates Palestinians, then Arafat is a blessing to Jews because as long as Arafat has been and remains in charge, the Palestinians have nothing. He should stop keeping his 72 virgins waiting, and make good on his repeated taunts to become a martyr and make an example for the one million people he has called upon to do this to themselves. And yet I appreciate that the Palestinians have to stick by him right now, just as Jews are rallying around Sharon. Things like that happen during a war. But it is a losing proposition to stand behind Arafat.
Think for a second what kind of state the Palestinians will have even if Arafat delivers one. It will be a state in which few Palestinians will want to live. Every time I have ever been in the Middle East, every Arab I have ever spoken to has said that he doesn’t want to live under Arafat and that, if he had to choose, he would prefer to live under Israel. This is not an argument against a Palestinian state; it is an argument against Arafat being the one to create and run it. Regimes founded by terrorists remain as such; the state must be founded by people committed to civil liberties if they will ever exist in the future.
I understand that Arafat reflects the aspirations of his people and respect that he ultimately refused to compromise with Israelis who wanted compromise on their terms; the problem is that he refuses to lead and to shape the aspirations of his people. He could have redefined what was reasonable instead of continuously calling for the unreasonable and promising everything to the most extreme. The Palestinians need a leader to cross the river and to be shown what is possible; at the end of the day, he was afraid to be honest, to do what was necessary and take the bullet in order to pave the way because he feared his own people. History won’t know if the Israelis would have been good partners or simply have embarrassed him, but he owed it to the future to use his position to try and I feel he did not give it an honest try at Camp David and afterward when things were at their most possible. If Palestinians want to be true martyrs, then brave ones should take on Arafat in order to create a path for future progress. You can demonize Sharon but he was the one who made the crucial concessions that directly led to the peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan. History shows that he is capable of making such decisions with the Palestinians and Syrians if the conditions are right.
A lot of damage has been done. People really hate each other out there, and a whole generation of people have seen things that will traumatize them for a lifetime. Everybody there has a friend involved in some way; some of my friends have had to get their families evacuated from the territories just to get out of harm’s way. Everybody knows someone who is a victim. It will be impossible to get many people in the region to think of the other as human. The extremists have won themselves a victory. People are animals who respond overall to fear more so than any other stimuli. Reputation and trust are hard to earn and easy to lose. But right now, the message from the Israelis and Americans is: Hate us if you want — just be afraid of us. The message from the Arabs is: About what can we negotiate if there is nothing to look forward to? Sharon doesn’t talk about any type of future arrangement. The Arab World keeps praising suicide bombers. Not exactly terms of engagement. Something’s gotta give. Last one out please turn off the lights.
Before you get the feeling I am being too macho, let’s look at the downside of this for Jews in America. Sooner or later, some Palestinian will blow himself up in America and say he did it for Palestine to punish American support for Israel. How many times do you want to take a really hard roundhouse kick in the face for your best friend (and how friendly are Americans to Jews anyway)? Not more than once probably if at all even in the best of friendships. Jews in America are not happy to have all this nonsense going on; it is not good for the Jews to have this conflict rage out of control and for America to be at odds with one-fifth the world’s population over its ally. But right now, the Americans understand they have to stand with Israel because the threat against Israel is ultimately a threat against everyone. If the Arabs or even the Palestinian masses are not strong enough to confront it (ie: extremist terror and blackmail), then somebody must. Arafat, Saddam, Bin Laden, Nasrallah – they must and will all be wiped out in the coming years.
THE NORTHERN FRONT AND GAZA
This area is going to get more attention real soon. Last week over 1,200 missiles flew across Israel’s northern border. Right now, the Hizbullah is trying to miss Israeli targets but that can change in a moment. Sharon is sending warnings and holding tight. He won’t for long and this time the targets will be in Syria. Bashar Assad has made a major mistake getting in bed with Hizbullah; his father avoided this but Bashar is weak, doesn’t know how to play the game well and has allowed himself to be manipulated by someone he thinks is fascinating. Sharon is going to teach him a lesson and he may already have started. There are reports that a major missile factory in Homs was destroyed on March 24 with over 100 people (including the North Korean technicians) killed; it may have been Israelis who did it. The Lebanese are going to enjoy this because when Sharon wipes the floor with Assad it will be the Lebanese who benefit from additional freedom. Cheney and Powell spoke with Assad this week and read him the riot act, by the way.
The Israelis have been careful not to touch Gaza and have left some of the more militant Hamas people alone, something that is strange except that the Al Aksa Brigade has been doing much more suicide bombings lately than the Islamist groups. Right now the Israelis have been shipping troublemakers from the West Bank to Gaza. Later on, after they consolidate control in the West Bank, they will move into Gaza if they are not assured that the Palestinians will show as a test case that they will control affairs in Gaza. For now, Gaza is well sealed off from Israel and there have been no attacks emanating from that area.
REGIONAL DEVELOPMENTS
It is difficult to take things at face value. I was in Kuwait in 1998 and I experienced the depth of feeling of Kuwaitis toward the invasion of Iraq almost a decade before. The Iraqis didn’t just want to take territory, they wanted to wipe out Kuwaiti culture. Kuwaitis will never forgive Iraq for what it did. The Saudis nearly lost their country to Saddam Hussein. And then to see the Kuwaiti, Saudi and Iraqi ministers kissing each other at the Arab League summit in Beirut last month almost falling over each other to say Fuck You to the United States who had just sent Cheney to the Middle East to coordinate a response to Iraq who is on the verge of coming on line with weapons of mass destruction that would destabilize all of its neighbors. All this in the hope of chasing some oil revenues with the Iraqis or showing solidarity with good old Arafat who took the wrong side you might recall. Saddam Hussein has killed more Muslims this past century than anyone else alive and he has done so with unconventional weapons. And yet he is their Big Hero. And Arafat’s absence gave the vast majority of Arabs an excuse to dodge their own summit. Really – as if he is the King of the whole Arab World. Or maybe they are just scared, paralyzed and waiting for us to rescue these countries from tormentors such as Saddam so they wouldn’t have to act out such farces. Considering how much we constantly hear about the “humiliation of Arabs” it would be a good start if they were to show a bit of backbone among themselves to get themselves out of their own mess so that they wouldn’t have to be constantly at the mercy of everyone else. Really, they humiliate themselves just as they attempt to humiliate us.
Remember, Dick Cheney was the guy the Saudis summoned to fly over the day after the Iraqis invaded Kuwait. They begged him to get Bush Sr. to do something about it. Dick Cheney deserved better treatment from them. It is demeaning that we have to appear to beg Saudi Arabia to use the air base that we built in order to attack Saddam who once again threatens the region and for us to be begging all the Arabs to support us in the endeavor. For America, the Arab League summit was a humiliation and for Sharon a vindication. Remember that Sharon made two critical concessions that week such as getting off his 7 Days of Quiet horse and letting Arafat out of Ramallah. Arafat was given almost a free pass to come down from his tree, meet Cheney and go to Beirut but he himself chose to play hard to get and did absolutely nothing preferring to paint himself as a martyr. He had the opportunity to get the free ticket without collecting the miles and chose not to leave home anyway.
So you can understand perhaps if I don’t take official comments coming out of the region too seriously. To my mind it is a region of appeasers amid wild beasts constantly looking for a moment of advantage in which to strike who otherwise keep trying to accommodate each other always temporarily because no one is powerful enough to have their own way and because the US has not yet shown it is serious about creating order in the region. You cannot talk tough on Monday, send in the army on Tuesday, equivocate on Wednesday, suggest a withdrawal on Thursday, demand a withdrawal on Friday and have the troops back in their barracks by the weekend, only to repeat the exercise the following week. Frankly, it is sensible that Sharon is letting the Americans know rather clearly although politely that he is not playing this kind of game right now, and from what I am being told, the Americans totally agree with him on this because they were under the same pressures with Afghanistan and threw out the media and told the rest of the world to just wait on the sidelines until their campaign was finished.
The Americans are not naive either. Americans are involved with Yemeni armed forces in incursions into Saudi territorial space. They are moving command structures and equipment from Saudi Arabia to Quatar and Powell didn’t put Riyadh on his itinerary for his latest trip. The Russians relish the thought of taking away more OPEC market share and Iraq’s announced oil embargo could only hurt the countries that are Arab allies more so than hurt the Americans.
So the Americans are publicly saying nice things to the Arabs but their actions say that you are either with us or against us. If the governments of Egypt and Saudi Arabia fall, we can live with that. A recent public opinion poll in Saudi Arabia said that 70% of Saudis “hate America.” Well, what can you do beyond a certain point except let them hate us and let them know that if they want to send 15 of the 19 hijackers over here and hold telethons for “martyrs” families that we will let them suffer the consequences and wallow in their own juices. Why couldn’t it just be a telethon for Palestinians? Why this fixation with martyrs especially when the rest of the world views this as such a threat? Just this past Saturday: The Saudi ambassador to Britain writes a poem in a pan-Arab daily glorifying suicide bombers, both male and female; the grand imam at Al-Azhar in Cairo did the same at Friday prayers. He said: “One who blows himself up among those (Israeli) aggressors is a martyr, martyr, martyr, and whoever says otherwise is a … liar.” Suicide is such a taboo among Jews that one who commits suicide cannot be buried in a Jewish cemetery.
At a certain point, we can’t keep apologizing for our positions and trying to convince them that we are not sexually perverted atheists who are to blame for all of their problems for the past 300 years.
But consider this one conundrum before leaving the subject: They can demonstrate for Palestine in America without getting killed by police; they can’t in Saudi Arabia and it’s not because the Saudi government loves America or Israel but because they fear their own people. Of course, I realize that the tragedy is that the people of Saudi Arabia hate their government and would love America if it rescued them (except that they are so caught up hating America that an election would bring on the fundamentalists for a decade until they got sick of them like they are in Iran). Isn’t the world a sick place since so much of the hate is really displaced and so unnecessary if we could all just start all over and be the reasonable people we really want to be?
My Thoughts going forward:
1. The US has to remove Saddam Hussein and his entire family’s regime from power. They cannot wait for a good time. I have long been recommending this. There never will be a convenient time and it is ridiculous that a front of guerillas funded by Iran making side deals with the likes of Iraq and Syria can stir up trouble in Israel goading a reaction that will distract the entire region and make it impossible to put together an Arab coalition. It is a conspiracy against any Arab who wants a life but it is an Arab conspiracy, not a Western one and the West can destroy this conspiracy. The Americans can get the job done without any Arab coalition and I am quite sure that as soon as the job is done the Arabs will rally to the victor’s side, their leaders will make empty promises of reform and hope to settle back into their comfortable comatose state once again as soon as possible. I’d like to think there’d be a chance that ordinary Arabs might see daylight of reform but based on what I see in Afghanistan reverting to warlords because we put nothing into security and infrastructure I wouldn’t bet on it. The Americans just make war and walk away from their victories, and their malfeasance with Afghanistan is a bad show of faith for Iraq. But it is worthwhile to try because we all know what will happen if we do nothing. I think it is fair comment that if the Israelis hadn’t bombed Osiraq in 1981, Kuwait today would be Iraq and Saudi Arabia might too.
2. Arafat should be killed and everyone should lie and say he had a heart attack. I have been recommending this for over a year now. The Arabs will mourn for him 7 days and on the 8th day merrily move forward as if he never existed. The world will condemn Israel; Israel will just have to stomach it as a cost of doing business and move on. This man is the excuse all Israelis and Palestinians have to avoid reality and it will be interesting if one day we find that Sharon gave Arafat immunity just so they could keep the war going forever. It will seem awful futile if after all this we have to watch another 6 months of Shimon Peres begging Sharon to present yet another peace plan to Arafat and at this rate Sharon could get rid of Peres without losing control anyway. Get rid of Arafat and put up someone reasonable, and 6 months later Sharon will be replaced by someone to the Left of him. That’s the best reason for getting rid of Arafat; otherwise it will only be Bibi to look forward to.
3. The Israelis should pursue several tracks taking into account several ASSUMPTIONS:
I. The crux of the “separation” problem is that if the Israelis declare a border, the settlements will be outside it because it is impossible to include them within a border. Such a border would leave the Arabs with nothing in Jerusalem and it doesn’t seem practical that Israel can succeed in neutralizing all the Arabs of Jerusalem and the 22% of the Israeli Arabs within their borders simply by thinking they can put up a fence next to the Territories. Besides, last month’s Hizbullah attack in the North showed that clever tactics can outwit even a multi-million dollar electronic fence with a simple angled ladder. No border is foolproof against clever humans.
II. The Israelis will never be able to completely stop terror. They can choose to pretend to live in a fortress but it will be a highly taxed and militarized prison without economy or tourists and its citizens will be those losers who couldn’t figure out how to leave. They will have fewer attacks but sooner will come the day when a well organized terrorist brigade sets off a nuclear nightmare in the Holy Land and finishes them off (it might happen anyway and you could argue that a fortress will reduce the odds, but I think the psychology runs otherwise). I wouldn’t underestimate the tactical capabilities of Israel’s enemies any more than I would underestimate Bibi Netanyahu’s chances of regaining the prime ministership, both of which I think would be disasters for Israel.
III. On an official level, Israel has to try all possible avenues to reach peace with its neighbors. Israel will otherwise be a pariah state.
IV. Arafat continues to play a double game and publicly condemn terror while quietly funding and supporting it in the name of national liberation. Nobody, even Bush, has been willing to shut him down for this no matter how much proof is presented of his complicity. He simply has a license to kill until he himself is killed.
V. The Israelis have a problem; they believe with good reason that too many of the Arabs came to feel over the past year that this violence was paying dividends and that they had the Israelis on the run, particularly after the Lebanon withdrawal which they thought could be replicated in the territories. The Arabs have not limited terror to military or occupied territory targets but rather attack 1948 territories, which has led Israelis to determine that ending the occupation will not make them safer. The Israelis will not cut and run – indeed, the last call-up of reservists found almost nobody trying to duck it. The Israelis feel a need to restore the fear that deters bad acts, so that even if a peace deal is negotiated it will not be mistaken for weakness because that after all, would only lead to continued aggression once the other side thought it had the advantage. Remember my analogy to the region as a whole of wild beasts waiting to pounce but making nice-nice in between rounds.
VI. It is unfair to generalize and say “The Arabs” or “The Israelis.” I know that not everyone feels the same way. However, I need to refer to something to represent the protagonists and it is fair to say that recent events have emotionally affected even the intelligentsia. People in the region on both sides feel profound feelings of humiliation, victimization, resentment, hopelessness and anger. They are angry at the TV, newspapers and the rest of the world. They want someone to kick ass on their behalf. I am certainly detecting changes in attitudes in e-mails from people in the region that are normally less charged. So it is probably true to say that most civilians sympathize with the militants of their side right now, on both sides of the divide. I know that a fundraising drive at my hotel for a Jewish terrorist organization would have raised at least a million dollars in an hour so I don’t expect Arabs to be liberals right now.
VII. Hamas, Hizbullah and the various terrorist organizations represent a real threat to stability, both to Israel and to everyone else and it is clear that the Arabs prefer to try and use them as a tool rather than see them as a threat. It was clear in Beirut that Hamas and Hizbullah had full entree to the Arab League summit, that they talked openly about throwing Israel into the Sea, and that they were treated over there as if they themselves were a State with full honors. The Arabs at that summit made it abundantly clear where they stand viz. Israel despite the Saudi resolution on the table (although I appreciate that both Egypt and Jordan sat the summit out). Americans watching television saw the whole circus as it unfolded in Beirut and it is partly the reason that Israel did not take the Saudi resolution seriously. The fact remains that the Saudis are not letting the Americans go after Al-Quaeda cells in Saudi Arabia which is partly the reason the Americans are now teaming up with the Yemenis.
VIII. It is tempting to think that Russians named Oleg who odds are one-third ain’t even Jewish and can’t speak Hebrew will be the soldiers that will keep Palestinians in their place. But the arch-conservative Edmund Burke writing in 1775 knew something: “The use of force alone is but TEMPORARY. It may subdue for a moment, but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again: and a nation is not governed, which is perpetually to be conquered. From “On Conciliation with America.”
Therefore, First, on the official level they should agree to a peace plan that essentially provides the Palestinians with the terms of the settlement that most people have come to expect because if such a plan can be adopted and implemented, it offers good prospects for 99% of the population. The 100,000 Israeli settlers that will be affected will just have to get with the program. True, it is still possible for terror to exist but at least there is the increased probability that people at work with homes and families will care less and less about fighting jihads. Polls in Israel still show that solid majorities will agree to such a plan IF they think it will be implemented and that ending the occupation will make them safer. Whether or not occupation will end terrorism is unknown, but occupation is definitely one cause of terrorism.
Second, on the unofficial level, the Israelis need to match Arafat at his game. A Jewish terrorist unit should be created and should be given deniability from the Israeli government, meaning that Sharon should condemn whatever it does, learn to flutter his lips and say the phrase “it’s just terrible terrible” with a lisp. Its role should be to deliver tit-for-tat responses to terrorism in order to regain the deterrence that has been lost through official restraint. Meaning that if a terrorist goes to someone’s Bar Mitzvah in Netanyah and shoots up the place, another terrorist goes to the sheikh’s daughter’s wedding in Gaza and shoots up the place. A suicide bomber blows up a bus of commuters, the terrorists go to the suicide bomber’s funeral where 5,000 sympathizers chant they want to be martyrs and answers as many of their prayers as possible. A suicide bomber goes to a synagogue and blows people up coming out of prayer; it becomes a problem to pray at the local mosque. Make people in the territories realize that their movie theaters will be only as safe as the Israelis and I suspect that frontier justice will take hold within a few months and keep the crazies in check. Sounds mean, but it beats surrounding entire towns, cutting off water and electricity, humiliating people at checkpoints all day long and making them walk around in their underwear with bandanas covering their faces when a good number of these people have no real history of involvement but come out of such experiences motivated to become radicalized.
Admittedly a primitive suggestion for a primitive situation but it’s the most equitable and pragmatic one I can come up with. It’s also one I’ve been suggesting for a long time.
4. Earlier this year, I suggested that nonviolent protest by Palestinians would get them more dividends. People from that region responded it was an unrealistic suggestion. People rationalized suicide bombings if they couldn’t openly justify them. They said that they could understand anything amid such despair. More than anything, they wanted the Israelis out and were prepared to try anything that might work. I will agree that the Israelis will never end the occupation without pressure, that Oslo was a conspiracy of a ruse that pitted a Tunis elite against the natives and that the Israelis have never made an offer the Arabs could accept, but also that the Arabs have never done what they had to do to make it clear to the Israelis that pulling out of the territories would make them less vulnerable because they kept allowing extremists to carry the war of terrorism inside Israel’s 1948 borders, glorifying martyrdom over official media and youth networks, and everyone kept talking about the right of return which is an understood codeword for destroying Israel from within by those that refuse to be reconciled with that country’s existence. The tactics meant to end occupation have only reinforced the sense that continued occupation is inevitable and vital even if it is despised by most Israelis.
The Palestinians would have a state today if they didn’t keep sitting around hoping the Americans, Europeans, Arabs and UN would pressure Israel into giving them what they want. Israel knows it must take care of itself. The Palestinians should take matters into their own hands and negotiate the best deal they can get. The Israelis are not going to give in due to outside pressure and Arab threats; they will give in when Palestinian and Syrian leaders talk nicely to them and convinces them that it’s safe to go into the water. You can’t argue with the fact that Egypt and Jordan got 100% this way and Palestinians and Syrians got nada their way.
5. For every reaction there is a counter-reaction. You can call it the cycle of violence and try to forget who started what, but the simple fact is that the Arabs will stop this cycle of violence any time they want by simply stopping the violence. Too many of them don’t want to because they think it serves their purposes. The Israelis can’t stop this cycle of violence by stopping the violence because the Arab leaders with who the Israelis are to negotiate keep saying they can’t control their side of the violence (which leaves no good reason to negotiate with them). The humiliation of occupation only increases as more violence creates more security concerns. Sharon could have taken his stupid little walk on the Temple Mount and been ignored and would have wound up in political oblivion after one day of news coverage but instead he has wound up in the prime minister’s chair and today, after the Israelis have had their backs to the wall for over a year, they’re kicking ass, telling the world to stand aside and shooting the cameramen every once in a while to keep them away, and I’m quite sure they are letting out their frustrations deep in the kasbahs of Arab villages with all the subtleties the Israelis are famous for even if they are pussycats compared to the Beduins across the river.
6. Over the long haul, the situation has deteriorated to such that America will have to put troops on the ground to keep the peace and will have to crack heads against the wall and impose a settlement on the parties, at least to start. Both the Israelis and Palestinians would probably welcome this. But first, the Americans have to restore their credibility in the region and make everyone believe that the momentum in the region is going the American way. If there is to be any hope that there will be political reform in the Arab world, there must be a cataclysmic shift away from the present status quo and the Arab regimes must be jolted and the people of the region must feel empowered to do something to improve their position (as opposed to helpless victims always being claiming to be humiliated). This might be brought about by replacing the regime in Iraq and working with the Iraqis to rebuild Iraq in a way that serves ordinary people. This will scare the Egyptian and Gulf regimes and empower their peoples to force political change. It will also make the Syrians, Libyans, Iranians and others realize the futility of trying to resist progress.
It will continue to be a very tough year and depending on how long Arafat holds out it could be a tough couple of years for this region as it struggles to sort out this deteriorating situation. I hope that the prospect of peace will not be drowned out by the feelings that a fight to the finish in a war of survival is inevitable in the intervening period where many lives will be wasted. There are too many reasonable people who are being dragged into a war not of their choosing and are being convinced of the inhumanity of the other side they hardly know — they are being led by fear more than logic. Too many young people who know nothing have had their futures poisoned by trauma amid manipulation. What will follow will not be the peace of the brave but rather the peace of the exhausted.
