|
|
Home | Notes
Contributors
Archives | Search
Links | About
..........
over 2 million served
..........
Julia Gorin
..........
..........
Conservatives Are From Mars, Liberals Are From San Francisco
by Burt Prelutsky
.........
America Alone
by Mark Steyn
..........
..........
..........
|
|
Contributors
Bruce S. Thornton - Contributor
Bruce Thornton
is a professor of Classics at Cal State Fresno and co-author
of Bonfire
of the Humanities: Rescuing the Classics in an Impoverished
Age and author of Greek
Ways: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization (Encounter
Books). His most recent book is Searching
for Joaquin: Myth, Murieta, and History in California (Encounter
Books). [go to Thornton index]
 The
Anti-Arafat?
Is Abbas really the pragmatist for peace?…
[Bruce S. Thornton] 1/18/05
Just as in the days after the death of Arafat, the Palestinian
elections have sparked an outburst of international optimism
that perhaps the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can begin to be
resolved. While all people of good will must hope that the optimism
is warranted, the evidence is scant that the hope is grounded
on something more than exhausted wishful thinking.
Mahmoud Abbas (aka Abu Mazen), newly elected president of the
Palestinian Authority, bears all the weight of the world's optimism.
He is opposed to the intifada, the launching of rockets from
Gaza, and terrorist violence in general, and unlike Arafat, he
is a pragmatist without the blood of terrorism on his hands.
Given democratic legitimacy by the vote, he can now use that
mandate to reign in the terrorists, clean up the corruption in
the Palestinian Authority, and create the conditions for a negotiated
settlement that will lead to a viable Palestinian state and security
for Israel.
So we are told-- but we should pay careful attention
to what Abbas says and the symbolism he manipulates. For all
he is supposed
to be the anti-Arafat, Abbas campaigned on a platform of total
agreement with the policies of Arafat: a Palestinian state with
a capital in Jerusalem and the "sacred" right of return
for Palestinian refugees, the latter demand a non-starter for
the Israelis, who recognize it as code for the destruction of
Israel by demography. To underscore his accord with Arafat, Abbas
not only used Arafat's image whenever possible during the campaign,
but also took to sporting a checkered scarf reminiscent of Arafat's
famous keffiyeh. And to make sure there was no doubt about his
solidarity with Arafat, after the election Abbas proclaimed, "We
offer this victory to the soul of the brother martyr Yasir Arafat."
Given that Arafat called for "jihad, jihad, jihad" to
be waged until there was a Palestinian state "from the river
to the sea," we should be troubled by Abbas' eagerness to
channel Arafat's blood-stained spirit--especially since there
is evidence that Abbas himself may not be so innocent of terrorism
as we are led to believe. Last year Israeli attorney Nitsana
Darshan-Leitner of the Israel Law Center in a letter to President
Bush pointed to evidence that Abbas financed the 1972 PLO massacre
of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. And let us not forget
Abbas' 1983 book in which he claimed that Zionists collaborated
with the Nazis to murder Jews in order to create sympathy for
creating the state of Israel, and asserted that fewer than a
million Jews had been murdered in the Holocaust.
But as of this moment, the question someone needs
to ask Abbas is whether his agreement with Arafat extends to
the PLO's "phases" plan
for the destruction of Israel, a long-range strategy in which
many different tactics--from suicide bombers to negotiated agreements--are
used at different times given particular circumstances. This
is a critical point, for Abbas' much-touted condemnation of the
intifada and violence seems to rest not on principle but on a
cost-benefit analysis. In 2002, Abbas made this obvious when
he said regarding the intifada, "If we do a calculation
we will see that without any doubt what we lost was big and what
we gained was small." And more recently, speaking out against
a rocket attack from Gaza, Abbas said, "This is not the
time for this kind of attack," which suggests there is a
time for shooting rockets at women and children.
In other words, blowing up innocents is not wrong, just an inefficient
tactic for achieving the long-term goal of a Palestinian state
that eventually will include the territory of Israel. Since force
alone isn't going to make Israel disappear, negotiate for time
(and money from the West) and wait to see what events transpire
that bring closer the ultimate goal of Israel's disappearance.
At that point, terrorist violence once again may be a suitable
tactic, just as at present negotiation is the best move in order
to provide space for rebuilding and strengthening a Palestinian
Authority weakened by the untimely use of terrorism.
This, of course, was essentially Arafat's view,
which means that Abbas' continual invocation of Arafat is a
statement of
ideological and strategic agreement; as Ephraim Karsh has written
recently in Commentary, "For all their drastically different
personalities and political style, Arafat and Abu Mazen are warp
and woof of the same fabric: dogmatic PLO veterans who have never
eschewed their commitment to Israel's destruction and who have
viewed the 'peace process' as the continuation of their lifetime
war by other means."
But for the sake of argument, let's give Abbas
the benefit of the doubt and assume that his embrace of Arafat--like
his assertion
that going after the terrorist militants is a "red line
that must not be crossed"-- is merely campaign rhetoric
necessary in order to pull off the elections and get himself
elected, not to mention keeping himself alive. Let's consider
Abu Daoud, mastermind of the 1972 Munich slaughter, a liar when
he said that Abbas kissed his cheek and wished him luck when
Daoud set out to organize the Munich attack. Let's assume that
Abbas is sincere about finding a negotiated settlement that respects
the right of Israel to exist.
Even if all that were true, the elephant in the
room is still being ignored: the Palestinian militants like
Hamas that are
explicitly dedicated to the destruction of Israel and to the
use of terrorism to further that aim. As long as these groups
exist, no settlement is possible, for Israel is not going to
sacrifice the lives of its citizens to give Abbas or anyone else
the time to find some other solution to the violence that does
not involve killing the terrorists who kill Israelis. Israel
should not be asked to treat its citizens as "loss leaders" in
order to achieve a "peace" deal that may or may not
come and may or may not last.
Quite simply, those Palestinians sincerely committed
to the "two-state
solution" must go after and kill those Palestinians who
are committed to the destruction of Israel, and whose murders
provoke Israel's legitimate responses that unfortunately make
life hard for the Palestinians. And yes, that means there must
be a civil war. The so-called "moderate" Palestinians
have to recognize that their aspirations are subverted by those
among them who want to kill Israelis more than they want to live
in freedom and prosperity, and that their suffering is caused
by the actions of such terrorists that compel Israel to do whatever
it can to protect its citizens, which after all is the primary
obligation of any state.
Yet here in the West we refuse to put this question
to these "moderates" and
to condition our political and financial support on the one action
that will eventually resolve the crisis. Instead, we have given
the Palestinian Authority 20 million dollars and have promised
200 million more, and Abbas has been invited to the White House.
Haven't we been through all this before with Arafat--the soothing
rhetoric of peace, the photo-ops at Camp David, the millions
of dollars, all followed not by peace but by political thuggery,
fiscal corruption, and more murdered Israelis? We have to learn
that as long terrorism even seems to pay dividends, terrorism
will continue to be used as a tactic. And giving money and prestige
to someone who refuses to destroy terrorists and calls them "martyrs," and
who implicitly endorses terrorism as a legitimate tactic, is
simply ensuring that indeed terrorism will be used.
So too with the magic powers bestowed on the recent election.
But a democratic election that puts into power someone like Abbas
who refuses to disavow terrorism and to prove it by killing terrorists
means nothing, no matter how much corruption he cleans up. The
one issue central to resolving the crisis-stopping the murder
of Israelis--is still unresolved. For all our delight at the
spectacle of Palestinians voting and Abbas talking about peace
and negotiations, we are back to the heady optimism after Oslo,
when so much hope was quickly drowned in the blood of Israelis. tOR
copyright
2005 Bruce S. Thornton
Searching for Joaquin
by Bruce S. Thornton |
Greek Ways
by Bruce S. Thornton |
Bonfire of the Humanities
by Victor Davis Hanson, John Heath, Bruce S. Thornton |
Plagues of the Mind
by Bruce S. Thornton |
Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek
Sexuality
by Bruce S. Thornton |
§
|
|
|
