The Intifada

Subject: The Intifada
From: GUEST
Date: 05 Dec 01 - 09:22 AM

The Palestinian Intifada II is finished.

It ended with last weekend's spasm of suicide bombings against Israeli kids — a signal that the Palestinian national movement was being taken over by bin Ladenism, which is the nihilistic pursuit of murderous violence against civilians, without any political program and outside of any political context. If there is anything left of the Palestinian national movement for independence, it better act now to rescue itself. Otherwise it's headed for the same dark cave as Osama bin Laden.

How so? Actually, I thought Intifada II was idiotic from the start. Why? Context. It came in the face of the most far-reaching U.S. and Israeli offers ever for a Palestinian state. While those offers of more than 90 percent of the West Bank, Gaza and part of East Jerusalem may not have been sufficient for Palestinians, they were a serious opening bid. The right response was a Palestinian overture to the Israeli people to persuade them to give up 100 percent — not murderous violence. That's still true. Two weeks ago a Gallup Poll showed nearly 60 percent of Israelis favoring a Palestinian state — a remarkable figure after a year of violence. Also, President Bush just publicly endorsed the idea of a Palestinian state.

In other words, it's not as if Palestinians' aspirations were being ignored and their only alternative was violence. The Israeli silent majority and the world's silent majority were both poised for a serious deal, and had Prime Minister Ariel Sharon spurned a Palestinian peace bid he would have been swept aside. But instead, Palestinians offered a suicide package. It leads to only one conclusion: that the priority of the Palestinians is not achieving an independent state. Their priority, apparently, is to kill Jews and get revenge for Israel's assassination of a Hamas leader whose only claim to fame was organizing previous suicide bombings — a regular Thomas Jefferson.

So Intifada II, which was supposedly an uprising to prompt Israel to give Palestinians 100 percent of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, has morphed into Bin Laden II, a Palestinian attempt to eliminate 100 percent of Israel. There are authentic Arab and Muslim voices who understand how self-destructive this is. Take The Jordan Times, which said in its editorial Monday: "There is mounting sympathy worldwide, even solid support for the Palestinians' legitimate fight for independence and freedom. . . . But resorting to suicide attacks that have mainly targeted civilians has been harmful to the cause itself."

Arab leaders know this too, but they won't speak the truth to the Palestinians. Sad. Because if it is impossible anymore for Arab-Muslim leaders to distinguish between Palestinian resistance directed at military targets and tied to a specific peace proposal, and terrorism designed to kill kids, without regard to a peace plan or political alternatives, then over time no moral discourse will be possible between America and the Arabs. You can already see the cleavage starting, with the White House's unqualified defense of Israel's retaliation.

Mr. Sharon is right to send the Arabs and the world the message that Israel is going to do whatever it takes to defend itself. But he would make a huge error — huge — if he eliminated Yasir Arafat. That is a job for Palestinians. Israel should not take ownership of their misfortune, and Mr. Arafat and his leadership are their misfortune. They need to face up to that. Mr. Sharon's job is to dispel any fantasies they have about eliminating Israel and to make clear that if Palestinians adopt a different leadership, with a different approach, Israel will offer them a fair and dignified peace.

Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which keep telling America that Israel is the problem, need to help now too — by giving Palestinians support and cover for a fair compromise. America just told Israel publicly that it must end settlements, end the occupation and accept a Palestinian state to end the conflict. When will Egypt and Saudi Arabia tell the Palestinians publicly that their game is up and they have to accept a Jewish state and end the conflict? (When will they tell themselves?)

Because if they won't, if they only blame Israel and sit by while the Palestinian national movement is hijacked by Hamas and Islamic Jihad — which want no end of the conflict except when all Jews are gone — then America too will retreat and simply adopt the view that Israel's occupation is a matter of self-defense, and may the stronger nation win.

Subject: RE: The Intifada
From: GUEST,Frank
Date: 05 Dec 01 - 11:07 AM

Saw Thomas Friedman's article in the New York Times.

Not sure where this thread is going but there is enough violence in our world today to preclude any country from making a moral judgement about it.

You point one finger at some one and two point back at you.

Talk peace, sing peace, make music of healing and get off the anger soapbox. Those are my exhortations.

Last night I had the strangest dream...........

Thanks Ed McCurdy

Frank

Subject: RE: The Intifada
From: GUEST,mg
Date: 05 Dec 01 - 08:03 PM

I think the best hope is for Arafat to go. I don't know why we have, with funding, allowed him to stay in power and represent the Palestinian people, who, I am sure, are predominantly in favor of peace and who have legitimate complaints about their treatment (which do not justify the terrorism). I believe that most are not advocating the destruction of Israel. At the same time their hopes and dreams of regaining lost homelands are probably unrealistic...but still legitimate as dreams. It is a morass to be sure, but I believe that historically they are innocent of causing the mess that they find themselves incapable it seems of getting out of. I wish too that they had signed the accord. If you read what the children there write, and I admit I have only seen sites where they write about their longing for peace, a chance for education, understanding etc...it is so tragic..like the blind girl who wanted to be an English teacher..her school was bombed..she couldn't find her way out of her room. She said now she is sure she can't be a teacher because part of her duties would be to lead her children out of places that would be bombed and as a blind person she couldn't do it...Pray that Arafat goes and someone without his background is elected or appointed or whatever they do over there..

mg

Subject: RE: The Intifada
From: GUEST,Lepus Rex, missing his cookie
Date: 05 Dec 01 - 09:07 PM

Why have we "allowed him to stay in power and represent the Palestinian people," mg? Uh, because the Palestinian people elected him to do just that, maybe?

---Lepus Rex

Subject: RE: The Intifada
From: wysiwyg
Date: 05 Dec 01 - 10:55 PM

To get caught up on this issue if you aren't, read the excellent book ARAB AND JEW, to see inside the hearts of the people in this struggle. See me for a copy if you can't find it-- I bought several.

~Susan

Subject: RE: The Intifada
From: GUEST
Date: 06 Dec 01 - 01:42 PM

It seems that Guest, Lepus Rex is under some kind of illusion that Arafat, the Palestinian dictator was chosen in a democratic election.

Memo to Guest, Lepus Rex: The Palestinian people had no election. Arafat was appointed by a small coalition of Palestinian faction leaders.

Your igonorance of democracy in the Arab world is astounding.

Subject: RE: The Intifada
From: Lepus Rex
Date: 06 Dec 01 - 05:31 PM

First, blow me, GUEST. Blow me hard.

Finished? Alright...

Second, yes he was elected, in public elections. President of the Palestinian Authority. January, 1996. 80+% of the vote. Perhaps you remember it? Big news and shit.

Take care, genius.

---Lepus Rex, no longer missing his cookie

Subject: RE: The Intifada
From: GUEST
Date: 06 Dec 01 - 05:44 PM

On NBC's Meet The Press last Sunday, Donald Rumsfeld was asked if he thought Yasser Arafat was a terrorist. "It's not for me to characterize him," said the Defence Secretary circumspectly, "but if one looks historically, he has been involved in terrorist activities."

That "Chairman" Arafat was a terrorist is not in doubt. The more important question is whether he's capable of being anything else. And the answer to that, too, is not in doubt. Under the terms of the Oslo "peace process," he has been a head of government -- not of a sovereign state, but of an embryo state. The "Palestinian Authority" is not a viable entity in and of itself, being merely selective areas of Israel's "occupied territories," but within it "the Palestinians" had, give or take, the same degree of autonomy that the Province of Quebec does today or the Irish Free State did in 1922. Arafat had an opportunity to demonstrate he was capable of governing -- in matters of law and order, health, education, the economy. Had he done so, the movement toward a fully-fledged Palestinian state would have been unstoppable. He didn't have to be perfect. The expectations in the reformed-terrorist category are not high -- Jomo Kenyatta, Robert Mugabe -- but Arafat has failed to make even this minimal grade. His Palestinian Authority is a swamp of corruption and organized crime presided over by trigger-happy goon squads from the Chairman's dozen competing state security agencies. If you gave this guy Switzerland to run, he'd turn it into a sewer.

At one level, this is a crisis for Israel: As George Will noted in yesterday's Post, more of their citizens have died from terrorism in the eight years of the "peace process" than in the 45 years before. But, in a more profound sense, Arafatism is a crisis for the Palestinians: If their cause remains mortgaged to the Chairman, their prospects of any kind of viable future are precisely zero. The Palestinians' problem is not Israel: Last year at Camp David, Ehud Barak, schmoozed out of his tree by Clinton, offered Arafat over 90% of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and part of Jerusalem. Nor is the Palestinians' problem Washington: President Bush has come out in favour of a Palestinian state. Rather, the Palestinians' problem is Yasser Arafat, his stunted lieutenants and their dark subsidiaries. Invited to choose between building a country or killing Jews, they choose Jew-killing. Every time.

That's why last weekend's carnage usefully clarified the situation. Once upon a time, professional Arab armies were prepared to fight for Palestine. Unfortunately, they kept losing. (Not to be mean-spirited but Arab armies are among the lousiest in the world, at least since King Hussein sacked Sir John Glubb in the Fifties.) So they contracted the job out to the PLO who in the Seventies waged a campaign of vicious but targeted terrorism. Then came the Eighties and the intifada, in which the new front-line warriors were rock-throwing nine-year olds. And now it's down to suicide bombers detonating themselves in shopping malls for the glory of killing kids and pregnant women -- the final stage of Palestinian nationalism's descent into nihilism. What other once credible liberation movement has so willingly embraced such awesome, total self-degradation?

Arafat has been successful only in one particular: landing Israel with the blame for the situation and persuading the Arabist romantics in the West to frame the debate entirely in his terms. I see even Anton La Guardia in Monday's National Post wrote "the Palestinians are a stateless people." In fact, there is a Palestinian state: it's called Jordan, whose population has always been majority Palestinian. It's not as big a state as it used to be, but that's because King Hussein, in the worst miscalculation of his long bravura high wire act, made the mistake of joining Nasser's 1967 war to destroy Israel. Hence, the "occupied territories": they're occupied because the Arabs attacked Israel and lost. And, unlike, say, Alsace-Lorraine or Hong Kong, Israel uniquely is prevented from returning the occupied territories to the guys they occupied 'em from. The West Bank cannot be given back to Jordan, because in 1974 the Arab League declared Arafat's PLO to be the "sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people," an impressive claim for an organization only five years old.

The Arabs did this to punish King Hussein because they were steamed at him for sitting out their 1973 war against Israel. That's a perfectly good reason from their point of view, but what's amazing is that they've talked the entire world to accept their little exercise in political muscle as the only valid position on the issue. There are no analogous situations anywhere and even trying to invent one will drive you nuts: Imagine if Quebec attacked English Canada but lost and, as a result, English Canada occupied Montreal and was then instructed by the world that Montreal had to be handed over not to Quebec but to a second francophone state headed up by a, er, Haitian-born terrorist based in, um, Guadeloupe ...

The Arab League didn't take its position because it cares a fig for the Palestinian people, or indeed for Arafat: until he landed in the Palestinian Authority, he'd spent his career being booted out of one Arab state and on to the next. The League chose to fetishize the PLO because the "Palestinian problem" is more useful to them than its resolution would ever be. Since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Arab leaders have tried and failed to promote a viable, sustained pan-Arabism. Today, the only tattered remnant of the pan-Arab cause is Palestinian nationalism, and very helpful it is, too. Why, only the other day a wealthy Saudi assisted by Egyptian lieutenants and Iraqi intelligence blew a hole in the middle of New York and the world rushed forward to insist that this proved the need for a Palestinian state. For the squalid thug regimes of the region, giving the impression to their hapless peoples that they're engaged in an epic struggle with the Jews helps excuse their own failures as nation states. It costs the Arab dictators very little in blood or treasure. They have no desire to lose any more wars against Israel, and most of their financial contribution has been in the longstanding arrangement by which "taxes" are deducted from the paycheques of Palestinian workers in the Gulf and wired direct to the PLO.

The Arab League's 1974 coronation made Arafat, a pipsqueak militarily, into a political powerhouse. The UN began treating him as the leader of a sovereign nation, as if to underline his inevitability: he's already a head of state; all he needs is for those "intransigent" Israelis to give him a state to be head of. And so in 1993 Israel consented to the creation of the Palestinian Authority. For Hamas and Islamic Jihad, this offered the prospect -- since taken up with gusto -- of being able to kill Jews from within Israeli territory! But for their protector Arafat it also offered an opportunity for a little bit of what the IRA calls "internal housekeeping": Since moving into the PA from their most recent lodgings in Tunis, Arafat's boys have successfully cowed into silence or interrogated to death many of the less radical, more accommodating West Bank Palestinians who might have made the Authority a going concern. If there seem fewer alternatives to Arafat than there used to be, it's because a lot of them are six feet under.

Much of this activity has been funded by the West, which has given billions to something called PECDAR, the Palestinian Economic Council for Development And Reconstruction. Set up under the Oslo accords, PECDAR was supposed to be entirely independent of the Palestinian Authority. Instead, Arafat's gang has creamed off most of the dough either for their personal benefit or to shore up their police state. One of the biggest changes in the West Bank post-Oslo is that, even as ordinary Palestinians' economic prospects have withered, you see a lot more local officials riding around in Mercs. Meanwhile, the schools teach children about the heroics of the suicide-bombers and in geography class Israel has been literally wiped off the maps. Whether or not a second Palestinian state is desirable, it's perfectly obvious that this particular second Palestinian state is not in the least bit so, and after last weekend there's no reason for Israel to pretend otherwise.

Nor for America: In an interesting development, the U.S. yesterday proposed Jordanian troops act as "international observers" in the West Bank. Symbolically, that would be the most serious challenge to Arafat's monopoly on the Palestinian cause in 27 years.

Subject: RE: The Intifada
From: GUEST,Pit Bill
Date: 06 Dec 01 - 05:48 PM

As suicide bombers commit mass murder and Israeli tanks and helicopter gunships respond, it's hard to maintain perspective on "the cycle of violence" amid the sound and fury.

But history can help. That history shows, throughout the 20th century, a fierce Arab opposition to the settlement of Jews in the lands of ancient Palestine that, after the defeat and breakup of the Ottoman Empire post-1918, were ruled by Britain under a League of Nations mandate.

That opposition was chronically violent. Soon after taking control, the British recognized a Supreme Muslim Council in 1921 to represent the Arab population. As its head, they appointed rich landowner Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, who'd distinguished himself in riots against Jews. He ensured over the following decades that fanaticism would rule Arab response to the Jews in their midst. "The mufti outrivalled Hitler in his hatred for Jews," writes Paul Johnson, a British journalist-historian who's admittedly pro-Israel, in his Modern Times: A History of the World from the 1920s to the Year 2000. "But he did something even more destructive than killing Jewish settlers. He organized the systematic destruction of Arab moderates."

Many Arabs had been happy to sell desert and swamp lands to Jewish settlers. In many communities, relations between Arabs and Jews were friendly. But the mufti and his Muslim council, by boycotts and attacks against Jews and moderate Arabs, polarized the two communities.

Holocaust historian Martin Gilbert, in his monumental Israel: A History,documented the many riots and pogroms against Jews. In 1920, they set up a defence force, the Haganah. In 1937, they began a technique for creating settlements: They'd secretly prepare machinery and materials, rush to the site by night, throw up a stockade and watchtower before the next night, ready to defend against attack.

In 1937, a British royal commission recommended partitioning Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. The Jews accepted, subject to negotiating the frontiers. The Arab spokesmen refused; they demanded a single Arab Palestinian state.

In 1947, the British handed the issue to the United Nations, which appointed a committee of enquiry. The Arab states boycotted it. The committee recommended the partition of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. Again, the Jews accepted in principle, the Arabs didn't. It was adopted by the UN General Assembly by a vote of 33 states for partition, 13 opposed, and 10 abstentions. The Arab states were opposed.

The state of Israel was proclaimed in May of 1948, and five Arab states invaded. In the following years, Israel, the Arab states and the Palestinians were embroiled in many conflicts and even wars. A welter of charges could be laid on all sides. But what remained constant was the demonization of Jews in the Arab press.

Constant, also, was the dominance of the extremists on the Arab side. Anwar Sadat made peace with Israel in 1978. He was assassinated by Islamic fundamentalists in 1981. His successor, Hosni Mubarak, revived the propaganda campaign against Jews and Israel.

Yasser Arafat signed the Oslo peace agreement of 1993 but, last year at Camp David, turned down the most advantageous proposals any Israeli government is likely to offer. No doubt he feared assassination if he accepted. Meanwhile, the fanatical Hamas, opposed to any peace treaty, has eclipsed the Palestine Liberation Organization in popularity.

Subject: RE: The Intifada
From: Lepus Rex
Date: 06 Dec 01 - 05:50 PM

Wow, cutting and pasting racist propaganda is hard!

---Lepus Rex

Subject: RE: The Intifada
From: GUEST,herpes
Date: 06 Dec 01 - 05:52 PM

Anyone taking up Lepus Rex's offer to blow him should be aware that he gave me herpes the last time that I blew him.

Subject: RE: The Intifada
From: Greg F.
Date: 06 Dec 01 - 05:56 PM

Yeah, and it's really choppy reading, too.

These guys (this guy/gal?) needs to take an advanced racist propaganda cut-and-paste course, or at least a refresher...

Best, Greg

Subject: RE: The Intifada
From: toadfrog
Date: 06 Dec 01 - 09:36 PM

TROLL ALERT