As
William Jefferson Clinton might say "it depends on what you mean by
just"
If
Israel reaches a just peace with the Palestinians, groups like Islamic Jihad
will essentially evaporate. There will be a few die hards left, as there
will be a few die hard Israelis, who will continue their murderous ways, but
the scale will be such that the Israeli and Palestinian governments, working
together will be able to proceed with the establishment of normal relations,
and with security cooperation.
So
the real issue is not the militants on either side, but what the shape of a
settlement might be that would be viewed as just by both sides. I am not
optimistic.
Palestinian violent resistance is, in terms of obstacles to
peace, a red herring.
Cheers,
Lawry
I believe that that still is a major issue.
Bill
Who does?
Arthur,
Good post. The one challenge is that Arafat [the real power] has
been reduced to such weakness that he cannot easily control the Islamic
Jihad.
Bill
On controlling Palestinian terrorist groups.
What Palestinians can learn from a Zionist milestone The Altalena
The New York Times -
NEW YORK
The Palestinians have often been called the Jews of the Arab world:
a stateless people dispersed in diaspora, living by their wits, pining
for a return to their historic homeland. This is not a comparison
either side likes. It implies an equivalency that both reject.
Yet the comparison remains common, even among Israelis and
Palestinians themselves. Palestinians study the milestones of the
Zionist movement for guidance and often speak about the Israeli
political system, with its freewheeling debate, as a model for their
own.
There is one milestone in particular that bears study today David
Ben-Gurion's fateful decision in 1948 to end Jewish terrorist
activities and bring armed splinter groups under government control.
When Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas, the Israeli and Palestinian prime
ministers, met on Thursday night, one of the biggest issues they
discussed was ending the terrorism of renegade Palestinian groups.
Abbas said that by next week he hoped to have a pact with Hamas, the
main Palestinian Islamic party, to halt violence against Israelis.
Sharon and his aides say a cease-fire pact is not enough, however,
that what is needed is to arrest and disarm the militants. What
Israelis increasingly say is that the Palestinians need their own
Altalena.
Little known to the outside world, the Altalena episode is
frequently invoked because without some equivalent, the Palestinian
state may never come to be. In the final years of the British mandate
in Palestine, there was not one Jewish militia but several, just as
there are competing Palestinian groups today. The main one, the
Haganah, was led by Ben-Gurion. A more violent and radical one,
the Irgun Zvai Leumi, often called simply the Irgun, was led by
Menachem Begin. The Irgun, along with an even more radical group, the
Stern Gang, was responsible for a massacre of more than 200
Palestinians in the village of Deir Yassin in April 1948. A month
later, after the British walked out of Palestine and Ben-Gurion
declared the state of Israel, Arab armies attacked. On June 1, the
Haganah and Irgun agreed to merge into the Israel Defense Forces,
headed by Haganah commanders. The accord called on Irgun members to
hand over arms and terminate separate activity, including arms
purchases abroad.
But there remained the question of an old U.S. Navy landing vessel
bought by the Irgun's American supporters and renamed the Altalena.
The ship, whose purchase had predated the June 1 agreement, was packed
with 850 volunteers, 5,000 rifles, 3,000 bombs, 3 million cartridges
and hundreds of tons of explosives. Ben- Gurion wanted every
soldier and bullet he could get and ordered the ship to dock. But
Begin said the arms should go to Irgun troops. Ben- Gurion
refused, at which point, Irgun men headed to the beach to unload the
arms. Ben-Gurion realized the challenge he faced. As he put it
in his memoir, I decided this must be the moment of truth.
Either the government's authority would prevail and we could
then proceed to consolidate our military force or the whole concept of
nationhood would fall apart.
He ordered the Altalena shelled. After the volunteers disembarked,
Begin boarded the ship, as did other Irgun fighters. The shelling
began. When one hit and the Altalena burst into flames, Begin was
hurled overboard by his men and carried ashore. The ship sank, along
with most of its arms and more than a dozen Irgun members. Others were
arrested, and the Irgun's independent activities were finally over.
In his 1953 memoir, The Revolt, Begin says he had known hunger and
sorrow in his life but had wept only twice once, out of joy, when the
state was declared, and the second time, in grief, the night the
Altalena was destroyed. The point for the Palestinians is that
until their radical militias are put out of action, those groups will
always be able to play the role of spoilers. In 1996, the
Palestinian Authority showed itself capable of confrontation, making
widespread arrests of extremists in the wake of several suicide
bombings. Thousands of militants were arrested. But most were
eventually let go. The Palestinians must do it again and in a
definitive manner. The Altalena is a symbol of that task because it
involved genuine confrontation yet little loss of life. As Ben-
Gurion put it in his memoir:
The incident caused near civil war among the Jews themselves. But
in the eyes of the world we had affirmed ourselves as a nation. When
the smoke cleared and the indignation died down, the population at
large put itself squarely behind its government. The days of private
armies were past, and, in the manner of every other well-organized
state, we had the makings of a central command under government
control.
Karen,
My guess is that it is:
just realized that all the pressure applied to the
Palestinians to change their stripes and demote Arafat
will have the end result
of exposing Israel's feet in concrete attitude since the
Palestinians are moving
ahead
However, to move ahead, he is going to need to jettison his
links with the Israeli far right and hook up with the Israeli
center. If he doesn't move to do this, not much will happen. Also,
while Hammaas made some conciliatory remarks, the Islamic Jihaad has
not.
Bill
Friedman is quite honest here,
both in trying to "separate the wheat from the chafe" and in his
attempts to cover his previous commentary where he was more
approving of the Bush2 stated reasons for going to war. It's been said that before
a war there are some believed good reasons. Afterwards, there are
never any good reasons.
You always wonder if another way would not have been more
productive and less
costly.
However, this is not just about
one local neighborhood, Iraq, it is about Israel and Palestine,
the best case study for human ineptitude and institutionalized
politics, historical animosity and historical opportunity as we
have in prima geopolitics today.
Since I've posted many times
here about the need for some heroic self-sacrifice on the part of
the political leadership in Israel and Palestine, let me share
that I am cautiously optimistic and holding my breath regarding
recent developments.
I am waiting to see if Sharon has had a midnight "legacy
conversion experience" or just realized that all the pressure
applied to the Palestinians to change their stripes and demote
Arafat will have the end result of exposing Israel's feet in
concrete attitude since the Palestinians are moving ahead. Lots of corny photo cops
abound, but I am waiting to see not the Kodak moments, but the
WYSIWYG, or What you see is
what you get moments. -
KWC
Because We
Could
By Thomas L. Friedman, NYT,
June 4, 2003
The
failure of the Bush team to produce any weapons of mass
destruction (W.M.D.'s) in Iraq is becoming a big, big story. But
is it the real story we should be concerned with? No. It was the
wrong issue before the war, and it's the wrong issue
now.
Why?
Because there were actually four reasons for this
war:
the real reason, the right reason, the moral reason and the stated
reason.
The
"real reason" for this war, which was never stated, was that after
9/11 America needed to hit someone in the Arab-Muslim
world.
Afghanistan wasn't enough because a terrorism bubble had built up
over there - a bubble that posed a real threat to the open
societies of the West and needed to be punctured. This terrorism
bubble said that plowing airplanes into the World Trade Center was
O.K., having Muslim preachers say it was O.K. was O.K., having
state-run newspapers call people who did such things "martyrs" was
O.K. and allowing Muslim charities to raise money for such
"martyrs" was O.K. Not only was all this seen as O.K., there was a
feeling among radical Muslims that suicide bombing would level the
balance of power between the Arab world and the West, because we
had gone soft and their activists were ready to
die.
The
only way to puncture that bubble was for American soldiers, men
and women, to go into the heart of the Arab-Muslim world, house to
house, and make clear that we are ready to kill, and to die, to
prevent our open society from being undermined by this terrorism
bubble. Smashing Saudi Arabia or Syria would have been fine.
But
we hit Saddam for one simple reason: because we could, and because
he deserved it and because he was right in the heart of that
world. And don't believe the nonsense that this had no
effect.
Every neighboring government - and 98 percent of terrorism is
about what governments let happen - got the message. If you talk
to U.S. soldiers in Iraq they will tell you this is what the war
was about.
The
"right reason" for this war was the need to partner with Iraqis,
post-Saddam, to build a progressive Arab regime.
Because the real weapons of mass destruction that threaten us were
never Saddam's missiles. The real weapons that threaten us are the
growing number of angry, humiliated young Arabs and Muslims, who
are produced by failed or failing Arab states - young people who
hate America more than they love life. Helping to build a decent
Iraq as a model for others - and solving the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict - are the necessary steps for defusing the ideas of mass
destruction, which are what really threaten
us.
The
"moral reason" for the war was that Saddam's regime was an engine
of mass destruction
and genocide that had killed thousands of his own people, and
neighbors, and needed to be stopped.
But
because the Bush team never dared to spell out the real reason for
the war, and (wrongly) felt that it could never win public or
world support for the right reasons and the moral reasons, it
opted for the
stated reason: the notion that Saddam had weapons of mass
destruction that posed an immediate threat to
America.
I argued before the war that Saddam posed no such threat to
America, and had no links with Al Qaeda, and that we couldn't take
the nation to war "on the wings of a lie." I argued that Mr. Bush
should fight this war for the right reasons and the moral reasons.
But he stuck with this W.M.D. argument for P.R.
reasons.
Once
the war was over and I saw the mass graves and the true extent of
Saddam's genocidal evil, my view was that Mr. Bush did not need to
find any W.M.D.'s to justify the war for me. I still feel that
way. But I have to admit that I've always been fighting my own war
in Iraq. Mr. Bush took the country into his war.
And
if it turns out that he fabricated the evidence for his war (which
I wouldn't conclude yet), that would badly damage America and be a
very serious matter.
But
my ultimate point is this: Finding Iraq's W.M.D.'s is necessary to
preserve the credibility of the Bush team, the neocons, Tony Blair
and the C.I.A. But rebuilding Iraq is necessary to win the war. I
won't feel one whit more secure if we find Saddam's W.M.D.'s,
because I never felt he would use them on us. But I will feel
terribly insecure if we fail to put Iraq onto a progressive path.
Because if that doesn't happen, the terrorism bubble will
reinflate and bad things will follow. Mr.
Bush's credibility rides on finding W.M.D.'s, but America's
future, and the future of the Mideast, rides on our building a
different Iraq. We must not forget
that.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/04/opinion/04FRIE.html
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