Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: How Long Will Failed Ways Persist?
Commentary: Heartfelt but misguided actions will only accelerate the cycle of war between the two people.
April 19, 2006
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BEIRUT -- The bomb attack against civilians in Tel Aviv on 17 April was no surprise, and the Israeli response of military and political strikes, and further economic strangulation of Palestinians, is equally predictable. In both cases, heartfelt but misguided actions will only accelerate the cycle of war between the two people. The danger that looms over the situation now is not more tit-for-tat punitive military strikes. It is the rapid transformation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a national to a civilizational one, with potentially dangerous linkages between events in Palestine-Israel and the rest of the Middle East.
It seems that little has changed in Israeli-Palestinian relations. The Hamas-led Palestinian government and the Kadima-led Israeli government both represent new political realities, focusing largely on their citizens’ domestic concerns about security, order, and socio-economic well-being. Hovering over them, however, is the monster of their century-old national conflict, represented by the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and Palestinian military and political resistance.
The 17 April attack and Israel’s expected response remind us that if we play by the failed old rules we will get failed old results, with a fairly steady kill ratio of four Palestinians to one Israeli. The failed old policies of Israel and the United States believed that daily hardship, ostracism and humiliation would render the Palestinians weak, desperate and amenable to any proposed unilateral Israeli plan. The reality has proved to be the opposite.
Palestinian weakness and acquiescence to Israeli dictates rendered the Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas governments virtually irrelevant, and powerless to control their own people. Israel’s disdain towards Palestinian rights generated only a greater will to resist Israeli oppression and colonial subjugation. The elections reflected this in the Hamas victory, sending two important messages: ordinary Palestinians want a government that gives them a sense of integrity, decency, normalcy and hope; and, peace with Israel, like the ongoing war, is a two-way process that needs concessions by both sides and cannot be achieved by Israel continuously humiliating the Palestinians.
The Hamas victory is about the Palestinian people’s determination to end acquiescence and colonialism. If the Israelis and Palestinians are to re-engage one day to make peace, they can only do so on the basis of two peoples with equal national rights. Palestinian suicide attacks against Israeli civilians and soldiers and Israeli army attacks on Palestinian civilians and militants perpetuate the cycle of occupation and resistance, but without offering a way out of it. If we do not acknowledge the acts of both sides in this war, we will only exacerbate it, as is happening now.
Since its electoral victory, Hamas has insisted that armed resistance and attacks against Israelis are justified self-defense against a brutal occupation, though Hamas itself adheres to the truce it initiated over a year ago. Even if others carry out these attacks, however, Hamas is now held responsible. It cannot expect to be left alone as the Palestinian governing body, and be exempted from responsibility for other Palestinian groups’ attacks against Israelis. Incumbency brings responsibility and accountability.
All concerned must now make hard choices. Hamas and the Palestinian people must decide if they wish to pursue armed resistance or a path towards peaceful negotiations. They now say they wish to do both. Israelis for their part must decide if they want to negotiate peaceful coexistence with the Palestinians, or try to impose a new status quo based on unilateralism, colonial land grabs, and militarism.
Israel, with American backing, is now on a course to destroy the Hamas-led government and the Palestinian Authority, as it has been doing for the past four years. Hamas is pursuing a policy that will help this process along, based on its diehard commitment to armed resistance to occupation as a right that it will not abrogate or curtail.
This path will have enormous regional consequences. It will discredit two important dimensions of recent Palestinian political change: the integrity and legitimacy of democratic elections, and Hamas’ decision to enter into mainstream governance at the local and national levels.
If the current Israeli-American policy prevails, with increasing European support, the collapse of the democratically elected Hamas-led government will send political shockwaves throughout the Middle East. Hundreds of thousands of young people who pursued peaceful democratic politics will feel duped and betrayed, and will become radically disenchanted. The wellspring of support for Hamas- and Muslim Brotherhood-style democratic engagement will slowly dry up in favor of more intense armed struggle.
We should not be surprised then to see large numbers of young men and women shift from the path of electoral democracy to that of military attacks against civilians and official targets, along with more Bin Laden-style terrorism in a wider arena. They will conclude that Israel, the United States and Europe value Israeli rights more than Palestinian rights. They will stop wasting their time trying to achieve a redress of grievance through peaceful democratic politics or diplomacy, and instead fight the larger civilizational battle they see before them.
Bringing down the Hamas-led Palestinian government will not bring quiet and more Palestinian and Arab acquiescence. It will result in further radicalization, resistance and terrorism across the region.
Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.
Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
Khoury’s “cycle of war” in Mother Jones edition of April 19, 2006 would be laughable were it not so serious. Muslims keep killing Jews, as they have been doing since the 1920's under the then leadership of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, well before Israel even existed. But the Jewish defense of their lives is a “cycle of war”, in Mr. Khoury's biased eyes.
What cockamamie notions he holds. Hamas and the Palestinian government intend to continue bombing and killing Israelis. Khoury acknowledges this in his article, yet according to him Israel should still “negotiate peaceful coexistence”. How does Israel negotiate peace when the aggressor fanatics of this conflict have said constantly, unquestionably, unwaveringly, unmistakably, irremediably, that they will kill the Jews and return the land to Dar Al Islam?
Khoury makes a convincing case that Israel is to blame for this conflict, which of course is the goal of any good propagandist. He refers to Israeli “unilateralism, colonial land grabs, and militarism”. But the reality is that the first three wars against Israel, after she was founded by the UN, were initiated by aggressor Arab states before Israel had captured any significant territory, and before she had any substantial military power. In each of those wars, there was very real question about whether she would survive the attacks by the various surrounding nations. It has only been since the 6-day war that Israel has been forced (under international law, by the way) to administer territories wrested from the aggressor Arabs (territories never referred to as “occupied” when Jordan, Egypt, and Syria occupied them). And it’s clear that Israel would be happy to relinquish territory for peace. She gave back enormous territory, including substantial improvements and oil wells, for peace with Egypt. The fantasy Khoury so deftly flourishes is based on deceptive premises which he skillfully weaves into a falsely sympathetic fabric of anti-Israel lies. That’s what propaganda is all about.
Khoury’s many misrepresentations have a military goal - to make victim Israel appear the bad guy and thus bring more pressure against her from the West. Arab & Muslim irredentists manipulate world opinion to increase pressure on Israel from world bodies already in threat of oil strangulation. They utilize all available resources to improve their ability to extort submission to Arab will.
The problems in the Middle East are much simpler - and at the same time much more complicated - than Khoury admits. The basic problem is Allah, the source of fanatical followers of Islamic concepts of justice. Israel has as neighbors a couple of dozen regimes with populations which have been brain-washed since the time of Mohammed to believe that Allah says that only Islamic Law can prevail in territories once governed by Islam. The corollary and much more complex problem is that these people believe that achieving such theocracy requires murder on scales the West hasn’t seen since... well, as Tom Lehrer put it, “We licked the Germans in 1918, and they’ve hardly bothered us since then.”
On a more complicated level, it is hard for people to be objective about themselves, so the Christian West thinks of themselves as pure and virtuous, while viewing the Arabs as barbaric and beneath contempt. In fact, this arrogance seems to be a source of an odd kind of condescension, where the West overlooks the vicious barbarity of the Arabs while holding other (non-European) populations to a much higher standard of moral behavior. Suicide mass-murders in the Middle East have never even been discussed, much less acted on by the UN, while similar killings in the Balkans have elicited war crimes trials and collective punishment of the Serbs. But I digress.
The basic problem in the Middle East is the special barbarity and the theosophy of world domination espoused by Islam. Powerful as Khoury makes her sound, Israel is basically helpless, knows this, and desperately seeks peace. She is a country of 5 million people, on a tiny patch of largely barren land, facing several hundred million insane Muslims whose philosophy still includes beheading infidels, behanding thieves, murdering wives and daughters who have inadvertently attracted smiles of strangers, and, yes, killing Jews and Christians and Copts, and Hindus, and anyone else - including Muslims of different beliefs - in the name of Mohammed, who thankfully at least isn’t referred to by his followers as “the Prince of Peace”. For Mr. Khoury to publish slick deceptions from highly visible pulpits is to only promote Islamic violence and to further the Arab goal of world conquest. Until such articulate and highly visible spokespeople such as Mr. Khoury can accurately recognize and publicly preach about the real source of conflict in the Middle East - without threat of death for telling the truth - I fear that there is little chance of peace anywhere that Islam holds sway.