Viewpoints

Us Vs. Them: The Carnage Continues

Whichever “Abu” Israel and the United States eventually deal with– whether Abu Mazen, Abu Ala, or Abu Amr (Arafat’s nom de guerre)– we’ll never know if the Jerusalem bus bombing of August 19 might have triggered a healthy and overdue change in Palestinian policy. (I refuse to examine the gratuitous idiocy of Arafat’s looming expulsion.)

Abu Mazen and security chief Mohammed Dahlan claimed that they were about to arrest terrorists on the very evening of the day that Israel vigorously renewed its targeted killing campaign against the leadership of Hamas. Israeli authorities insisted that they had waited two days in vain for such Palestinian action; what would it have cost them to wait another couple of days before embarking upon their counterattacks? Especially since they know– as a spokesperson admitted with unusual candor– that striking back at the terrorists will cost additional innocent Israeli lives, as it soon did, in their inevitable counter-counterattacks.

Still, it would be wrong to place the blame only upon the government of Ariel Sharon. Imagine the unmitigated chutzpa of Hamas claiming that the so-called hudna still held after its August outrage in Jerusalem. They felt they had squared accounts with Israel by responding to the latter’s ongoing assassinations against terrorists.

Israeli actions and inactions have often (maybe even usually) provoked them, but the terrorist factions are not people who respond to the normal give and take of diplomacy. It is perfectly reasonable for Israel to expect the Palestinian Authority to use its more than 50,000 security personnel to deter or disarm the terrorists, but not without being encouraged to do so with concrete facts on the ground.

As required under the Road Map, in order to build popular support among Palestinians for a true cessation of violence, Israel should have removed over a hundred settlement outposts and numerous roadblocks, frozen settlement construction, ended land confiscations, housing demolitions and other measures that unduly encroach upon the property and everyday lives of most Palestinians. Both sides needed to act in tandem along the Road Map; neither side did.

Palestine as Third Front

Months after proclaiming the end of “major combat operations,” Pres. Bush now calls Iraq the “central front” in the war on terrorism. His administration now take it as a good thing that jihadists are rallying from other Muslim countries to attack US-led coalition forces within Iraq; it’s here that we will “defeat” them, Bush says.

Undoubtedly, the body count of the holy warriors and violent elements within Iraq will be high, but victory is far from certain. Fundamentalist jihadists, and Arab nationalists who like to conflate their causes and especially their suicidal methods, seek martyrdom. Their very deaths serve to recruit new soldiers of terror. This is a truth that neither the United States nor Israel fully comprehends– although the US is ahead of Israel in this regard.

The US is at least attempting to wage a battle for the “hearts and minds” of the Iraqi people, by struggling to reestablish stability and rebuild the shattered material infrastructure of a society ravaged by decades of war, sanctions, and a brutal totalitarian regime. Israel destroys the economic and civic infrastructure of Palestinian society, as it repeatedly strikes at the so-called infrastructure of terror. In so doing, it stiffens the spirit of unyielding resistance among Palestinians that reinforces support for terrorism. Should not that be a lesson drawn from the sickening display of joyous celebration– mostly by young people in Gaza– following the Café Hillel and Rishon Letzion bombings?

If Iraq is the central front, and Afghanistan continues to flare up as a secondary front, is not Israel/Palestine a third front in the war against terror? Not that Palestinian terrorists are exactly identical to Al Qaeda and the Ba'athists, but these struggles have spillovers and are related as flashpoints and irritants between East and West, between militant Islam and the rest of the world.

However we may feel about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, opinions should be unanimous that more international resources and authority needs to be exercised in both countries to restore stability and rehabilitate these societies.

Given the outsized regional and international significance of Israel and Palestine (very small places after all) and the continuous failure of the indigenous parties to end or even de-escalate their conflict, the US and the greater international community need to impose a solution as outlined in the Road Map: two states, Israel and Palestine, coexisting in peace. May this come speedily in our days.

Ralph Seliger,

NYC

USA

RALPH SELIGER is executive editor of Israel Horizons,  the publication of Meretz USA.