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COMMENTARY
December 18, 2004
Peace with Israel?
Perhaps the reason we are reading comparatively less about "Israel/Palestine" lately is that there is so much real news and so much of it is astounding and hopeful. The media are allergic to good news and run from it as from holy water. The greatest single piece of good news was presented as if it were a tragedy -- Arafat is gone. As became inmediately evident he was blocking the only possible way forward to the "two-state solution" that all but the terrorists claim to support. Abu Mazen -- whom we should really start calling by his real name Mahmoud Abbas -- quickly emerged as Arafat's successor without carnage at least without much and looks certain to win the January election with the withdrawal from it of Marwan Barghouti a more "charismatic" leader who might well have become another Arafat (as Arafat became another Mufti of Jerusalem). Mr. Barghouti is currently rotting in an Israeli jail for several well-earned life terms. Mr. Abbas made at least some mark as an appointive prime minister with slight independent powers under the Arafat regime. He was among the soi-disant architects of the Oslo accords and his reputation as a "moderate" comes from having actually said aloud that the Intifada Arafat launched in 2000 had not proved to be in the interest of the Palestinian people. He bravely and publicly opposed the actions of Arafat's Al Fatah and protested the "militarization" of the Intifada -- by which he meant the vast arms smuggling that was turning Palestinian society into a terror camp. He correctly guessed that Israel could not be defeated by any imaginable Palestinian military means; and moreover that the days when the armies of Syria Jordan Egypt and Iraq would come to the Palestinians' aid were long gone. This does not make him a secret Zionist and indeed his credentials as a Holocaust-denier are if you will beyond reproach. Though memorably the author of the saying Killing is not our hobby, he never argued there was a moral objection to ambushes and suicide-bombings against Jews. He merely suggested the tactics were counter-productive. Indeed his overall view as he made plain in several interviews with the Arab press long before the demise of Arafat is that the Palestinians were tricked by Ariel Sharon into launching the Intifada with weaponry the Israelis could easily trump while the Palestinians lost diplomatic support around the world for behaving as monsters and the White House gave Israel the green light to go ahead and smash the entire infrastructure of the Palestinian Authority. This view in itself should exclude him from membership in any Arik Sharon fan club. Yet as we know from the sainted example of Egypt's Anwar Sadat the first Arab leader to recognize Israel a man's past does not always predict his future. Sadat was if you looked at his credentials among the least likely Arab politicians to get on a plane for Jerusalem and sue for peace. Yet he did obviously not for the purpose of selling out to Israel but for his own people: to put a national catastrophe behind them and incidentally recover Egyptian territory in the Sinai. Likewise with any luck Mahmoud Abbas -- should he live (as Sadat didn't and Mr. Abbas has already been targeted by assassins). Israel doesn't need a lover it needs to negotiate with someone who is sane. And the surest sign of sanity in a political leader is a commitment to advancing the real interests of his own people. Which means sometimes abandoning dreams. Mr. Abbas's recent trip to Kuwait in which he apologized on behalf of all Palestinians for the support Saddam Hussein had received from them was the surest indication of a new Palestinian approach to survival. It was also an indirect acknowledgement of a new order of things in the Middle East: that the shift of Iraq from fair-weather friend of Jihadis to mortal enemy is likely to stick with (mostly positive) repercussions across the region. Once again as several times before in the 57-year history of "Israel/Palestine" a free Palestinian state is on the table that would complete the partition plan first presented to the United Nations in 1947. One senses from public statements by many prominent Palestinians that the time to accept this and cut their huge accumulated losses is now. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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