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COMMENTARY
July 30, 2005
Intifada III
It is time to invoke the Altalena again. This is the ship full of arms and newly-recruited Jewish fighters, which Menachem Begin's Irgun attempted to land in Palestine, in June 1948, just as the State of Israel was coming into being. The shipment wasn't meant for the government, but for the Jewish underground, to defend Jerusalem against an impending Arab onslaught. Because it was illegal, and the Irgun fighters were hesitating to accept the new state's authority, Israel's founding prime minister, David Ben Gurion, ordered the ship to be shelled. By doing so, he established once and for all that Israel would be a legitimate state, recognizing only one source of law and order.At least, that was the official story. There has been considerable fuss in Israel, over the years, about what the facts actually were, and whether far from being the hero of the piece, Israel's founding prime minister pulled off a cynical, bloody political stunt, to help his Labour Party win the first election. Be that as it may. The principle that a state, to have legitimacy, must in addition to de jure recognition, prove de facto control over its own police and military, is one of those sound, rational, characteristically Western ideas. It is what both the U.S. and Israel have been trying to explain to the Palestinian Authority for a long time. And their frequent reply, that they either can't or won't confront the "independent" activities of Fatah cells, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Hezbollah, et al., is one of the things that makes the "roadmap to peace" so hard to read. Worse, the heritage from the late Yassir Arafat is of "legitimate" and "illegitimate" Palestinian forces in cahoots. And worse still, for it precludes even the possibility of negotiating, the "legitimate" Palestinian Authority persists in denying the legitimacy of Israel in its own rhetoric. While reviewing Palestinian forces in Gaza, earlier this week, the PA prime minister, Ahmed Qureia, declared: "We are telling the entire world, today Gaza and tomorrow Jerusalem. Today Gaza and tomorrow an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital! ... A state will not arise without our achieving all the rights of our Palestinian nation and the right of return." In other words, the condition for a true Palestinian state continues to be the eradication of Israel. In English the message is made a little ambiguous; in Arabic it continues to be broadcast loud and clear. This is now the official Palestinian response to Israel's extremely painful withdrawal of all the Jewish settlements in Gaza, and four on the West Bank -- an act which was intended to kickstart serious negotiations with the "moderate" PA regime of Mahmoud Abbas. Ariel Sharon's government has had to tear Israeli society apart to deliver that gift of land to the Palestinians. And as Natan Sharansky and others (including me) said, the gesture has bound to backfire. Mohammed Dahlan, the PA's civilian affairs minister, was on record this week declaring, "Israel's current actions are paving the way for a third Intifada." Translation, to those familiar with the past: "We are planning a third Intifada to follow the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza." It was the same when the Israelis withdrew from southern Lebanon, five years ago. Far from assuaging Arab complaints, the withdrawal was taken as a sign of Israeli weakness, and inspired the launching of the second Intifada. Israeli intelligence has in fact detected weapons stockpiling and other indications that a third Intifada is in fact being planned; and the IDF is already making call-ups in anticipation of it. In a sense, it has already started: for there have been more than 800 attacks on Israeli targets since the last "ceasefire" was signed in February. The carnage is only being minimized by the efficiency of new Israeli security measures -- read, the West Bank Wall. But the fear is that the Palestinian underground has made progress in recruiting Israeli Arabs to operate behind it. For remember, nearly a quarter of Israel 's own population is Muslim; and currently feeling quite aloof from the spectacle of a strictly intra-Jewish debate about the future of Jewish settlements. From a Western view, given public attitudes towards terrorism engendered by e.g. the recent bombings in London, you would think the Palestinians would know better than to throw away the support they still enjoy from the Western media and Left. But this is to assume they think like us. As we are about to discover, yet again, they don' t. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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