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COMMENTARY
September 28, 2005
Greater Palestine
The late Emperor Hirohito of Japan set the world record for understatement in the final moments of World War II, when he made an unprecedented address to his nation on radio -- shortly after atomic bombs had obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He began, “There have been developments in the war situation that are not necessarily to our advantage.”I wouldn’t go quite that far, in describing current developments in the Middle East. Hope remains in many quarters, especially in Iraq, notwithstanding the pathologically negative and anti-American blatherings of (most of the rest of) the mainstream media. There are developments in Lebanon, Egypt, and Syria that are not necessarily not to the advantage of those who want democracy and constitutional government to spread through the region. Lebanon continues to reclaim its independence, there have been minor feints towards multi-party democracy in Egypt, and the Baathist regime in Syria might yet fall to international pressure and increasingly daring domestic opposition. But each of these fragments of good news is more a potential than actual improvement. There is, for instance, no detectable “upside” in the huge issue of Iran’s impending emergence as a nuclear power, and its determination to proliferate nuclear technology it has acquired from Russia, China, North Korea, and Pakistan. The European trio of the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, to which it now appears the Bush administration subcontracted its policy on Iran, have funked the necessary confrontation. Across the Arab world, apart from the exceptions I mentioned, all the indications I can see are of movement backwards, as one regime after another calculates the Americans have spent their shot in Afghanistan and Iraq, and their own survival now depends on competing with Islamists for the quasi-legitimacy that comes from ideological purity. The movement is therefore almost everywhere towards stricter Sharia, and away from Westernizing innovations. And this is unlikely to change as long as the rebuilding of Iraq is presented as a defensive operation. We, in the West, including those in Washington, tend seriously to underestimate the power of sheer morale to determine winners and losers in the Middle East. It is a hard cultural fact, I would say wherever the Arabic language is spoken, that in order to win it is usually sufficient to appear to be winning. And this is why the refusal of both Western and Islamic media to report anything positive from Iraq has real, practical consequences. It is also why the recent Israeli evacuation of Jewish settlements in Gaza has proved, and will continue to prove, a disaster far beyond Israel’s borders. The view of Hamas and Islamic Jihad has prevailed, in Arabic media -- that the Israelis were forced to retreat under the barrage of Islamist rocket and suicide attacks. The moral taken from it, is that terrorism works, and should be escalated to keep Israel and America retreating. A look around Gaza itself, since the evacuation, must add weight to the cart of discouragement. The public consensus of U.N. bureaucrats, embassy diplomats, and other foreign officers was that removing Israeli settlements could only help advance the “peace process”. Privately, most of those I have ever had any communication with, know better, and speak differently; which is why I tend to think of this whole international class as “professionally naïve”. Look around Gaza, after the Hamas-sponsored victory parades, with their exhibitions of weapons and psychopathic slogans and acts, and what is there to see? Since Israel's exit, the “joyous Palestinians” have desecrated then torched all the synagogues left behind, looted and destroyed all the greenhouses that philanthropists had bought up to provide new sources of employment, and stepped up cross-border attacks on Israeli targets within Katyusha rocket range. Worse, they have effectively stormed down the frontier with Egypt, creating what increasingly resembles a Somali-style free trade zone for weapons, and opening new and more intimate contacts between Palestinian terror interests and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Palestinian “terrorists of fortune” were already being fed through Syria into the Sunni Triangle of Iraq, where their corpses regularly wash up in considerable numbers after American and Iraqi offensives. But now there are also numerous reports from Lebanon, of Palestinian terrorists being inserted into the Bekaa Valley and other lawless districts, to do the work of the departed Syrian occupiers in fomenting Levantine chaos. Jordanian authorities are increasingly alarmed by Palestinian underground activities in Amman and elsewhere. And within the West Bank itself, attacks on Christian Palestinian settlements, such as the recent pogrom at Taybeh near Ramallah, suggest an accelerated breakdown of civil authority, to which the unilateral withdrawal of Israeli forces can only contribute. For two generations, Palestinian society was radicalized, by a psychotic leadership, at first in a secular, socialist, pan-Arabist direction, but more recently, and more successfully, in an Islamist one. Far from being contained by the counter-productive “peace process”, the Palestinian problem is now metastasizing throughout the region, like a long-nurtured cancer. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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