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COMMENTARY
March 9, 2002
Us & them
Without using up all the space in this newspaper today I am going to try to explain what I believe is at the heart of the bloodbath now extending through Israel and "Palestine". In the foreground we are witnessing an extraordinary duel between Israel's prime minister Ariel Sharon and the Palestinian generalissimo Yasser Arafat. Contrary to appearances Israel is still winning. It continues to win through extraordinary pain as long as the Palestinian side cannot gain from its much-expanded Intifada. In the longer run it can only win if the Palestinians can be convinced that they have nothing to gain by attacking Israel. When that magical point is achieved there will be peace and the Palestinians can have a state of their own. It remains a good question whether this can happen in our lifetimes. Mr. Sharon has endured as a small part of this pain a great deal of heat not only from the West but from the left side of the Israeli domestic political spectrum and a few doubters who are actually to his right. I have described him as a man with tactics and without a strategy (the opposite of Mr. Arafat) and this has become the popular opinion within Israel itself. He came to power promising to be the kind of tough guy who could win Palestinian respect and thus make peace. It sure doesn't look like he's succeeding. But he does in fact have the first idea. Though it doesn't amount to a strategy he realizes that you can't give in to terrorism. The more you allow it to succeed the more of it you are going to get. President Bush now understands this on behalf of America but neither he nor most Americans fully grasp its application to the Middle East largely because the U.S. national interest only sometimes coincides with Israel's. Indeed given the cost of the relationship the U.S. support of Israel must be idealist: they do it not for benefits but because they think it's right. Their problem is how to continue supporting Israel while reducing the cost; and there appear to be no such options. The U.S. needs the neutrality if not the support of various Arab regimes to pursue its larger scheme of battle against Islamist terrorism. Israel continues to be in the way by offering a common pathological focus to the anger of the entire Arab world. The "Arab street" is not a problem -- for there is no such thing as an Arab with elementary human rights in his own country. However get enough Arab regimes in your way and you will have a problem passing. The big news this week has been the suggestion of the U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell that Prime Minister Sharon has to take a hard look at his policies to see whether they will work. If you declare war against the Palestinians thinking that you can solve the problem by seeing how many Palestinians can be killed, I don't think that leads us anywhere. If the Israeli policy actually were to kill as many Palestinians as possible they could do a better job. They have the equipment to annihilate almost everyone on the West Bank in the space of a few hours. If the Israelis chose to re-occupy all the Palestinian territory ceded to Mr. Arafat's administration since the Oslo talks senior Israel Defence Force commanders think it could be done in four or five days (one week max). It is time this kind of fatuous rhetoric were eliminated from Western diplomacy and protest. President Bush said nothing. Part of his own diplomatic practice has been to allow Mr. Powell to get slightly ahead of him and thus take the hits. Neither what Mr. Sharon is attempting nor a winning strategy for Israel could possibly involve the intentional targeting of Palestinian civilians. My own view is that in addition to what Mr. Sharon is doing which has the virtue of reducing Palestinian terror hits (and thus Israeli reprisals) in the short run to several per day from the dozens intended the Israelis should be developing a crack all-voluntary but substantial force separate from the IDF that specializes in the detection and destruction of terror cells both within and outside Mr. Arafat's militias. For the IDF is being demoralized -- in the broadest sense of this word -- by its employment in a job it was never trained for. It is designed to repel conventional attacks from foreign armies but is being used to make up swat teams which are compelled to move among a profoundly alienated civilian population which the terrorists are using for cover. In other words the Israelis need to go after armed Palestinians at a much higher level of precision and at a rather lower level of publicity. The problem with killing civilians even accidentally from a strictly military point of view is that it gives an argument to the other side and by enraging one's enemy can improve his morale. This statement requires slight qualification. Again from a strictly military angle you do sometimes want to enrage your enemy in order to make him behave stupidly. But in the "Western" still Judaeo-Christian mind killing non-combatants even killing unarmed combatants is so desperately wrong (the word is evil ) that you don't do it for any reason unsanctioned by a court of law. Not so in the West Bank. A different mindset is found which contrary to our own fond wishes is not Judaeo-Christian at all except occasionally in a volatile schizophrenic way. Two-thirds of Palestinians according to the estimate of polls (which should always be distrusted when they are attempted in countries that are not free) believe that the killing of unarmed Jewish non-combatants is morally justified by the Palestinian cause. And yet I think the "European Western even Israeli mindset, has so far penetrated the Palestinian worldview, that there is no feeling of security in this view, and it could still be changed. Among the better educated or more sophisticated (which include the leadership of the Palestinian Authority, and most of the associated terrorist groups), there is an acute consciousness of Western attitudes, but these are not therefore embraced. Yasser Arafat knows perfectly well that the death of every Palestinian civilian in the Intifada contributes to his cause, by putting more pressure on Israel from the West. That is the very reason the Palestinian militants go to such lengths to endanger the civilian population around them, even beyond using them as cover. It is why they locate bomb factories in refugee camps. It is why they use ambulances to ferry arms and fighters to the scene of an incident. To their mind, these are win-win tactics. For even if they don't get away with it, news of collateral damage, or that the Israelis have entered a refugee camp, or that they have strafed a clearly-marked ambulance, or prevented one from getting to the wounded, is as effective on public opinion in the West, as a fruitful suicide bombing is effective in rallying public opinion in the East. (For make no mistake, there is public celebration every time Israeli civilians are killed.) By contrast, the loss of hundreds of Muslim innocents to Hindu massacres in Gujarat, India, is of little interest. To start with, those Muslims were Indian, not Arab. They live in a society where the two are equal, and each group massacres the other from time to time. To continue, the Gujarat victims, in their hundreds, were not killed by Jews. Whereas a single child killed in the West Bank, is killed by Jews. To conclude, Israel is an absolutely special case, for it is at the border with Israel that the Arab world senses it is fighting the real clash between civilizations -- a battle, if you will, for spiritual survival. It is identity politics" at its most lethal. To understand this in its human dimension we need only consider our own reaction to the murder of Daniel Pearl. He was just one man but he was an unarmed American surrounded by "Muslim fanatics" (in fact as well as rhetoric). He was killed like a sheep in an Eid sacrifice. How little we take note of the numerous Shia Muslim and other victims of Muslim fanatics in Pakistan. We weren't even that much moved by the massacre of a church full of Pakistani Christians. It would be as wrong to think of the Arab outlook as "inhuman" as it would be to conclude that it is just like our own. The difference between us isn't racial at all. It is cultural religious. For centuries we have had drummed into our heads Thou shalt do no murder. They haven't. The very definitions of "murder" and of what is "human" vary across the frontier. In a way the Arab view is more natural less "conditioned" than our own sensibility closer to what you will find in every other human culture that is not "Judaeo-Christian". And as we over time cease to be Christian in our mental outlook we may come to behave more and more like them. What largely keeps us apart is that our modern secular outlook on life took aboard all kinds of religious -- specifically Christian -- ideas without ever really examining them. Even the option of "resist ye not evil" (i.e. revenge is wrong) came to seem self-evident after so many centuries of repetition. It is not a doctrine that has ever been taught in any other culture. (Though it has sometimes been approached.) But in contrast the grief at the loss of one's own is absolutely universal. All mothers cry when their children are killed all human beings are moved more by the death of one's own than by the death of some stranger. The intensely selective outrage across the Arab world at the scenes of Palestinian devastation is not hypocrisy to their culture; it is only hypocrisy to ours. I am certain that their grief in this is perfectly sincere. It is enhanced to a terrible sense of injustice because the Arab media do not report on the Israeli victims of Palestinian atrocities. The footage is shown again and again only of the Palestinian Arab child who is dead; the cameras focus almost lovingly on every wound; then on the wailing of the child's surviving mother or sister or aunt. The announcer assures the viewers that the Israeli attack was gratuitous and that the child was among the intended targets. Shown this story every day and never told another we ourselves would come to believe that the Israelis the Jews were somehow subhuman. Only in the West do we get to see both sides. Only in the West do we even think we could handle dealing with both sides -- for again the idea of equality as between Muslim and non-Muslim does not exist in Islamic culture. (There have always been different laws for the two groups.) The very idea that "all men are equal in the eyes of God" is a very specifically Christian idea; even the Jews believe themselves "chosen". Where it is seen to exist it has been imported -- whether into the Muslim world or more commonly into modern secular and Jewish attitudes and beliefs. While all this must seem like an involved and even dangerous aside I believe it is necessary to make sense of what is now happening in the West Bank and Gaza. We sense but do not think through the fact that Israelis and Arabs are playing by much different cultural rules. As Westerners most of whom have never travelled outside our own cultural sphere (except to gawp at tourist monuments) we can't take in the full depth of the cultural differences on display. We see what the Palestinians are up against; but we can't fully see what the Israelis are up against. Now Israel has been surrounded since its creation in 1948 and indeed the Arab attempt to annihilate the Zionists began long before. In Yasser Arafat performing feats of duplicity constantly repeating one set of things in English to a Western audience and another set in Arabic to his own people we have a true if slightly more sophisticated version of Al-Haj Amin al-Husayni the grand mufti of Jerusalem who was the Palestinian leader in the 1930s and '40s. To the person familiar with the history of the conflict what is most deadening is the endless repetition of the same old arguments on both sides. To the West Israel has a right to exist because it exists if not for other reasons. To the East the argument for the removal of the Jews has not changed since the 1880s. The belief that eventually they will be removed just as the Crusaders were is likewise endemic. What we have heard Mr. Arafat saying in English repeatedly since 1993 is that he recognizes Israel's right to exist in the Western definition; what we don't hear is the more frequently repeated Arabic addresses in which he assures his people that "this is just a tactic" -- and then names romantically in Arabic the various Israeli towns all of them within the "green line" (the 1967 border) to which God willing they will some day return. Ariel Sharon and the entire Israeli political establishment now have a fairly clear sense of what they are facing: the harvest of decades of inculcated hatred. They know the IDF could defeat Egyptian Jordanian Syrian Iraqi armies; that at least the Egyptian and Jordanian regimes ultimately came to terms with the existence of Israel in order to assure their own survival. While the Israelis disagree among themselves about the means or sometimes even the ends of their struggle they are in possession of one insight that we don't fully share. It is that unlike Egyptians Jordanians Syrians Iraqis the Palestinians have never really been defeated. They have been often forced to retreat but they have never been put in a position where they had to abandon their hopes of reconquering "Zionist-occupied Palestine" -- from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Mr. Arafat leads and his people continue to follow the dream that some day external pressure by an act of God will bring Israel to its knees. And in their culture they can wait forever. Every time a Western government including this week the Bush administration through its spokesman Mr. Powell warns Israel that "there is no military solution" the Palestinians see light at the end of the tunnel. Peace will not come until that light is extinguished. For this moment it comes down to the duel between Mr. Sharon and Mr. Arafat. Neither will be replaced in the next several weeks (barring an accident). The short-term prize for the latter is to win his release from Israeli encirclement. He must somehow find a way to attend the 14th Arab League Summit in Beirut on the 27th of this month. Even the recent Saudi Arabian peace initiative is I believe designed to achieve this important object. If through Arab European and Canadian diplomatic pressure on the U.S. and consequent U.S. pressure on Israel Mr. Arafat can somehow win his release then he sails into Beirut the conquering hero -- and all Palestine can rejoice that the suicide bombers are achieving their objective. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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