[Reader-list] Israel-Palestine: The Hard Truth

[Yazad Jal]

The Hard Truth

April 3, 2002

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

A terrible disaster is in the making in the Middle East. What Osama bin
Laden failed to achieve on Sept. 11 is now being unleashed by the
Israeli-Palestinian war in the West Bank: a clash of
civilizations.

In the wake of repeated suicide bombings, it is no surprise that the Israeli
Army has gone on the offensive in the West Bank. Any other nation would have
done the same. But Ariel Sharon's operation will succeed only if it is
designed to make the Israeli-occupied territories safe for Israel to leave
as soon as possible. Israel's goal must be a withdrawal from these areas
captured in the 1967 war; otherwise it will never know a day's peace, and it
will undermine every legitimate U.S. effort to fight terrorism around the
globe.

What I fear, though, is that Mr. Sharon wants to get rid of Mr. Arafat in
order to keep Israeli West Bank settlements, not to create the conditions
for them to be withdrawn.

President Bush needs to be careful that America doesn't get sucked into
something very dangerous here. Mr. Bush has rightly condemned Palestinian
suicide bombing as beyond the pale, but he is not making clear that Israel's
war against this terrorism has to be accompanied by a real plan for getting
out of the territories.

Why? Because President Bush, like all the other key players, doesn't want to
face the central dilemma in this conflict - which is that while Israel must
get out of the West Bank and Gaza, the Palestinians cannot, at this moment,
be trusted to run those territories on their own, without making them a base
of future operations against Israel. That means some outside power has to
come in to secure the borders, and the only trusted powers would be the U.S.
or NATO.

Palestinians who use suicide bombers to blow up Israelis at a Passover meal
and then declare "Just end the occupation and everything will be fine" are
not believable. No Israeli in his right mind would trust Yasir Arafat, who
has used suicide bombers when it suited his purposes, not to do the same
thing if he got the West Bank back and some of his people started demanding
Tel Aviv.

"The only solution is a new U.N. mandate for U.S. and NATO troops to
supervise the gradual emergence of a Palestinian state - after a phased
Israeli withdrawal - and then to control its borders," says the Middle East
expert Stephen P. Cohen.

People say that U.S. troops there would be shot at like U.S. troops in
Beirut. I disagree. U.S. troops that are the midwife of a Palestinian state
and supervise a return of Muslim sovereignty over the holy mosques in
Jerusalem would be the key to solving all the contradictions of U.S. policy
in the Middle East, not new targets.

The Arab leaders don't want to face this hard fact either, because most are
illegitimate, unelected autocrats who are afraid of ever speaking the truth
in public to the Palestinians. The Arab leaders are as disingenuous as Mr.
Sharon; he says ending "terrorism" alone will bring peace to the occupied
territories, and the Arab leaders say ending "the occupation" alone will end
all terrorism.

Like Mr. Sharon, the Arab leaders need to face facts - that while the
occupation needs to end, they independently need to address issues like
suicide terrorism in the name of Islam. As Malaysia's prime minister,
Mahathir Mohamad, courageously just declared about suicide bombing: "Bitter
and angry though we may be, we must demonstrate to the world that Muslims
are rational people when fighting for our rights, and do not resort to acts
of terror."

If Arab leaders have only the moral courage to draw lines around Israel's
behavior, but no moral courage to decry the utterly corrupt and inept
Palestinian leadership, or the depravity of suicide bombers in the name of
Islam, then we're going nowhere.

The other people who have not wanted to face facts are the feckless American
Jewish leaders, fundamentalist Christians and neoconservatives who together
have helped make it impossible for anyone in the U.S. administration to talk
seriously about halting Israeli settlement-building without being accused of
being anti-Israel. Their collaboration has helped prolong a colonial Israeli
occupation that now threatens the entire Zionist enterprise.

So there you have it. Either leaders of good will get together and
acknowledge that Israel can't stay in the territories but can't just pick up
and leave, without a U.S.-NATO force helping Palestinians oversee their
state, or Osama wins - and the war of civilizations will be coming to a
theater near you.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/03/opinion/03FRIE.html?ex=1018897014&ei=1&en=
b97af7259c1d7ca0