|
Arthur,
Good post. The one challenge is that Arafat [the real power] has been
reduced to such weakness that he cannot easily control the Islamic Jihad.
Bill
On
controlling Palestinian terrorist groups.
What Palestinians can learn from a Zionist milestone The Altalena
The New York Times
-
NEW YORK
The Palestinians have often been called the Jews of the Arab world: a
stateless people dispersed in diaspora, living by their wits, pining for a
return to their historic homeland. This is not a comparison either side likes.
It implies an equivalency that both reject.
Yet the comparison remains common, even among Israelis and Palestinians
themselves. Palestinians study the milestones of the Zionist movement for
guidance and often speak about the Israeli political system, with its
freewheeling debate, as a model for their own.
There is one milestone in particular that bears study today David
Ben-Gurion's fateful decision in 1948 to end Jewish terrorist
activities and bring armed splinter groups under government control. When
Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas, the Israeli and Palestinian prime ministers,
met on Thursday night, one of the biggest issues they discussed was ending the
terrorism of renegade Palestinian groups. Abbas said that by next week he
hoped to have a pact with Hamas, the main Palestinian Islamic party, to halt
violence against Israelis. Sharon and his aides say a cease-fire pact is not
enough, however, that what is needed is to arrest and disarm the militants.
What Israelis increasingly say is that the Palestinians need their own
Altalena.
Little known to the outside world, the Altalena episode is frequently
invoked because without some equivalent, the Palestinian state may never come
to be. In the final years of the British mandate in Palestine, there was not
one Jewish militia but several, just as there are competing Palestinian groups
today. The main one, the Haganah, was led by Ben-Gurion. A more violent
and radical one, the Irgun Zvai Leumi, often called simply the Irgun, was led
by Menachem Begin. The Irgun, along with an even more radical group, the Stern
Gang, was responsible for a massacre of more than 200 Palestinians in the
village of Deir Yassin in April 1948. A month later, after the British walked
out of Palestine and Ben-Gurion declared the state of Israel, Arab
armies attacked. On June 1, the Haganah and Irgun agreed to merge into the
Israel Defense Forces, headed by Haganah commanders. The accord called on
Irgun members to hand over arms and terminate separate activity, including
arms purchases abroad.
But there remained the question of an old U.S. Navy landing vessel bought
by the Irgun's American supporters and renamed the Altalena. The ship, whose
purchase had predated the June 1 agreement, was packed with 850 volunteers,
5,000 rifles, 3,000 bombs, 3 million cartridges and hundreds of tons of
explosives. Ben- Gurion wanted every soldier and bullet he could get
and ordered the ship to dock. But Begin said the arms should go to Irgun
troops. Ben- Gurion refused, at which point, Irgun men headed to the
beach to unload the arms. Ben-Gurion realized the challenge he faced.
As he put it in his memoir, I decided this must be the moment of truth.
Either the government's authority would prevail and we could then
proceed to consolidate our military force or the whole concept of nationhood
would fall apart.
He ordered the Altalena shelled. After the volunteers disembarked, Begin
boarded the ship, as did other Irgun fighters. The shelling began. When one
hit and the Altalena burst into flames, Begin was hurled overboard by his men
and carried ashore. The ship sank, along with most of its arms and more than a
dozen Irgun members. Others were arrested, and the Irgun's independent
activities were finally over.
In his 1953 memoir, The Revolt, Begin says he had known hunger and sorrow
in his life but had wept only twice once, out of joy, when the state was
declared, and the second time, in grief, the night the Altalena was destroyed.
The point for the Palestinians is that until their radical militias
are put out of action, those groups will always be able to play the role of
spoilers. In 1996, the Palestinian Authority showed itself capable of
confrontation, making widespread arrests of extremists in the wake of several
suicide bombings. Thousands of militants were arrested. But most were
eventually let go. The Palestinians must do it again and in a definitive
manner. The Altalena is a symbol of that task because it involved genuine
confrontation yet little loss of life. As Ben- Gurion put it in his
memoir:
The incident caused near civil war among the Jews themselves. But in the
eyes of the world we had affirmed ourselves as a nation. When the smoke
cleared and the indignation died down, the population at large put itself
squarely behind its government. The days of private armies were past, and, in
the manner of every other well-organized state, we had the makings of a
central command under government control.
Karen,
My guess is that it is:
just
realized that all the pressure applied to the Palestinians to change their
stripes and demote Arafat will
have the end result of exposing Israel's feet in concrete attitude since the
Palestinians are moving
ahead
However, to move ahead, he is going to need to jettison his links with
the Israeli far right and hook up with the Israeli center. If he doesn't
move to do this, not much will happen. Also, while Hammaas made some
conciliatory remarks, the Islamic Jihaad has not.
Bill
Friedman is quite honest here, both in
trying to "separate the wheat from the chafe" and in his attempts to cover
his previous commentary where he was more approving of the Bush2 stated
reasons for going to war.
It's been said that before a war there are some believed good
reasons. Afterwards, there
are never any good reasons.
You always wonder if another way would not have been more
productive and less costly.
However, this is not just about one
local neighborhood, Iraq, it is about Israel and Palestine, the best case
study for human ineptitude and institutionalized politics, historical
animosity and historical opportunity as we have in prima geopolitics
today.
Since I've posted many times here about
the need for some heroic self-sacrifice on the part of the political
leadership in Israel and Palestine, let me share that I am cautiously
optimistic and holding my breath regarding recent developments. I am waiting to see if Sharon has
had a midnight "legacy conversion experience" or just realized that all
the pressure applied to the Palestinians to change their stripes and
demote Arafat will have the end result of exposing Israel's feet in
concrete attitude since the Palestinians are moving ahead. Lots of corny photo cops abound,
but I am waiting to see not the Kodak moments, but the WYSIWYG, or
What you see is what you
get moments. - KWC
Because We
Could
By Thomas L. Friedman, NYT, June 4,
2003
The
failure of the Bush team to produce any weapons of mass destruction
(W.M.D.'s) in Iraq is becoming a big, big story. But is it the real story
we should be concerned with? No. It was the wrong issue before the war,
and it's the wrong issue now.
Why?
Because there were actually four reasons for this war:
the real reason, the right reason, the moral reason and the stated
reason.
The
"real reason" for this war, which was never stated, was that after 9/11
America needed to hit someone in the Arab-Muslim world.
Afghanistan wasn't enough because a terrorism bubble had built up over
there - a bubble that posed a real threat to the open societies of the
West and needed to be punctured. This terrorism bubble said that plowing
airplanes into the World Trade Center was O.K., having Muslim preachers
say it was O.K. was O.K., having state-run newspapers call people who did
such things "martyrs" was O.K. and allowing Muslim charities to raise
money for such "martyrs" was O.K. Not only was all this seen as O.K.,
there was a feeling among radical Muslims that suicide bombing would level
the balance of power between the Arab world and the West, because we had
gone soft and their activists were ready to
die.
The
only way to puncture that bubble was for American soldiers, men and women,
to go into the heart of the Arab-Muslim world, house to house, and make
clear that we are ready to kill, and to die, to prevent our open society
from being undermined by this terrorism bubble. Smashing Saudi Arabia or
Syria would have been fine. But
we hit Saddam for one simple reason: because we could, and because he
deserved it and because he was right in the heart of that world. And don't
believe the nonsense that this had no effect.
Every neighboring government - and 98 percent of terrorism is about what
governments let happen - got the message. If you talk to U.S. soldiers in
Iraq they will tell you this is what the war was
about.
The
"right reason" for this war was the need to partner with Iraqis,
post-Saddam, to build a progressive Arab regime.
Because the real weapons of mass destruction that threaten us were never
Saddam's missiles. The real weapons that threaten us are the growing
number of angry, humiliated young Arabs and Muslims, who are produced by
failed or failing Arab states - young people who hate America more than
they love life. Helping to build a decent Iraq as a model for others - and
solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - are the necessary steps for
defusing the ideas of mass destruction, which are what really threaten
us.
The
"moral reason" for the war was that Saddam's regime was an engine of mass
destruction
and genocide that had killed thousands of his own people, and neighbors,
and needed to be stopped.
But
because the Bush team never dared to spell out the real reason for the
war, and (wrongly) felt that it could never win public or world support
for the right reasons and the moral reasons, it opted for
the
stated reason: the notion that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction that
posed an immediate threat to America.
I argued before the war that Saddam posed no such threat to America, and
had no links with Al Qaeda, and that we couldn't take the nation to war
"on the wings of a lie." I argued that Mr. Bush should fight this war for
the right reasons and the moral reasons. But he stuck with this W.M.D.
argument for P.R. reasons.
Once
the war was over and I saw the mass graves and the true extent of Saddam's
genocidal evil, my view was that Mr. Bush did not need to find any
W.M.D.'s to justify the war for me. I still feel that way. But I have to
admit that I've always been fighting my own war in Iraq. Mr. Bush took the
country into his war. And
if it turns out that he fabricated the evidence for his war (which I
wouldn't conclude yet), that would badly damage America and be a very
serious matter.
But
my ultimate point is this: Finding Iraq's W.M.D.'s is necessary to
preserve the credibility of the Bush team, the neocons, Tony Blair and the
C.I.A. But rebuilding Iraq is necessary to win the war. I won't feel one
whit more secure if we find Saddam's W.M.D.'s, because I never felt he
would use them on us. But I will feel terribly insecure if we fail to put
Iraq onto a progressive path. Because if that doesn't happen, the
terrorism bubble will reinflate and bad things will follow.
Mr.
Bush's credibility rides on finding W.M.D.'s, but America's future, and
the future of the Mideast, rides on our building a different Iraq. We must
not forget that.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/04/opinion/04FRIE.html
|
