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I believe that that still is a major issue.
Bill
Who
does?
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
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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
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