Why aren’t we
asking what is it that controls
Islamic Jihad, Hammas and Al Qaeda?
The people in
charge can change, but it’s the hatred, the lack of vision for a positive future,
the despair and the ignorance that drive these groups. Institutional hatred always has leaders
but the leadership can be dismantled by being disproved and dismantled, like
communism, when it fails to work, to achieve the goals and to cause more harm
than it does good for even its True Believers.
Even if Sharon
is assassinated by the True Believers in Israel’s hardcore right, is there a
consensus on the ground that the status quo failed?
Even if Abbas
does not meet the expectations of the world that he can motivate change fast
enough, is there consensus that the old ways failed?
Even if Bush
gets more staged photo ops driving golf carts that say Club Car and arms
outstretched like the statue of Jesus in Brazil, can we admit that inadvertently
even with the wrong motivation, he might move the momentum forward?
They say
leadership is often taking people where they do not want to go, or maybe taking
people where they don’t know yet they want to go there.
In Bush’s
case, his public has made it clear that they want something done. I don’t trust his motives (Campaign
2004) but will take what I get and run with it.
Yes, I am
clinging to idealism as if it were a lifeboat. The Titanic sank already, so let’s
all hope and work towards something good coming from this.
KWC
Bill wrote: I believe that that still is a major
issue.
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 Thu, 5 Jun 2003 11:01:00 -0400 [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
On
controlling Palestinian terrorist groups.
What Palestinians can learn from a Zionist milestone The Altalena
The New York Times
-
31 May 2003
International Herald Tribune
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.
-----Original
Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, June 5, 2003 10:31
AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Because
We Can
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
On Thu, 5 Jun 2003 07:18:03 -0700
"Karen Watters Cole" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
writes:
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
