Those two really are quite the pair of worthy adversaries, and it's the citizen population that has really suffered at their hands. I doubt the Israelis are dupes, they've seen what a "success" the Sharon administration has been at providing security for them, and I think he's going to be gone soon.
I doubt it. Sharon was hired to fight the war that Arafat imposed on the Israelis (nobody in Israel buys the pose of Arafat-as-moderate that the West still hangs onto). You don't dump your general in the middle of a war. Even the carping from Haaretz, a paper ideologically completely opposed to everything Sharon stands for, strikes me as rather subdued by Israeli standards.
Yes, it's a nasty business. The Israelis are fighting by strangling the Palestinian economy and blowing up PA offices; the Palestinians are fighting by shooting at any IDF troops they see and sending a campaign of suicide bombers and shooters to kill as many civilians as they can manage. War is a nasty business.
One could only wish the Palestinians could come to their senses about what Arafat has done for them in all this time as well. They're being used as cannon fodder in the goal of the destruction of the Israeli state, and it just isn't going to work.
The Palestinians are in their current situation because they have never been able to see this. Or rather, those who have seen it are living outside of Israel, in the Gulf or Europe or the US. But you can't blame them, since Palestinian political tradition, going back to the Mufti, calls anybody with ideas of compromise "traitors" and shoots them. They prefer to stick with their maximalists no matter how many disasters result.
Non violent resistance doesn't work against a Saddam Hussein or Kim Jong, and it won't work against militant Islam, but it can function against a democracy, which Israel really is.
If the Palestinians had ever had a statesman, they would have had a state long since, or they might peacefully be part of Jordan, which no one had any objection to before 1967. |
