The Palestinian Conversation
By DEBORAH SONTAG nytimes.com
Always good to note the link for future reference, it gets hard to retrieve after a week these days. Deborah wouldn't be any relation to Susan, would she? I agree that this article is depressing. I don't know about the squishy part, it's hard to read policy tea leaves in man-on-the-street pieces, the NYT isn't the state press agency or anything.
A few bits that struck me.
After Arafat asked the Palestinians on Dec.16 to halt attacks on Israelis, he visited Barbakh's turf to beseech the residents of Rafah to honor his request. Barbakh boasted that he wagged his finger at Arafat and declared: ''May the cease-fire go to hell. They are shooting at us. We can't offer them flowers.'' He said that Arafat waited him out. ''Then he told me I was too agitated, and when the meeting ended, he ordered me arrested,'' Barbakh said.
Immediately, though, the loyal shebabs -- my kids'' -- came to Barbakh's defense by burning the neighborhood police station. So a truce was reached; Palestinian police officers did not take Barbakh into custody, and he embraced the cease-fire in practice if not in principle. ''We'll give Abu Amar a chance,'' he said, using Arafat's nom de guerre and speaking in his own way for a majority of Palestinians at that moment in time.
. . .
Before I traveled to Jerusalem, which I left in August after three years there as a reporter, I e-mailed friends to commiserate about how things had gone from horrible to worse over the fall. My Israeli pen pals sounded pretty despairing, but the Palestinians didn't. It wasn't as if they saw a rainbow on the horizon, but they seemed to have reset their clocks, accepting the idea that their struggle for independence might take a good deal longer.
. . .
Toward the end of our conversation, David ruminated a bit on the suicide bombers. He and his wife condemned the bombings because ''we don't want innocent civilians to die.'' But Maria said that the bombers themselves had to be understood as products of desperate circumstances, and David effectively said that he was impressed by their self-sacrifice. ''Theirs is real faith,'' he said.
This appeared to be a bit much for his father to handle. He sputtered: ''Excuse me, David, but what did they do, these noble creatures? Blow themselves up? They blew themselves up and blew us up with them. To hell with them. What is the result of their self-sacrifice? Now America is saying Arafat is bin Laden? Bravo for Hamas.''
David changed the subject. ''Are you sure we can't get you a beer?'' he asked me.
One thing I noticed in this article is that there was very little reference to religious fundamentalism, somewhat in contrast to the popular local "demon Islam" subtopic. (the "real faith" line above was delivered by a Christian.) I've always found the 9-11-Afghanistan / Palestinian tie-in sort of weak, though obviously advantageous for the people preaching that tie-in. The Palestinians cheered for Saddam too. Economically, that was probably a bigger blunder than the 9/11 cheering. Before the Gulf War, they were a large part of the expatriate labor force in the Gulf states. But the Palestinians didn't bring Saddam to power, or invade Kuwait, or keep Saddam in power afterward. And I haven't seen any indications that Palestinians had much role in Afghanistan either. |
