Interesting commentary from the Gulf News from a moderate Syrian commentator. At least he's not calling for the annihilation of Israel, and that's what passes for a Mideast moderate these days. I have added a few comments:
Questions and futility of the Arab vision
Damascus | By Sami Moubayed | 10-04-2002
The situation in the Middle East has raised a million questions and a million possible answers. What does Sharon want? How will the Arabs respond to the popular street demands they are facing? And more importantly - where are we all heading?
One can be sentimental and say, "we are heading towards war." The sentimentalists, who are many, can listen to revolutionary music all day long, take part in parades, throw stones at their own armed forces,and chant, "Open the borders, we want to die for Palestine." [Western pundits generally present war as a worst-case scenario, not a bright, attractive option]
The latest Hezbollah attacks on Mount Hermon and Kiryat Shmona have managed to send emotions soaring, with Arab citizens demanding that their governments do the same. They do not know how dangerous the attacks can be, to both Syria and Lebanon, and how ineffective they be in damaging the Israeli war machine. [so shelling the Galilee is thrilling?]
The word "war" is being used interchangeably and freely with "confrontation" but nobody knows its psychological, financial, and political impacts. This new generation of Arabs, born between the years 1965-1985, does not know the meaning of war. This is a generation that was too young to remember 1967 and 1973. [The voice of pragmatism intrudes. War would be lovely, but alas, the Arabs are not likely to win]
War will lead to defeat and nobody knows that better than Arab leaders - who despite all that is being said, are nevertheless rational in their stance. We do not need another Gamal Abdul Nasser to drag us into defeat. We are not here to judge the Arabs on why their armies are weak. [Actually, it was Syria that dragged Egypt into the 1967 war, but nevermind]
We are not here to ask our leaders, how is it that after so many years of arms-build up, they are not prepared for war? Why has 85 per cent of most regional taxes gone to the armed forces?
Ariel Sharon, it must be noted, wants radical Arabs to rise to power and foolishly declare war on him. He would love another 1967. He has tried repeatedly to provoke the Arabs, declaring his intention to bomb the Aswan High Dam in 2000, flying constantly into Beirut airspace, and shelling a Syrian radar station in Lebanon in April 2001. Still, to his dismay, the Arabs have not reacted. [Syrian provocations are not mentioned, naturally]
Sharon believes in the policy of "might makes right" and knows better than everyone that he has unlimited powers to do as he pleases. He knows that if an Arab-Israeli war were to erupt, he will be leading the winning army and, unlike in 1967 and 1973, the Arabs are on their own and there is no USSR to help them. [It's call 'transference' when you transfer your own motives and wishes to the enemy. If Syria had Israel's army, they would really want a war. If it's Sharon who wants the war, why is it Hezbullah that's doing the shelling?]
He wants to militarise the conflict and has succeeded in transforming it from a stone-throwing campaign, which had the entire world on its side, into an array of suicide bombers who have aroused pro-Israeli sympathy from the international community. [Yes, Israel is really feeling overwhelmed by world sympathy right now. And if memory serves, this intifada became a military campaign right away, over six months before Sharon was elected.]
Sharon was embarrassed by the image of his soldiers shooting down young Palestinian stone-throwers but justifies himself when Palestinians are blowing themselves up in Israeli populated civilian territory.
Sharon has worked relentlessly since September 11 to portray the Palestinians as terrorists and depict his war against them as similar to the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan. Yasser Arafat was seen as another Osama bin Laden and the PA were seen as the Taliban. [Aren't they? Doesn't a strategy of blowing up as many random Israeli civilians as possible qualify the Palestinians as terrorists?]
Bush had his own reasons to strike at the Arabs. First, he wanted to "punish" them for their refusal to endorse the U.S. campaign against Iraq. More importantly, however, he wanted to voice his resentment to the Iraqi-Gulf rapprochement that was agreed to at the Arab Summit in March 2002.
Sharon came storming into Ramallah on March 29 with a clear nudge from President Bush, and had he wanted, Bush could have gotten him to withdraw within hours from the invasion. Having secured U.S. backing Sharon did not seem to mind what the rest of the world thought of him.
To move on, the Palestinians must forget that salvation is to come from the Arabs and realise that they are in a war on their own. TIME magazine ran a story this week entitled 'Worse Case Scenario' claiming that if the killing continues, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak would call his massive army into Sinai, forcing the Israelis to freeze their atrocities and prompting Syria to move its forces to the Golan Heights. [The permanent Palestinian pipe dream]
Other Arab states, mainly Iraq and Jordan, would follow in a confrontation that would erupt into an all-out regional war. I personally find that very hard to believe - knowing perfectly well how reluctant, unable and unwilling the Arabs are to sustain such a war. [Very practical]
The policy Sharon has laid out for the Arab world is an ugly one. He wants to push deeply into the Palestinian territories, kill anything that moves, and break the spirit of the Palestinian people. [Typical Arab hyberbole. If you want to think of a campaign that really killed anything that moved, think of how Hafed al Assad handled his Islamist rebellion in Hama. He killed 20,000 people and wiped out half the town.]
He wants to inflict maximum pain, without any regard to UN resolutions, or Israeli opinion, and force the Palestinians to surrender. In doing so he wants to re-occupy all the Palestinian territories given at Oslo and negotiate a peace agreement from scratch. This time, however, negotiations will be different.
In 1993 the Palestinians were the victorious ones, after the triumph of the first Intifada. Arafat presented his conditions for peace and was received promptly by what today seems to be the relatively moderate Yitzhak Rabin and Bill Clinton.
Unlike the first Intifada, the Palestinians would emerge from this war in defeat, tormented by so much blood and anguish that their negotiating stance would be weak. No matter how brave they may be, too much death can cripple the most courageous of nations. Negotiations will be conducted with a gravely wounded Palestinian side.
The Sharon strategy
In reaching that, Sharon would have weakened the Palestinians' will and destroyed their aspirations for statehood and independence. At first, we thought he was out to kill Yasser Arafat. Today it is clear that Arafat is the safest Palestinian citizen alive - he is being protected by the Israeli Army itself! However, Arafat will emerge weak and humiliated like his people and would be disenchanted by the Arabs than ever before.
In a battle of nerves, Sharon might succeed in breaking Arafat's spirit and making him hopeless, defeated, forgotten, and weak. Once this is achieved, international pressure will be applied on the PNA, forcing Arafat to sign any agreement laid out before him or suffer prolonged massacres against his people. Given such a choice he would accept proposals that he had turned down in the past.
Step Two of Sharon's plan would be to offer Arafat the same proposals made by Prime Minister Ehud barak at the Camp David talks in 2000. The Palestinians would be given 95 per cent of the West Bank and Gaza, with parts of East Jerusalem, the right of return for a limited number of refugees, and compensation up to $30 billion. [You see? Sharon will humiliate the Palestinians by repeating Clinton's offer of a Palestinian state on 95% of the territories! What a diabolical insult! This is the voice of a moderate? Isn't the story supposed to be that Israel never offered 95% of the territories, it was just 'little bantustans', right? Did someone forget to mail this guy his party line talking points? Maybe that's the story for Western consumption; everyone at home understands that this offer was a terrible insult, of course the Israelis must all offer to pack.]
In return the PNA would sign an agreement declaring an end to the state of war with Israel and offer full-recognition to the Jewish state, which would be accompanied by economic deals that would keep the Palestinian economy forever dominated by the Israeli one.
The strings to such an agreement, which led Arafat to reject in 2000 are that the Israelis would continue to have settlements, and would continue to control the border with Jordan. The holy sites in East Jerusalem, which include the Wailing Wall, would remain in the hands of a joint Palestinian-Israeli authority.[Shudder. They dared to proposed joint control of the holy sites. It's an insult]
In addition the time of the Israeli withdrawal from Palestinian territory and East Jerusalem would be left for the Israelis to decide. Gush Shalom, the Israeli peace movement, described the agreement and its proposals as "humiliating." [That's the lovely thing about Israel, you can always find some opposition member somewhere to quote]
The romantic outcome to the bloodbath in Palestine would be for Arafat to appear on the rooftop of his Ramallah compound, and right before the whole world, raise the Palestinian flag and declare the establishment of the State of Palestine. He would denounce the Israeli campaign as invasion of a sovereign state and declare war, along with 21 Arab nations, against the Jewish state. [Arab 'romances' are bloodthirsty, aren't they?]
Hezbollah would declare war from Lebanon and official Arab armies would march into Israel while voluntary Arab forces would be sent to Palestine to protect its people. Syria would retrieve the Golan Heights, Lebanon would retrieve the Shebaa Farms, and the Arabs would occupy all of Jerusalem and hand it over to the Palestinians. [In this happy vision, would there be any Jews left in Palestine at this point?]
Then, all 22 Arab leaders would go to the holy city, as Arafat had long hoped for, and pray side-by-side at Al Aqsa Mosque.
Beautiful as it is, this vision is a dream. As Arab intellectuals, however, the most we can hope for today is that the brave Palestinians are able to benefit from this genocide, just as the Israelis did under Nazi Germany, to market their plight and materialise their aspirations for statehood. [The Arabs can't get enough of the word 'genocide'. Let's see, if the Israelis were really interested in genenocide, don't you think Israel would be "Arab-free" by now? How do you compromise with a mindset that sees compromise as humiliation, but war and conquest as beautiful and proper?]
Sami Moubayed is a Syrian political analyst
gulf-news.com |
