RAGE AND REASON
by DAVID REMNICK
The New Yorker
Issue of 2002-05-06
Will anyone listen to the P.L.O.'s voice of restraint?
<<...Sari Nusseibeh, the Palestine Liberation Organization's chief representative in Jerusalem, is perhaps the most moderate adviser in the councils of Yasir Arafat. (He is no doubt the only one to have worked on a kibbutz or to have written a graduate-school essay at Harvard on Wittgenstein and the role of jokes in philosophical discourse.) On many issues of moment within the Palestinian hierarchy—the morality of suicide bombings, the wisdom of Arafat's rejection of the Israeli offers at Camp David and at Taba, the refugees' demand for the "right of return" to historical Palestine—Nusseibeh disagrees, publicly and in all languages, with the hard men of the P.L.O. and Hamas, and even with Arafat (to the extent that Arafat reveals himself). To him, "martyr operations" are blatantly "immoral," the flat rejection of the Israeli proposals a "major missed opportunity," and the right of return a painful delusion best forgotten. It is not obvious why Arafat, who craves the support and supposed authenticity of the maximalists of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, appointed a mild man in corduroy and tweed to run the East Jerusalem portfolio. As a scholar and as the scion of a distinguished family, Nusseibeh wields about as much street credibility in the refugee camps of Nablus as a duke among the sansculottes. He has no muscle to offer Arafat, no immediate value, except, perhaps, as an ornament of democracy where democracy hardly exists. There is no argument to be made for Nusseibeh's power—unless one happens to believe in the power of restraint and rational thought...>>
[IMO, this is a must read article from the current issue of The New Yorker...It contains some fascinating insights]
Here's a link to the full article...
newyorker.com |
