The Hard Truth
April 3, 2002
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
A terrible disaster is in the making in the Middle East.
What Osama bin Laden failed to achieve on Sept. 11 is now
being unleashed by the Israeli-Palestinian war in the West
Bank: a clash of civilizations.
In the wake of repeated suicide bombings, it is no surprise
that the Israeli Army has gone on the offensive in the West
Bank. Any other nation would have done the same. But Ariel
Sharon's operation will succeed only if it is designed to
make the Israeli-occupied territories safe for Israel to
leave as soon as possible. Israel's goal must be a
withdrawal from these areas captured in the 1967 war;
otherwise it will never know a day's peace, and it will
undermine every legitimate U.S. effort to fight terrorism
around the globe.
What I fear, though, is that Mr. Sharon wants to get rid of
Mr. Arafat in order to keep Israeli West Bank settlements,
not to create the conditions for them to be withdrawn.
President Bush needs to be careful that America doesn't get
sucked into something very dangerous here. Mr. Bush has
rightly condemned Palestinian suicide bombing as beyond the
pale, but he is not making clear that Israel's war against
this terrorism has to be accompanied by a real plan for
getting out of the territories.
Why? Because President Bush, like all the other key
players, doesn't want to face the central dilemma in this
conflict - which is that while Israel must get out of the
West Bank and Gaza, the Palestinians cannot, at this
moment, be trusted to run those territories on their own,
without making them a base of future operations against
Israel. That means some outside power has to come in to
secure the borders, and the only trusted powers would be
the U.S. or NATO.
Palestinians who use suicide bombers to blow up Israelis at
a Passover meal and then declare "Just end the occupation
and everything will be fine" are not believable. No Israeli
in his right mind would trust Yasir Arafat, who has used
suicide bombers when it suited his purposes, not to do the
same thing if he got the West Bank back and some of his
people started demanding Tel Aviv.
"The only solution is a new U.N. mandate for U.S. and NATO
troops to supervise the gradual emergence of a Palestinian
state - after a phased Israeli withdrawal - and then to
control its borders," says the Middle East expert Stephen
P. Cohen.
People say that U.S. troops there would be shot at like
U.S. troops in Beirut. I disagree. U.S. troops that are the
midwife of a Palestinian state and supervise a return of
Muslim sovereignty over the holy mosques in Jerusalem would
be the key to solving all the contradictions of U.S. policy
in the Middle East, not new targets.
The Arab leaders don't want to face this hard fact either,
because most are illegitimate, unelected autocrats who are
afraid of ever speaking the truth in public to the
Palestinians. The Arab leaders are as disingenuous as Mr.
Sharon; he says ending "terrorism" alone will bring peace
to the occupied territories, and the Arab leaders say
ending "the occupation" alone will end all terrorism.
Like Mr. Sharon, the Arab leaders need to face facts - that
while the occupation needs to end, they independently need
to address issues like suicide terrorism in the name of
Islam. As Malaysia's prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad,
courageously just declared about suicide bombing: "Bitter
and angry though we may be, we must demonstrate to the
world that Muslims are rational people when fighting for
our rights, and do not resort to acts of terror."
If Arab leaders have only the moral courage to draw lines
around Israel's behavior, but no moral courage to decry the
utterly corrupt and inept Palestinian leadership, or the
depravity of suicide bombers in the name of Islam, then
we're going nowhere.
The other people who have not wanted to face facts are the
feckless American Jewish leaders, fundamentalist Christians
and neoconservatives who together have helped make it
impossible for anyone in the U.S. administration to talk
seriously about halting Israeli settlement-building without
being accused of being anti-Israel. Their collaboration has
helped prolong a colonial Israeli occupation that now
threatens the entire Zionist enterprise.
So there you have it. Either leaders of good will get
together and acknowledge that Israel can't stay in the
territories but can't just pick up and leave, without a
U.S.-NATO force helping Palestinians oversee their state,
or Osama wins - and the war of civilizations will be coming
to a theater near you.
nytimes.com |
