Israel and the Palestinians / It should have been so simple economist.com
[ Just because I happen to be at the site, I got to note this background article from a couple weeks ago. Since "the Economist has never been friendly to Zionism" (Tm Nadine) , I'm sure the parts that cut the wrong way can be easily dismissed. But here's what they say anyway. Excerpt : ]
After seven years of spiralling down snakes and clambering back up ladders, a final agreement seemed within touch. This would have split the land of the old mandate, giving the Palestinians most of the West Bank and Gaza (which together account for only 22% of the old mandate). The remaining differences between the two sides were tricky but not insuperable, given goodwill and time.
But elections were looming, and the Americans and Israelis were in a hurry. Mr Barak was prepared to concede more than any Israeli leader before him, but held back from making his offer firm. Mr Arafat, instead of showing bold leadership, listened to public opinion at home and dithered. Both teams, in the end, were ham-handed, dropping a uniquely precious ball, and the region was plunged into a bleakness that still prevails.
A second, but this time wholly misbegotten, Palestinian uprising then broke out. The first outbreaks rose from spontaneous frustration, but the revolt gathered speed without ever acquiring an aim. Senseless killing inflamed senseless killing; the current intifada has turned out to be quite extraordinarily self-destructive.
Politically, it shattered Israeli trust, destroying, in the blink of an eye, the gains painfully gathered.The popular Israeli refrain—“We gave the Palestinians land and they replied with bullets”—is a crude simplification, but it is how the Israelis feel. Militarily, the intifada gave Mr Sharon, by then Mr Barak's successor, a pretext for crushing the life out of all the central Palestinian institutions and locking the Palestinian people into what amount to detention camps in their towns and villages. And as Palestinian suicide bombers ply their dreadful trade, the Palestinian cause falters in the western world. |
