When the US Sec. of Defense says Israel "cannot sit there and tolerate" suicide bombers, that's a clear green light for retaliatory actions. It hardly backs up your assesment that the Administration is opposing Sharon's actions or blaming him for the violence. In fact, Rice clearly blames Arafat.
I do try to read Arab papers. So few of them are in English and not state controlled. Do you know of any sources for translations from Al Jazeera? I usually read the Jordanian and Lebanese papers.
Here's a view of the Intifada from the Lebanese Daily Star. IMO if Arafat were capable of doing anything as sensible as the author suggests, he would already have a state. Also, the author fudges over the fact that talks broke down not over the return of the refugees to Palestine, but to Israel. But interesting none the less.
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Palestinians shouldn’t get carried away with armed struggle
by Michael Young
Years ago I befriended a most interesting classmate named Hani Haddad. He would frequently describe his days growing up in Baghdad, and his knowledge and curiosity contrasted sharply with the apathy permeating the American University of Beirut’s political science department. He never told me what his father did, no doubt due to his natural reserve. Later I would learn that his father had done quite a lot, for Hani was the son of Wadih Haddad, once the most hunted man in the world.
The Arabic-language weekly Al-Wasat has started publishing a series of articles on Haddad, who headed the foreign operations department of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in the 1970s. One of those interviewed was Hani, who provided a personal perspective on a man of the shadows, long seen by his adversaries as the personification of undiluted evil. Yet as Al-Wasat attempts to argue, Haddad was merely a representative of the Palestinian refugees of 1948, a scion of Safad seeking retribution for a lost homeland.
The intifada has, rather naturally, provoked a resurrection of 1970s Palestinian militancy. This was not the case a few years ago. When Abu Daoud of Munich Olympics notoriety published the first volume of his memoirs in 1999, it was greeted with relative indifference in the Arab world. The prevailing mood was that the book had been written by a has-been. As Palestinian martyrs have accumulated in the past year, however, the cult of armed struggle has returned, with a vengeance.
The irony is that Wadih Haddad, until his death in East Berlin in 1978, was not convinced of the value of Palestinian armed resistance inside the Occupied Territories. That is why he adopted a strategy centering on hijackings and hostage-taking, which served the dual purposes of attracting attention to the Palestinian cause and bringing in ransoms to finance the continuation of the armed struggle.
The scale of the present intifada might well have changed his mind, as it has those of other Palestinian officials who spent decades in exile. However, such a transformation means recognizing the value of the much-maligned Oslo process, which, alone among all previous initiatives, brought Palestinians back home. One wonders whether Haddad would have had the tactical flexibility to accept the advantages offered by Oslo.
Just as the Palestinians have benefited from a return to their land, they are engaged in a battle on that land that is bound, sooner or later, to lead to statehood. However, the inevitability of this equation has been resisted by Israel, and by its allies in the US. It has been a mistake of the Palestinian leadership to not emphasize that the intifada is a military means to a historic, but limited, political end.
The hazy boundary between the Palestinians’ military and political objectives, necessary to unite the contending factions and tendencies in the Palestinian national movement, has provoked an existential fear in the Israelis. As bombs have gone off in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, Israelis have seen the intifada as a first step in their own expulsion. Though the paradox is exotic given past history, if this attitude persists it will delay Israeli acceptance of a truly sovereign and independent Palestinian state.
With the help of the Egyptians and Jordanians, both of whom have their own difficulties with the intifada, Arafat must better emphasize his already declared objectives a state in all of the West Bank and Gaza, a capital in Jerusalem, and the return of refugees to these territories and call for a serious Israeli interlocutor with whom to deal. This also means affirming that the Mitchell plan is unrealistic since its conditions merely delay a long overdue final solution.
This clarity will have three advantages: it will inform the Israelis that the Palestinians are fighting a war of liberation for a limited territory, not all of pre-1948 Palestine. It will satisfy the more radical Palestinian factions by showing them that there can be no compromise on Jerusalem, refugees, and full statehood. And it will put these same factions on notice that aspirations for a state beyond the Green Line are detrimental to Palestinian interests.
If nothing else, Haddad symbolized the mayhem in Palestinian strategy during the 1970s. Indeed it was differences over how the battle must be conducted that separated him from his friend George Habash, who nevertheless remembers Haddad with emotion. The Palestinians have entered the final stretch of national liberation and there is no room for ambiguity. The political end statehood must overcome, and absorb, the increasingly unruly infatuation with armed struggle.
Michael Young writes a weekly column for the Daily Star |
