David Ignatius meets Mideast reality, or, why Oslo was always a pipe dream. "Under War, everything happens" IF the infidel is dying. But when Arabs suffer, as in 1948, no, no, that's totally different. To the Arab mind, "fair" means that Arabs rule. Period.
'Under War, Everything Happens'
By David Ignatius
Friday, June 7, 2002; Page A27
BEIRUT -- Down a dusty alleyway, deep in the maze of the Shiite Muslim suburbs of this city, lies the headquarters of the man some analysts identify as the inventor of the modern suicide bomb, Sheik Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah.
It was Fadlallah who supposedly issued the fatwa, or religious ruling, that encouraged Shiite terrorists to detonate truck bombs outside the U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks in 1983 -- killing hundreds of Americans and beginning the process that soon drove the United States from Lebanon. Those 1983 bombings began a war of terrorism against the United States that arguably continues to this day.
I spoke with the sheik last week during a visit to Beirut. I wanted to know what he thought about the world that has evolved since his famous fatwa -- and what he thinks about the wave of Palestinian suicide bombings now taking place in Israel.
I came away with sincere respect for Fadlallah's intellect and passion; he is one of the few Muslim clerics who recognize that there is an urgent need for Islam to find a better accommodation with the West. And he has a nimble mind, which is evident in the curious eyes and the arched eyebrows that seem to reach almost to his black turban as he listens to questions.
But Fadlallah expressed such a deep and unyielding opposition to Israel -- a state he referred to at one point as "this bizarre situation called Israel" -- that I left his headquarters more pessimistic than ever about the prospects for anything that deserves to be called "peace."
Fadlallah has a reputation among Shiite clerics as something of a modernizer. And he is certainly not a reflexive supporter of terrorism. He was among the first prominent Muslim sheiks to condemn the Sept. 11 suicide attacks against the United States, unequivocally.
"Those [who] committed the attacks yesterday were criminals twice over -- for hijacking planes and for killing their passengers as well as for targeting civil installations and thousands of innocent," Fadlallah said on Sept. 12. In a later interview with a Lebanese magazine, he accused Osama bin Laden of "profiteering from the oppression suffered in the Muslim world."
Fadlallah's willingness to challenge Muslim conventional wisdom was clear in some of his comments to me. He greeted me with the observation that "journalism is more a mission than a craft" -- not the usual meandering pleasantries one encounters in the Arab world. And he went on to say that the Islamic world could use more of the journalist's passion for objectivity. Emotionalism is "a plight that afflicts the East," he said. "Their reality is a mirage, rather than reality itself."
But when the conversation turned to Israel, Fadlallah lost that playful tone. He said he regards the Jewish state as an alien implantation in the Arab world -- a form of "colonialism."
"It is inhuman and uncivilized simply to claim that because you had something 2,000 years ago, you can kick out the people who are living there now," he argued. In other words, as a moral matter, he does not accept Israel's right to exist.
I asked Fadlallah whether he could imagine a peace settlement that would lead him to advise his followers that it was time to stop the killing. Yes, he said. If Israel agreed, say, to the Saudi peace proposal and recognized a Palestinian state, "war is no longer a realistic option and no longer something people should think about," he said.
But in his heart, would Fadlallah accept that Israel had a moral right to exist? It seems clear that he -- and millions of Arabs with him -- would continue to view the Jewish state as immoral and unjust. That's the problem. There is no peace; only truce.
To explain his position, Fadlallah noted that the United States had not gone to war against the Soviet Union during all the decades of the Cold War, but it had not truly accepted the Soviet state's right to exist, either. "Americans did not wage war," he said, "but they did not accept the legitimacy of the Soviet Union."
What about the suicide bombings against Israeli civilians? What would Fadlallah say to me, I asked, if I were an Israeli father who had lost one of his three daughters to a suicide bomber? How would he counsel me?
"I would tell you that the person who killed your daughter is under occupation," Fadlallah said. "You have driven him to desperation. My advice to you would be to join forces with those who want to end the occupation. Then your other two daughters would be safe."
Fadlallah asked me, in return, what I would say to the parents of a child who died at Nagasaki, or to the parents of a child who died during the U.S. bombardment of Afghanistan. "Under war, everything happens," he said. "Because war is war."
Like most other Lebanese I met here, Fadlallah expressed a conviction that the Bush administration could impose a solution to the Palestinian problem, if it only tried harder. "What we want is that when the American president gazes at the Statue of Liberty, he think not of freedom for Americans only," he said. "The Arab in the street believes there is no American policy. It has a stamp: 'Made in Israel.' "
Fadlallah's comments make clear just how difficult the road ahead will be. "Peace" doesn't have meaning in a world where ancient wrongs cannot be forgotten or forgiven. We can hope, at best, for a "cold war" -- in which neither side accepts the other as morally legitimate, perhaps, but the killing stops.
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