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Politics : Foreign Policy Discussion Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (1935)	1/9/2003 7:41:12 AM
From: zonder	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 15987

a culture of violent evil in which civilians blow both themselves and other civilians up.. Are you suggesting there is no motive, no aim, etc for the suicide attacks and hence it is a cultural phenomenon that cannot be understood in rational terms but is "evil"? It's about a perceiving one culture's worship of life as a military weakness to be exploited by their becoming worshippers of death... I think you are being a bit dramatic in this whole "This side is good, that side is evil. This side worships life, the other side worships death" thing. Here's an excerpt from today's IHT: ---------------------------------------- Yet some time ago Palestinians did travel to London, where they attended a joint seminar with Israelis. Retired Admiral Ami Ayalon, one of the Israeli participants and a former head of the Israeli General Security Services, had an unusual exchange with one of the Palestinians, Dr. Eyad Sarraj. During a coffee break, Sarraj casually told him about the mood prevailing among Palestinians. "Today," he said, "they feel that in the struggle with the Israelis, they finally have the upper hand." . Ayalon was stunned. The upper hand? How come, when the Palestinians have suffered so many casualties, their economy has been ruined and their dream of a Palestinian state seems more remote than ever? Sarraj explained that indeed the Palestinians have suffered a lot, and have already lost all hope. Consequently, more suffering doesn't really matter. Yet they have discovered a way to cause pain and suffering for Israelis, and that is now the most important thing for them. They have found the ultimate response to Israel's superiority: "Israel has F-16 jet planes. The Palestinians have suicide bombers." . Sarraj is worth listening to. Besides being a human rights activist, this psychiatrist, who heads the Gaza Community Mental Health Program, has been closely monitoring the pulse of Palestinians for a long time. Back in the summer of 1987, just prior to the first ntifada, he told Thomas Friedman, then the New York Times correspondent in Israel, how a boy had come to his clinic with a "solution" for the problems of the Palestinians: "We must each kill just one Israeli." He asked the doctor whether he could get him a bomb. Sarraj, believing that the boy was psychotic, decided to examine him. He found him perfectly normal. In an interview he gave to the Journal of Palestinian Studies this summer, Sarraj described how the children of the first intifada became the suicide bombers of today, and how a new generation is now ready to follow in their footsteps. "If you ask a child in Gaza today what he wants to be when he grows up, he doesn't say that he wants to be a doctor or a soldier or an engineer. He says he wants to be a martyr." . Ayalon came back from London convinced that something must be done to dissuade the Palestinians from going on ruining their lives and the lives of Israelis forever with this destructive pattern. He believes that the way to do it is by recreating an environment of hope, in which Palestinians will have a lot to gain if they follow the path of peace, and a lot to lose if they choose to pursue terror. . His model is the first 10 months of 2000, when a peace process was going on and only one Israeli was killed in terrorist attack. The reason for that calm? The Palestinians had hopes then, and therefore rejected the attempts of radicals to destroy the peace process by terror. . Today the majority of Palestinians support suicide bombings even while knowing perfectly well that they backfire on them. Back then, they approved the efforts of the Palestinian security services to curtail terrorism. iht.com ------------------------------------------------ In my humble opinion, it is neither realistic nor helpful to follow this "religious" rhetoric of "good vs evil". We need to solve the problem at its root, and classifying whole nations of people as "culture of violent evil" overlooks some very important issues - issues like incessant suffering and lack of hope.