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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (101291)	6/12/2003 5:59:29 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Here is my prediction from this afternoon, which I PM'd to michael, who asked for my predictions: I don't know, mike. Somebody has to go after Hamas, that's all I know. Last night I heard an unusual thing - an Israeli commentator allowed to speak at length on the BBC. It was Shlomo Ben-Ami, Ehud Barak's foreign minister. When I heard the BBC announcer say warningly before the tape, "remember, he's a fierce critic of Ariel Sharon," I knew that Ben-Ami was going to say something sensible and very far from the BBC's usual line of twaddle on Israel. Ben-Ami said several things, first that the road map was useless because it repeated Oslo's mistakes "and you don't build trust by making peace, you make peace first and then you build trust". Then he repeated several times that you cannot negotiate with Hamas, you have to fight them. Third, he said negotiations were hopeless because in 2000, he & Barak had essentially retreated to the Green Line, offered to divide Jerusalem, and ceded control of the Temple Mount - and it still wasn't enough. Would Sharon ever go that far, let alone farther? never! Ben-Ami thought that you had to impose a peace at this point, and suggested NATO troops. I say, that would either be subcontracting Israel's security to NATO, or, more likely, providing Hamas with a fine bunch of human shields. Let's see if we can get the NATO troops and the IDF shooting at each other! What fun! The sad truth is that if one side doesn't want peace, there won't be peace, and Hamas, PIJ, Al Aqsa don't want peace. Now if Abu Mazen was what everybody pretends he is, a real PM with a political base, and a government to control, and the will to subdue the militants, it might be different, but it's not. The roadmap is useless. Either the situation will go on in low-grade war until something changes, or there will be a conflagration and Israel will go into Gaza as they went into the West Bank, with higher casualties all around.