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Jewish World Review
August 1, 2005
/ 25 Tamuz, 5765
Condi's blurred vision
By
Martin Peretz
In praising Mahmoud Abbas, Condoleezza Rice showed how little she understands the Palestinian Authority
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Condoleezza Rice rushed to Jerusalem and Ramallah on what she is likely to have imagined as a rescue mission for the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. If that was truly her motive, she need not have bothered. Ariel Sharon has mainstream Israel solidly behind him, and a parliamentary majority has voted for withdrawal no less than four times. Sharon long ago determined that Gaza was a dead end for the country, what with the particularly daunting demographic ratio (1.3 million Arabs to 9,000 Jews, this number itself being the biggest failure of the settler movement) and the human price the army would have to pay to defend an agrarian idyll that some confused with biblical prophecy and national destiny. Israel would depart whatever the circumstances.
Still, even if the reason for her panic was misplaced, Rice's sudden presence was certainly needed if only to prop up the designated receiving end of the disengagement equation. After all, Palestinians were shooting one another on the streets of Gaza, where Hamas has staggering gun-toting superiority. But it is doubtful that her coyly supportive appearance in the Muqata, Yasir Arafat's old haunts far from the historic squalor of the Strip, will do the trick for Mahmoud Abbas for long.
It is true that much of diplomacy is stage drama, which is why it doesn't change realities. In any case, the secretary of state's description of what was happening on Palestinian ground was so patently not true that almost no one, neither in Israel nor in long-emerging Palestine, could possibly believe that what she said was anything other than fantasy. Maybe the European Union will take Rice's pleasing appraisal of the behavior of the Palestinian Authority as an accurate assessment, but EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana's constituents do not have a record of reliable judgment on these matters. Moreover, the recent eruption of Islamic terrorism in London, and even Jacques Chirac's troubles at home, seem somehow to have alerted much of Europe to the perils of misunderstanding such matters of life and death.
So, despite what the American secretary of state said on Saturday in praise of the Abbas government's efforts at establishing the rule of law in the West Bank and Gaza, the Palestinians see that she was not describing their reality. They know that Jews within and just beyond Gaza are targeted by rockets, mortar shells, and simple bullets every day. Sometimes these kill, sometimes they only maim or injure (and often they are so off the mark to make it all a bit comical). And an increasing number of suicide bombers are being stopped by Israeli security forces. But, just before Rice took a break from the tiresome Israeli and Palestinian positioning — and went to Beirut to buck up the newly formed Lebanese government (which, for the first time in history, reserved a cabinet position for Hezbollah, even as the United Nations insists that it disarm) — two events occurred within hours of each other that illuminate the moral swill that defines the Abbas moment in Palestinian history.
First, an innocent Palestinian child was murdered and a fantastic tale was spun around the atrocity. The fact was that a 12-year-old boy was stabbed several times in one of those family honor feuds that so elevate Palestinian society. But family members and PA authorities, including the Ministry of the Interior in official statements, blamed the killing on Jewish settlers. Second, rockets aimed at a Gaza Jewish settlement fell far short of their target and killed a 10-year-old Palestinian boy in the Khan Yunis slum instead. No doubt, the hapless youngster has by now been proclaimed a martyr. These are the usual compensations in the Arab world for friendly fire.
On Saturday, after Rice had finished her visit with Abbas in Ramallah, another atrocity occurred in Gaza. A Jerusalem couple was killed on their way back from visiting a family preparing to leave its home in Gush Katif. Others in their party were wounded. Who were the perpetrators of these crimes? Well, yes, members of Islamic Jihad were involved. But primary credit in Gaza was taken by, and given to, the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade of Fatah, Abbas's organization. So this was not a good weekend for Rice to discover so many omens of peace. Were it not for the Sharm El Sheik enormity (attributed to the Zionists on Al Jazeera and even in the Egyptian press), the biggest news would have been the arrest in Israel of an 18-year-old Gaza youth — with five kilograms of explosives in his body belt — on his way with an accomplice, arrested in mixed Arab-Jewish Jaffa, to downtown Tel Aviv, for which he planned a lethal extravaganza. It turns out that he, too, is not one of the frenzied pious, just a member of Abbas's old establishment white-pita Fatah militia. And this is barely 72 hours in the annals of Israel's terrorism, much of it is so quotidian that it doesn't even make the evening news.
Israel knows that it will have to live with these failures that are less of skill than of will. And Sharon is obviously eager not to contradict the architect of U.S. foreign policy upon whom he and his entire country rely. But something interesting has now happened in Israeli society: The extremes have collapsed. At one end, the peace movement has more or less expired, a decline that has been in process ever since Arafat refused Bill Clinton's sweetheart deal for just about everything in the last days of his presidency. The fact is that almost no one in Israeli politics — except for the dreamful Shimon Peres, who is certain that he already lives in the "new Middle East" — talks anymore about a comprehensive peace settlement with the Palestinians. And, at the other end, the territorialist millennium is also coming to a close. The pathetic failure of last week's demonstrations against the government's insistence on leaving Gaza deflated, in two or three days, the Greater Israel movement of some three decades. Nearly everybody, even on the Israeli far right, now grasps that Israel cannot sit on the Arabs of the West Bank forever. So Israel will decide where the lines will be drawn, and it will cut as little as possible into densely populated Arab regions of a territorially contiguous cartography. Concentrated Arab population centers in Israel that abut the new Palestinian state may be easily transferred from one national jurisdiction to another, with compensation from the Israeli social system following their present recipients for decades and beyond. This is not "population transfer," it is pragmatism: the ceding of what are actually Palestinian towns cleaving to Palestine.
Still, Rice's remarks about the day after the Gaza disengagement demonstrate that she has hardly grasped the new realities. Nothing in the experience of Gaza or the West Bank should have permitted her to move blithely into talking about the U.S. commitment to "the connectivity" of the two areas.
Under any design at the present moment, this would inevitably be a link between two lively centers of terrorism. The Palestinian Authority has, for years, been promising to smother the terrorist ranks in would-be Palestine; but whatever progress has been made in this regard is the work not of Palestinians, but of Israelis and their targeted assassinations, checkpoints, and defensive barriers, some of which are admittedly kind of ugly. Rice hopes that Gaza "cannot be a sealed or isolated area, with the Palestinian people closed in." So the demand has grown already — supported by the secretary — that a modern port be built in Gaza and the Gaza airport reopened. But who will guarantee that these facelifts will not quickly turn out to be transfer points for deadly weapons? Shall we, perhaps, devolve this responsibility on the United Nations? Rice's vision is ingenuous and premature.
The Palestinians have a history as true pioneers in the great terrorist bane of our times, and they are still stars in the terrorist firmament. There is only one way they can earn their sovereign independence, and it is by ceasing to imperil their neighbor.
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JWR contributor Martin Peretz
is editor-in-chief and chairman of The New Republic. Comment by clicking here.
© 2005, Martin Peretz
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