Avi — Threatening to harm ourselves
Topic(s): Palestine / Israel | Comments Off on Avi — Threatening to harm ourselvesThreatening to harm ourselves By Akiva Eldar
The lethal terror attack at Negohot on the eve of
Rosh Hashanah confirmed the forecasts voiced in
holiday interviews. This new year, like the
previous three, apparently will belong to
religious fanatics and other intransigents
rejecting compromise.
Ariel Sharon has announced that
“there is no possibility of
forging a settlement so long as
terror continues, and so long
as the Palestinians fail to
crack down on terror.”
Ehud Barak, Sharon’s predecessor
as prime minister and perhaps
his rival-to-be in the next
national elections, has supported this
position, opining: “Sharon is right when he
says that it would be wrong to move one
millimeter on an a major issue before it is
clear that the Palestinians are doing their
utmost to destroy terror.”
The demand that the Palestinian police succeed
in an effort that has frustrated Israel’s air
force, tank corps, Border Police, and Shin Bet
security service, Sharon knows, is implausible.
Barak understands that no Palestinian
organization for national liberation has put
down its arms in the absence of a guarantee
that the occupation is to be brought to an end.
Barak himself once said in a television
interview that had he been born a Palestinian,
he doubtlessly would have joined militants who
fight Israel.
Up to three years ago, Israel’s government
(under Barak’s leadership) upheld the principle
that Israel ought to pursue the peace process
as though there were no terror, while also
fighting terror as though there were no peace
process. Barak conducted final status
negotiations with Yasser Arafat at a time when
Israelis were murdered in Ramallah and Tul
Karm.
Now Barak supports Sharon’s position that
demands that the Palestinian Authority fight
Hamas as though there were no occupation (as is
required under the road map), but overlooks the
fact that Israel refuses to dismantle illegal
settlement outposts, and freeze settlement
construction (as is also required by the road
map), as though there were no terror. The
Palestinians, Israel’s neighbors, must embark
on a civil war while Israel continues to kill
innocent civilians who have the bad luck of
dwelling in neighborhoods next to “terror
suspects.” Palestinian authorities must
endanger their own lives in a struggle against
their own countrymen, and then return by
nightfall to a village or city which has been
turned into a prison compound by Israel’s
separation fence.
No national movement and no government,
including Israel’s government, would ever agree
to appear to play the role of collaborator with
the conqueror in order to improve the
conqueror’s security situation.
Israeli security officials who are experts on
Palestinian affairs urge that Saeb Erekat’s
analysis be taken seriously – the chief
Palestinian negotiator maintains that in the
absence of any progress on the peace process
(and humanitarian) track, incoming PA Prime
Minister Abu Ala will follow in the footsteps
of his predecessor, Abu Mazen; and armed,
unrestrained, militias will, under this
scenario, replace Abu Ala.
Standing on every available soapbox, Erekat
warns that he himself, and his colleagues in
the PA leadership, would be the first ones to
receive house calls by these armed militia men.
These militants belong to a generation that
came of age during the first intifada; for
them, an Israeli is the soldier who sits atop a
tank, at a roadblock or in an armed group of
security men that frightened his mother in the
middle of the night. As far as these militia
men are concerned, there is no difference
between Sharon and Barak, or between Yossi
Sarid and Effi Eitam. En route to the next
violent attack, they will sneer and laugh about
the threat voiced by Israel’s prime minister –
that there will be no peace agreement so long
as terror persists.
The suicide terrorists apparently have managed
to distort the public’s grasp of what
right-wing, and also opportunistic, politicians
have wrought. A growing segment of the public
takes it to be self evident that the issue
which rivets Israel-U.S. relations is a fence
built against surface-to-air missiles that
might threaten planes landing at Ben-Gurion
International Airport.
Lurking behind this position of ratcheting
conditions for resuming the peace process up to
a level that the Palestinians will never reach
is a dubious, troublesome position – viz, a
peace agreement has become the Palestinians’
interest. Should they behave well, they’ll
receive such an agreement; if they behave
poorly, they won’t. It’s as though our own
lives, our morality, our democracy and our
economy can do without a peace agreement.
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