Posted on 12/24/2004 7:41:21 PM PST by CHARLITE
JERUSALEM -- It was midnight in the West Bank city of Ramallah where the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat spent the final years of his stormy life.
Out of nowhere, a squad of gunmen appeared in Manara Square with an unarmed 20-year old civilian in tow. They stood him up, took aim and opened fire. His bullet-riddled body was discovered at dawn by unfazed pedestrians.
Summary executions are par for the course of the so-called Palestinian Revolution. The victim this time was accused of informing on two members of Hamas and Fatah who were killed by Israeli troops in Betunya, a nearby town.
The Palestinian police, whose West Bank headquarters are in Ramallah, did not intervene when the suspect's death sentence was implemented without a preliminary trial or benefit of a defense attorney.
Nor did they show up in Kabatya, another Palestinian town, where a public execution was carried out a few months beforehand in the presence of a TV crew working for one of the American networks.
Neither of these stories made big news -- not in this country and certainly not abroad. There was a brief mention of the Ramallah shooting on Israel Radio, but not on local TV.
Palestinian editors who knew about it disclosed the details in a whisper lest they be overheard by agents of the local ''mukhabarat'' intelligence services and suffer the consequences of telling an outsider from the international media the gory details.
Besides the tragic aspects of these West Bank facts of life (or is death a better word?), including the deliberate concealment of the victims' names lest they bring shame on their respective families, there are grave political implications.
The Palestinian Authority, which is being touted by Israel's government, the European Union, Russia, the United States and the United Nations as the nucleus of a West Bank-Gaza Strip state, not only is unable or unwilling to uphold the rule of law within its tentative domains, but also lacks the moral stamina to condemn these violations of human rights.
This brings to mind the arrogance and short-sightedness of the world's self-styled diplomats and statesmen who advocate dubious solutions to the problems of nations other than their own -- solutions that fail the test of time and generate new crises for generations to come. President Woodrow Wilson's slogan, ''self-determination for small nations,'' which he used to justify the Allied cause in World War I, is an excellent example.
The peace treaties negotiated after the defeat of the Central Powers (Germany, Austro-Hungary and Turkey's Ottoman Empire) spawned newly invented states designed to accommodate the long-oppressed Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs, Croats, Bosnians and Macedonians. Among them were Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, both inspired by Wilsonian idealism.
Neither of them lasted into the 21st century: Czechoslovakia split into separate Czech and Slovak republics and Yugoslavia disintegrated into Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia-Montenegro and Macedonia (not to mention Kosovo, whose status is yet to be defined).
Can President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair, the West's most outstanding and outspoken proponents of a Palestinian state adjacent to and at peace with Israel, be sure that their political protege will live up to their expectations? Can they be sure that Palestinian nationalism and above all, irridentism (yearning for the terrain that has comprised Israel since 1948) will not transform it into a source of constant friction rather than peaceful coexistence?
Maybe it would be better if they bowed out and let the peoples of the Middle East work out their own problems, albeit by bearing in mind the realities of their respective military capabilities and regional balances of power. That would make more sense than allocating $6 billion to the Palestinian Authority (an idea broached in a New York Times editorial) immediately after the Jan. 9 election of a successor to Arafat on condition that it stamp out terrorism, something it just cannot (or will not) do.
Jay Bushinsky is a free-lance writer based in Israel.
I'd like to know more about the Palestinian "collaborators," what motivates them to risk so much. They must have some guts to do their jobs.
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