Posted on 12/18/2004 12:53:07 PM PST by quidnunc
Perhaps the reason we are reading comparatively less about "Israel/Palestine" lately is that there is so much real news, and so much of it is astounding, and hopeful. The media are allergic to good news, and run from it as from holy water. The greatest single piece of good news was presented as if it were a tragedy — Arafat is gone. As became inmediately evident, he was blocking the only possible way forward to the "two-state solution" that all but the terrorists claim to support.
Abu Mazen — whom we should really start calling by his real name, Mahmoud Abbas — quickly emerged as Arafat's successor, without carnage, at least without much, and looks certain to win the January election, with the withdrawal from it of Marwan Barghouti, a more "charismatic" leader who might well have become another Arafat (as Arafat became another Mufti of Jerusalem). Mr. Barghouti is currently rotting in an Israeli jail for several well-earned life terms.
Mr. Abbas made at least some mark as an appointive prime minister with slight independent powers under the Arafat regime. He was among the soi-disant architects of the Oslo accords, and his reputation as a "moderate" comes from having actually said aloud that the Intifada Arafat launched in 2000 had not proved to be in the interest of the Palestinian people. He bravely and publicly opposed the actions of Arafat's Al Fatah, and protested the "militarization" of the Intifada — by which he meant, the vast arms smuggling that was turning Palestinian society into a terror camp. He correctly guessed that Israel could not be defeated by any imaginable Palestinian military means; and moreover that the days when the armies of Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and Iraq would come to the Palestinians' aid were long gone.
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(Excerpt) Read more at davidwarrenonline.com ...
FYI
We can only hope he is right.
Not much, just the Munich Massacre of the Israeli Olympic athletes in 1972.
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