Posted on 10/12/2003 6:32:57 AM PDT by SJackson
Reports last week about Yasser Arafat's failing health seem to be of a piece with the condition of his government. With Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei threatening to resign from office only days after assuming it, it is becoming plain that the latest attempt to move the Palestinian Authority away from Arafat without moving Arafat away from the Palestinian Authority has failed.
This is nothing new. With Arafat and the PLO as their sole legitimate representative, the Palestinian people have achieved neither prosperity, nor peace, nor statehood. Ahmed Qurei's plight, like Mahmoud Abbas's, is only a reminder that Arafat would rather hammer at someone else's state than focus on building his own.
Now there is the matter of Arafat's health. It should have gone without saying that at some point Arafat would go. But so much time has been spent debating the avenue of his departure that no real thinking seems to have been given to what will come next. Now that question appears to be upon us.
Israel's options in shaping the post-Arafat "Palestine" are limited. We may yet impose ourselves militarily on the Palestinians in a way that would improve our own security situation and free ordinary Palestinians from the yoke of the terrorist mafias that rule their lives. Such action would strengthen our hand in future negotiations. But it cannot substitute for a political settlement, and there's a limit to what we can do to alter the Palestinian mind-set that fuels this conflict.
The US also has a role to play. In Iraq, US President George W. Bush has a chance to demonstrate to Arabs everywhere exactly what he envisaged for Palestinians in his speech of June 24, 2002: a prosperous, progressive, pluralistic state that respects the rights of its citizens and neighbors equally.
Unfortunately, America's leverage with the Palestinians is severely compromised by the refusal of European leaders to apply pressure on the PA to fight terrorism. Were Jacques Chirac, Chris Patten, Javier Solana, and Gerhard Schroeder to cease indulging PA excuses for its failure to fight terrorism, good progress might be made. But given the EU's track record, that seems unlikely.
Still, it is a mistake to focus too much on what assorted third parties must do for the Palestinians. What is first required in a post-Arafat world is greater political assertiveness by those Palestinians who wish to secure for themselves a decent, progressive, and genuinely self-determining future.
This begins by rejecting failed models of leadership in the Arab and Muslim world. Throughout his eventful career, Arafat has appeared, disappeared, and reappeared in the guise of Nasser the revolutionary, Sadat the peacemaker, and Khomeini the warrior for Islam. By now, most Israelis are convinced that his post-Oslo Sadat act – never convincing in the first place – was a ruse from the start. And few Islamists were ever persuaded by his protestations of piety.
In fact, Arafat remained throughout his career a Nasserist by temperament and ideology. Like Nasser, Arafat cut a figure that was dashing internationally, dangerous regionally, and despotic domestically.
Like Nasser, too, his myth exceeds his achievement by an order of magnitude.
In a post-Arafat world, Palestinians will have to reject this legacy rather than seek an heir for it. But the Palestinians most opposed to the PA are the ones most attracted to the Khomeini model. Unless Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the PA's religious establishment is discredited – not least by being defeated militarily and losing financial support for their social functions – it's a fair bet that the Palestinian future will be a fundamentalist one.
How is a Palestinian Sadat to emerge, then? It belongs not to us, but to the Palestinian people to find him, and it is in their interest, more than ours, that they do so. Arafat's death will not be an occasion for anxiety, but an opportunity to be seized, much like the death of Mao was for China. And nobody here wants a Gang of Four to take his place.
It should be clear to all conservatives by now that the left intends to demonize us. They don't just disagree with us, they hate us. And worse, they want to get other people to hate us.
Places like Free Republic drive the left batty.
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This is the crux of the entire issue. Islam is the millstone that is tied around the necks of most of the middle easterners. It's their religion to be spoilers instead of builders.
Before the Balfour (sp?) Declaration, the land that is now Israel was only populated by a few miserable arabs. That is the state that that land will return to again if moslems have their way with it.
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