Fiddling while the Middle East burns

Bush's one-sided speech is just the latest chapter in a long history of U.S. ignorance, ill will and condescension toward the Palestinians -- and it's not going to help Israel, either.

By Gary Kamiya

Jun 25, 2002 | George Bush added another chapter to the long history of American ignorance, ill will and condescension toward the Palestinians in his statement about the Mideast crisis on Monday. His plan -- demanding that the Palestinians change their leadership and offering them a provisional state if they do, asking the Israelis to pull out of the occupied territories and stop building settlements -- allows him to say that he is engaged in trying to solve the most dangerous crisis in the world, and it shores up GOP support with two vital constituencies, Jews and right-wing Christians. But it is impossible to believe that anyone knowledgeable in the Bush administration believes that it will bring an end to the vicious ongoing semi-war between Israel and the Palestinians. By embracing Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's position that the whole problem is Arafat, -- while making vague, pleasant-sounding noises about a Palestinian state -- Bush paid obeisance to American political realities, and if the votes he gains have to be paid for in Israeli and Palestinian lives, so be it.

It would be lovely if Bush's fairy tale came true. It would be lovely if the Palestinians denounced suicide bombings and embraced other forms of nonviolent resistance, as Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said recently called for them to do. But national liberation struggles rarely play by Marquess of Queensbury rules. The weird schizophrenia of the Bush administration's position is that it implicitly recognizes that the Palestinians have a just cause -- why else would Bush call for a Palestinian state and use the word "occupation" to describe the Israeli presence in the West Bank and Gaza? -- but denounces the fact that it uses violence to realize that cause. This is the language of the pulpit, not the real world. Yes, suicide bombings against civilians are abhorrent. War itself -- which in the 20th century generally involves the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians -- is abhorrent. But it is not customary for world powers to lecture militant movements about their tactics or leadership while implicitly endorsing their goals: Such lectures are nothing more than moral grandstanding. Attacking Arafat may be a good political move for Bush, but it takes less courage than just about any political posture you can name.

And it will almost certainly have no effect. Forget the fact that it is far from clear that Arafat, and the Palestinian leadership in general, supports the current wave of terror attacks or has the power to stop them. The Bush administration presumably knows that the Palestinians are not going to suddenly elect to throw out the corrupt leadership of the Palestinian Authority and replace it with a bunch of hitherto nonexistent Martin Luther Arafats just because the American president -- whose words and actions have shown him to be a one-note moralist who is ignorant of the issues -- told them to. Even if a full-fledged Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza were the reward, with Israel's borders defined by the consensus international interpretation of U.N. Resolution 242 (i.e., the June 4, 1967, borders, plus or minus a few adjustments), Bush's patronizing demand that the Palestinians carry on their struggle within parameters set by the U.S. would be doomed. And Bush is not even offering that much of a political horizon: His Palestinian entity is so conditional and ill-defined that from the Palestinian perspective, it actually represents a step back from the state envisioned at Camp David and Taba.

Indeed, Bush's heavy-handed demands may actually backfire. For Palestinians who were ready to vote against Arafat, Bush's Israel-centric speech may only cause them to dig in their heels. The Middle East works by concrete, sometimes brutal quid pro quos, not lofty moral epiphanies: When Palestinians see that the U.S. president is prepared to spend some political capital to put pressure on Israel, they will believe that the U.S. is indeed an honest broker and will keep its word -- and then they will be prepared to make painful changes, including bidding farewell to a legendary but thoroughly discredited leader. But why should they make this sacrifice -- which in the shame-based culture of the Arab world amounts to knuckling under to a humiliating demand from a big bully -- without getting anything in return except vague promises to start negotiations at square one with an Israeli leader who has always regarded Palestinians as the enemy?

Make no mistake: The Palestinian people are sick of Arafat and his cronies, whose power-hungry ways, inept administration and failure to achieve Palestinian goals have eroded the respect they once earned for fighting for the Palestinian cause during the long decades when neither Israel nor the United States was willing or able to even recognize that the Palestinians existed. And many of them are also sick of Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians, which beyond their moral repulsiveness have played into Sharon's hands and given the timorous Bush a convenient excuse not to challenge any of "the Bulldozer's" retaliatory actions, no matter how savage. The Palestinians would be better off with different leadership. (So would the Israelis, for that matter.) But the Palestinian struggle is larger and deeper than the abhorrent tactics some of its zealots have embraced. If the president of the United States recognized that, in addition to calling for an end to terrorism, his words might have the moral resonance to reach the Palestinians. As it is, they'll recognize them as P.R.

Next Page: Does Bush really expect a new Palestinian leader to initiate a civil war against his own people?

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