The Old Men of Israel and Palestine must go

The Palestinians quickly found that socially and economically life was unsustainable, and Arafat and the PLO leadership found they did not know how to govern. Basic services were not maintained; soldiers made poor policemen; corruption was rife; poverty endemic. The Arab elites, and their dollars, stayed away. Western welfare support was sporadic, not always welcome and inadequate. The pattern of the history of decolonisation was repeated: the previously oppressed could not manage the peace.

How did Arafat and the PLO handle the deterioration of the embryonic Palestinian state into chaos? They blamed Israel for their failure to cope with the dull yet complex need for effective government to create and sustain order, economic opportunities, and provision of social services. Soon enough, the boys went back to doing what they did best: hating and fighting and killing. The Intifada was proclaimed

This was the context in which, in September 2000, Barak made his offer, which sought to redress the inadequacies of the 1994 Peace Accord. The devil lies in the detail, of which little is known directly. But it seems that Barak saw the chances of success for the Palestinian Authority were slim. A Palestinian State with a capital in Jerusalem was needed, joining together significant territory in which the Palestinian people could live was needed, and their religious ownership of the Temple Mount was needed. This would create the opportunity for the Palestinian people to achieve a sustainable peace, in which they could shape their own future and be self-defining.

And, crucially, it would have enabled Israel to be transformed from oppressor to something more akin, to peace maker. It would remove from the PLO leadership, and the Arab world, the grounds on which to blame Israel for their personal and institutional failures.

It seems it was too big an offer, too much of a challenge, for Arafat to accept. To accept it meant his PLO leadership accepting their own end, not through defeat in war, but through a peace in which the Palestinian people would again be dependent on their own resources, and in which the incompetence of Arafat and his cabinet would be finally exposed.

It seems to me that Arafat and his lieutenants responded to Barak’s offer by choosing their own political survival and their known path of war, rather than the survival of the Palestinian people and the complexities of governing a peace.

Sharon

Sharon, too, is a man of war, not a man of peace. Sharon went to the Temple Mount on September 28^th, 2000, at the time Barak was making his offer, as his way of ensuring that the war would be back on. It was as cynical as it was successful. Arafat uttered his dismay, Barak was dismissed, and that most lauded of the old soldiers, Sharon, was elected.

Sharon, like Arafat, earned his reputation as an army leader. In 1982, when the Israeli army entered Lebanon he was appointed Defence Minister, then, as now, to uproot the PLO. After shelling Beirut, he succeeded, unlike this time, in forcing Arafat into exile in Tunis. Under his watch, and with his agreement, Lebanese Christian militiamen massacred hundreds of civilians in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps, an act many regard as a war crime. An Israeli inquiry found Sharon ‘indirectly responsible’ for the atrocity and, as a result, his political career was regarded as over.

In 1999 he returned to the leadership of Likud, the right wing party he forged in the early 1970’s. Since becoming Prime Minister , Sharon has resumed his life’s work: to invade, to destroy, to kill the enemy he has devoted his entire adult life to destroying. He grasped the Bush inspired ‘war on terror’ as his rationale for the killing of more Palestinians.

Whither the Middle East?

Sharon has had his soldiers razing Palestinian towns with unrestrained ferocity; Arafat has regained glory as the brave general holed up in Ramallah. The Arab world has, once again, rallied to the Palestinians. The US administration is, again, caught in the deeply divisive dilemma, of balancing political imperatives of the American people with its international economic imperatives, this time balancing on the Bush anvil of the ‘war on terror’.

If nothing else is clear, it is this: peace will not be found by Sharon and Arafat brokering a detailed peace accord. The Old Men, it seems to me, must go.

This website provides a remarkably well designed tool for tracking the respective histories, and parallels of these two men.