AUSTIN -- Since we have declared war on a noun, we are now by
definition in the definition business. The shortest version of our
definitional problem, as we see in attacks from India to Israel, is that one
man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
Lewis Lapham, the editor of Harper's, writes in a scathing
essay, "We might as well be sending the 101st Airborne Division to conquer
lust, annihilate greed, capture the sin of pride." Since President Bush has
given us his own somewhat exuberant definition -- "We go forth to defend
freedom, and all that is good and just in the world" -- we can only hope
there will be no further mission creep.
Hendrik Hertzberg, in a New Yorker essay, makes the useful point
that while Israelis kill Palestinians and Palestinians kill Israelis, it is
wrong to imply moral equivalence: "Innocent Palestinian civilians, including
children, have indeed been killed, often carelessly, and that is bad enough.
But they have not been 'targeted.' For Hamas and Islamic Jihad, however, the
killing of innocent Israeli civilians, including children, is deliberate,
premeditated and desired." While I doubt the distinction is of much
consolation to the mothers of children who end up as collateral damage, it's
certainly worth making.
In yet another essay (lots to read these days), Robert Friedman
reminds us in The Nation, "In the 1980s, a messianic Jewish underground,
which staged bombing attacks on democratically elected Palestinian West Bank
mayors and machine-gunned Palestinian students who were eating their lunch
at Hebron University, was caught planning to blow up the Muslim holy sites
and replace them with the Third Jewish Temple." It 's quite possible those
folks were encouraged by the fact that the then-prime minister of Israel was
Menachem Begin, himself a one-time terrorist. Definitionally speaking, we
probably need a separate category for terrorists who become prime ministers.
All this is by way of backing into a discussion of the current
mess in the Middle East and our role there. Perhaps the most important thing
to remember about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was flatly stated by
George Mitchell on a Sunday chat show: "There is no military solution."
As all good mothers know, the first step is to get the kids to
stop hitting each other. That's the ceasefire, the separation of the
combatants -- and if it takes putting in an international force, that's what
it takes. Then we can move on to the real problems.
President Clinton had the two sides so close to a settlement
summer a year ago, we know this can be done. It is a doable deal. In the
American press, Yasir Arafat took full blame for letting that deal get away,
although some were given pause when they saw the proposed map, which did
have an unfortunate resemblance to bantustans.
And that's the real problem: The map was drawn that way to
protect the settlers on the West Bank. The settlers will have to be gotten
off the West Bank. Actually, that's what you negotiate -- how many stay and
where. It was crazy to ever let them build to begin with, it's been a bad
idea ever since, and it gets worse every day.
Since some of the settlers are among the most obdurate of
Israelis -- indeed, a few of them fit the definition of terrorist -- this
will not be easy or pleasant. We begin, naturally, by buying them out. If
all it takes is money -- and that assumption is optimistic to the point of
idiocy -- we should pony up and count ourselves lucky to pay.
The next question is: Is this remotely possible with Ariel
Sharon in office? Well, we'll have to find out, won't we? We have leverage
with Israel, and we have to use it. Nothing unites warring parties like
getting both sides mad at us -- the old common-enemy trick works every time.
There's little point in going into Sharon's history, but I do
think it is disingenuous for uncritical supporters of Israel to write about
this second round of the Intifada as though it had broken out spontaneously,
like hives, and not mention that it was Sharon who deliberately touched it
off.
His famous visit to the Temple Mount in the fall of last year
was a deliberate provocation that had precisely the effect he intended -- it
blew the lid off. The main problem with Sharon's policies is not that they
don't work, but that they make everything so much worse.
Not that anyone ever claimed Arafat was a prize. The United
States has no alternative but to force a solution. This awful situation is
so dangerous it is insane to let it continue. If we think we can step
briskly around the Arab world, rounding up Al Qaeda in the middle of all
this, we're nuts. We'll get every friend we've got there overthrown.
To find out more about Molly Ivins and read features by other
Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web
page at
www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2001 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
