Augean Stables

Hattip: Lkrut

Sometimes, when I outline the horrendous contribution of Arab elites to the suffering of their own people, others object: “Oh yeah, but what about what “x” says (where x is a self-critical Jew who takes responsibility for what Israel has done to the Palestinians)?” To which I often respond, “Where is the Arab x?” Fouad Ajami, born to a Shiite family in Lebanon and professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins, represents the finest example of Arab self-criticism. Indeed, unlike the messianic pretensions of Jewish hyper-self-criticism, Ajami manages to articulate in astonishingly measured tones a sane but devastating indictment of the way the Arabs and the “progressive” West have managed to enable the Palestinian to create their nightmare.

Brothers to the Bitter End

By FOUAD AJAMI
Published: NYT, June 19, 2007

SO the masked men of Fatah have the run of the West Bank while the masked men of Hamas have their dominion in Gaza. Some see this as a tolerable situation, maybe even an improvement, envisioning a secularist Fatah-run state living peacefully alongside Israel and a small, radical Gaza hemmed in by Israeli troops. It’s always tempting to look for salvation in disaster, but in this case it’s sheer fantasy.

The Palestinian ruin was a long time in coming. No other national movement has had the indulgence granted the Palestinians over the last half-century, and the results can be seen in the bravado and the senseless violence, in the inability of a people to come to terms with their condition and their needs.

The life of a Palestinian is one of squalor and misery, yet his leaders play the international game as though they were powers. An accommodation with Israel is imperative — if only out of economic self-interest and political necessity — but the Palestinians, in a democratic experiment some 18 months ago, tipped power to a Hamas movement whose very charter is pledged to the destruction of the Jewish state and the imposition of Islamist rule.

The political maxim that people get the leaders they deserve must be reckoned too cruel to apply to the Palestinians. Before Hamas, for four decades, the vainglorious Yasir Arafat refused to tell his people the basic truths of their political life. Amid the debacles, he remained eerily joyous; he circled the globe, offering his people the false sense that they could be spared the consequences of terrible decisions.

In a rare alignment of the universe, there came Mr. Arafat’s way in the late 1990s an American president, Bill Clinton, eager to redeem Palestinian claims and an Israeli soldier-statesman, Ehud Barak, who would offer the Palestinians all that Israeli political traffic could bear and then some.

But it was too much to ask of Mr. Arafat to return to his people with a decent and generous compromise, to bid farewell to the legend that the Palestinians could have it all “from the river to the sea.” It was safer for him to stay with the political myths of his people than to settle down for the more difficult work of statehood and political rescue.

And part of what permitted Arafat to sustain this bizarre elation
even as he guided his people into the abyss, was the tremendous support the Palestinian “liberation” “resistance” against the cruel Israeli occupier. As Amos Har-el put it in The Seventh War: How We Won and How We Lost in the War with the Palestinians [translated from Hebrew]:

One of Arafat’s cabinet members later explained that Arafat didn’t want to stop the conflict because “he thought that the world was on our side and the continuation of the armed struggle would only serve us. At that time Arafat believed that he could control the violence and to use it against Israel.”

Those close to Arafat describe his mood in the first months of the conflict as high, nearly euphoric. The intifada was described in the international media in romantic colors; the international community supported the Palestinian’s struggle; in Arab countries demonstrations of support were held… the Sharm Summit in the middle of October returned Arafat to the center of the world stage after the isolation that was forced upon him when he was blamed for the failure of Camp David.

Such are the wages of folly.

For their part, the Arab states have only compounded the Palestinian misery. The Arab cavalry was always on the way, the Arab treasure was always a day away, and there was thus no need for the Palestinians to pay tribute to necessity. In recent years, the choice was starkly posed: it was either statehood or a starring role on Al Jazeera, and the young “boys of the stones” and their leaders opted for the latter.

After Mr. Arafat’s death, the mantle passed to a fairly decent man, Mahmoud Abbas, a leader for a post-heroic era. He is free of Mr. Arafat’s megalomania, and he seemed keen to cap the volcano; he promised, as he put it, “one law, one authority, one gun” in the Palestinian street. But he has never been a master of his world; by the time he had been given his political stewardship the culture of the Palestinian world had succumbed to a terrifying cult of violence.

It has long been a cherished legend of the Palestinians, and a proud claim, that they would not kill their own, that there would be no fratricide in their world. The cruelty we now see — in both Gaza and the West Bank — bears witness that the Palestinians have run through the consolations that had been there for them in a history of adversity.

It isn’t a pretty choice, that between Hamas and Fatah. Indeed, it was the reign of plunder and arrogance that Fatah imposed during its years of primacy that gave Hamas its power and room for maneuver. We must not overdo the distinction between the “secularism” of Fatah and the Islamism of Hamas. In the cruel streets and refugee camps of the Palestinians, this is really a distinction without a difference.

It is idle to think that Gaza could be written off as a Hamas dominion while Fatah held its own in the towns of the West Bank. The abdication and the anarchy have damaged both Palestinian realms. Nablus in the West Bank is no more amenable to reason than is Gaza; the writ of the pitiless preachers and gunmen is the norm in both places.

There is no way that a normal world could be had in the West Bank while Gaza goes under. There is no magic wand with which this Palestinian world could be healed and taught the virtues of realism and sobriety. No international peacekeeping force can bring order to the deadly streets and alleyways of Gaza. A population armed to the teeth and long in the throes of disorder can’t be pacified by outsiders.

For decades, Arab society granted the Palestinians everything and nothing at the same time. The Arab states built worlds of their own, had their own priorities, dreaded and loathed the Palestinians as outsiders and agitators, but left them to the illusion that Palestine was an all-consuming Arab concern.

Now the Palestinians should know better. The center of Arab politics has shifted from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, a great political windfall has come to the lands of the Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula, vast new wealth due to the recent rises in oil prices, while misery overwhelms the Palestinians. No Arabs wait for Palestine anymore; they have left the Palestinians to the ruin of their own history.

The rise of Hamas in Gaza should concentrate the minds of the custodians of power in the Arab world. Palestine, their old alibi, the cause with which they diverted the attention of their populations from troubles at home, has become a nightmare in its own right. An Arab debt is owed the Palestinians — the gift of truth and candor as well as material help.

Arab poets used to write reverential verse in praise of the boys of the stones and the suicide bombers. Now the poetry has subsided, replaced by a silent recognition of the malady that afflicts the Palestinians. Except among the most bigoted and willful of Arabs, there is growing acknowledgment of the depth of the Palestinian crisis. And aside from a handful of the most romantic of Israelis, there is a recognition in that society, as well, of the malignancy of the national movement a stone’s throw away.

The mainstream in Israel had made its way to a broad acceptance of Palestinian statehood. In the 1990s, Yitzhak Rabin, the soldier who had led its army into acquisition of the West Bank and Gaza in the Six-Day War of 1967, told his people that it was time to partition the land and to accept Palestinian sovereignty. It was an unsentimental peace, to “get Gaza out of Tel Aviv,” as Mr. Rabin put it, but it was peace nonetheless.

In varying degrees, all of Mr. Rabin’s successors accepted this legacy. There was even a current in Israel possessed of a deep curiosity about the Palestinians, a romance of sorts about their ways and folk culture and their connection to the sacred land. All this is stilled. Palestinian society has now gone where no “peace processors” or romantic poets dare tread.

Fouad Ajami, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, is the author of The Foreigner’s Gift: The Americans, the Arabs and the Iraqis in Iraq.

A friend referred to this article as nihilistic. It’s realistic. And we have to start from there, not from the blow-back creating fantasies about how if we just turn on the money spigot aimed in the “right” direction, things will turn around. Any money from the West, means the right to intervene, in education, in media, in the demand that Palestinian society become, like Germany and Japan after WWII, an unarmed state. It might be a blow to their pride, but that seems like an awfully small price to pay when the alternative is destructive madness.