ONE TIN SOLDIER RIDES AWAY:

The Palestinian morning after (Khaled Abu Toameh, Mar. 20, 2003, Jerusalem Post)

"[US President George W.] Bush insists that the regime change in the Arab world should start in Ramallah," says a senior PA official. "He wants to get rid of all Arab leaders who refuse to dance to American and Israeli music."

Indeed, the US, with the help of the European Union, United Nations and Russia, has already forced Arafat into accepting the idea of sharing his "bedroom" with another Palestinian leader. Palestinians who have worked with Arafat for the past four decades say the move is tantamount to forcing the Palestinian leader to dig his grave with his own hands.

"Bush is trying to bury Arafat alive, and that's not fair," complains one official. "Now, he is trying to bury Saddam Hussein in a more brutal manner. What's going on here? Has the man gone mad?"

Saddam is the only Arab leader whose posters are raised together with those of Arafat during demonstrations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. By all accounts, he is the second most popular Arab leader among the Palestinians after Arafat.

He is admired in the refugee camps and villages mainly because he is the only Arab leader who defied Israel and made good on his promise to launch Scud missiles at Tel Aviv during the first Gulf War. The rest of the Arab leaders are usually condemned for only paying lip service to the Palestinian issue instead of sending their armies to fight Israel.

The Iraqi dictator's popularity skyrocketed during the current intifada when he started paying thousands of dollars to the families of Palestinian victims, including suicide bombers [see box]. Once a week, Saddam's representatives in the tiny Arab Liberation Front hold a ceremony in the Gaza Strip or West Bank to hand out checks to Palestinian families. Hence by losing Saddam, the Palestinians would not only lose a major political and military ally, but a significant financier.

"The downfall of Saddam's regime is going to be a major loss for the Palestinians," says a university lecturer from an-Najah University in Nablus. "It will send home the message that unless Uncle Sam is happy with you, you have no room in this world. This is a very serious matter because it gives Bush the power to decide who's good and who's bad. This applies also to the Palestinians, who will have to choose leaders favored by Bush and [US National Security Adviser] Condoleezza Rice.

"I believe that the defeat of Saddam will only complicate the situation because it will increase bitterness and frustration not only in the Palestinian street, but also throughout the Arab world. The Arabs will go around with the feeling that their dignity has been badly hurt. This creates a strong desire for revenge."

PALESTINIANS HAVE different opinions as to the post-Saddam era. While some believe that Washington is expected to focus its efforts on finding a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, others say that the US would need several more years to rid itself of the quagmire in Baghdad and therefore won't have time for the problems here.

In any case, the Palestinians are fully aware that they would have to play the American card after the war is over. Senior Palestinian officials in Arafat's entourage are openly talking about the possibility that a triumphant Bush, who in their eyes represents an administration that is 100 percent biased toward Israel, would try to impose a solution that only a few Palestinians would accept.

"We have red lines that no Palestinian leader, not even Arafat, can cross," explains a senior official. "These include, first and foremost, the right of return for the refugees and a full withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, including Arab Jerusalem. Any attempt to impose a solution that does not include these factors will be doomed to failure. Even the most moderate Palestinian leader wouldn't dare cross the red lines. An enforced solution would only lead to more anger and violence in the Palestinian street."

It's hard to see how crushing the heroes of radical Islam can possibly be a bad thing. It should help to drive home the idea that Islamicism is an abyssmal failure and has no future. As for imposed statehood, that's the best option available right now, but it's not going to include the right of return nor all of the territory they want. It could though include much of what they're asking including much of Arab Jerusalem and a pullback of Israeli settlements.

MORE:
-Facing reality: There Will Never be a Palestinian Democracy (Barbara Lerner, 3/27/03, National Review)

srael's Natan Sharansky is one of the intellectual godfathers of President Bush's new "democracy first" approach to the Palestinian question. Sharansky's influence is hard to miss. His influence on the views of his countrymen is another matter. Twenty-nine months of suicide bombings, shellings, and machine-gun attacks aimed at civilians have decimated the ranks of Israelis who still believe a Palestinian state could ever be anything other than the same old terror-warriors, with new and more lethal powers. When I interviewed Sharansky in Jerusalem on February 12, his political party had just lost two of its four seats in Israel's 120-member parliament, but his faith that democracy was the answer remained unshaken.

Natan Sharansky has a big Russian soul, but he carries it on a small frame, and slumps in his seat. When I sat at his soon-to-be-vacated desk in Israel's Ministry of Housing and Construction, I had to scrunch down to be at eye-level with him. When I forgot, I would find myself looking instead into the eyes of his mentor, Andrei Sakharov, in a large photo above Sharansky's head. The man once known as Anatoly wants it that way. He believes the principles he and his fellow Soviet freedom fighters went to prison for are universal principles - as real and right in the Middle East as they were and are in what was once the Soviet Union. He also believes that in the terror war, as in the Cold War, appeasing tyrants can never bring lasting peace - only the spread of democracy can. And he believes, too, that democracy is for everyone, that neither Arabs nor Palestinians are exceptions to the rule.

I offer up the Israeli everyman's objection at the outset: Polls show that 80 percent of Palestinians approve of suicide bombings. Anyone they elect will be a murdering thug. "Of course," Sharansky explodes. "It's primitive to think democracy is about elections. It's not. It's about freedom. Freedom is the key." First, he explains, you have to free people from the all-pervasive fear that is the sine qua non of all tyrannies. Give people the freedom to express themselves, to say what they really think, over time - without the fear that government goons will come and get them. That's the start of the democratization process. Elections are at the other end. They come last, after people have experienced what it's like to live free, because that - not elections - is what democracy is about. Once people know freedom, Sharansky argues, they vote to keep it. And because rulers in a democracy can't ignore what majorities vote for if they want to stay in office, they have powerful incentives to respect freedom at home and to pursue peace abroad. For tyrants, the situation is quite different. Freedom is their nemesis, and to negate it they need to demonize enemies, both at home and abroad - justifications for their brutal, suffocating control. [...]

But it's unrealistic, I think, to expect anything like democracy in the southern half of the Middle East any time soon - and a dangerous illusion to expect a Palestinian democracy ever.

-Laundering Abu Mazen: A Holocaust revisionist, a conspiracy theorist, and a promoter of terrorism. (Nissan Ratzlav-Katz, 3/19/03, National Review)

Mahmoud Abbas, known by his nom de guerre Abu Mazen, has been tapped by PLO leader Yasser Arafat to be the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority. Merely the fact that he has been selected by arch-terrorist Arafat to take on the mantle of authority should already give pause to those committed to fighting terrorism. In fact, anyone involved with the corrupt, duplicitous terrorist organization called the PLO - Abu Mazen is the head of its executive committee - should by now be considered unfit to lead anything but a prison-work detail. Beyond his senior position in the PLO, however, Abu Mazen is also a Holocaust revisionist, a conspiracy theorist, and a promoter of terrorism.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 30, 2003 10:03 AM