When Palestinians have no hope 

By James A. Goldborough

The measure of the failure of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is this: The Palestinians are stronger today than they ever have been. 
It is strange to think that these bedraggled people, living in squalid refugee camps under the gun muzzles of Israeli tanks, could be gaining in strength, but it is a fact. The dynamic of this awful conflict has changed dramatically in a single year. 

The Palestinian strength grows from evidence that an entire generation is ready to die for the cause. And another generation is ready to follow, for the Palestinian birth rate and population under 5 years old are twice that of Israel. 

Warfare by collective immolation is not something that can be defeated by a conventional army. When Benjamin Netanyahu, Sharon's critic on the right, calls for "complete military victory," he can only be thinking of re-occupation of all the West Bank and Gaza, the bankrupt policy Israel abandoned a decade ago. 

The Bush administration has much to answer for in the Middle East collapse. Bush blamed Clinton for being too involved in the Middle East, and so decided to do nothing. Sept. 11 is no excuse for the failure, for Bush did little before that date to deal with the Palestinian powder keg. 

Carte blanche was given to Sharon to "fight terrorism," with the results we see today. Obsessed with Iraq, Bush failed to see that the real threat to U.S. security lay in the festering Palestinian problem and its potential to radicalize the entire Middle East. 

The most perverse result of Bush fecklessness and Sharon's intransigence has been the creation of a generation of Palestinian martyrs. Israelis, like most people, don't want to die. Dealing with people who want  to die, who regard dying as better than living, is not easy. 

Short of killing them all, the only solution is to help them want to live, which Sharon has no desire to do. 

All nations worry about fanaticism these days - America more than most. But the Palestinian bombers are not just fanatics. The Sept. 11 bombers were recruits to al-Qaeda, brain-washed Muslim killers with only dim understanding of why they were doing what they were programmed to do. 

The Palestinian martyrs are everybody - girls from nice families, middle-aged fathers, peaceful bus drivers, young people living at home and unconnected to radical fundamentalism or international cells such as al-Qaeda. They appear willing to die for a simple reason: their lives are hopeless. 

Most people grow up with hope. Young Israelis, like young Americans or - because of Sept. 11 - even young Afghans, grow up with hopes for an education, a job, a house, a family. Hope is what life is all about. 

Try to imagine what it is like to have no hope. For Americans, the only point of reference would be slavery. Slaves could not own property, marry, travel, earn money, learn to read or write, become free. Slaves had no hope. They worked until they dropped. Slavery created America's great tragedy, the civil war. Cousin fought against cousin to give slaves hope. 

The Palestinian generation of martyrs has no hope. I have been in their camps, seen how they live. Young Palestinians are born, raised and die in those camps. The camps are their prisons. Is it any surprise they regard death as liberation? Who wouldn't? 

The camps bred Intifada I, which began in 1986 and led to the Oslo peace process. Israel's great leader of the time, Yitzhak Rabin, murdered by a Jewish fanatic, understood the hopelessness of the Palestinians. 

Oslo, directed by Clinton, got close to success at Camp David in July 2000. But it failed. 

Each side today blames the other for the failure. Robert Malley, at Camp David as a member of Clinton's National Security Council staff, spreads the blame equally. He writes: "The mutual and deeply entrenched suspicion meant that Barak would conceal his final proposals, the "endgame," until Arafat had moved, and that Arafat would not move until he could see the endgame." 

But all was not lost. The two sides met again in January 2001, in Taba, Egypt, and says Malley, "produced more progress and more hope." 

But it was too late. Sharon, who for the Palestinians symbolizes the end of hope, set off Intifada II on Sept. 28, 2000, by visiting the Temple Mount. 

"For Barak to have allowed Sharon to go there," writes Avishai Margalit, Schulman professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, "escorted by hundreds of armed Israeli policemen, showed the worst possible political judgment." 

For Sharon it worked to perfection. Palestinians were soon dying by the hundreds and Israelis by the dozens. Sharon easily beat Barak in elections a year ago by promising to restore the security he himself had destroyed. 

Sharon's failure can be seen in what his year in office has brought. For Israelis, there is no security anywhere, not on streets or buses, in cafes or malls. Death is everywhere. A generation of Palestinians without hope is robbing Israelis of their hope. 

Only through creation of a viable Palestinian state, where young Arabs can learn that living is better than dying, will the killing stop. 

  

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