George W. Sadat

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN   

            
    
    
o Colin Powell goes out to the Middle East and tries to stop the killing and 
what happens? Let's see, first he gets embarrassed by the boy king of 
Morocco. Then he arrives in Israel to be greeted by editorials in the 
hysterical Jerusalem Post about how his mission is "doomed to failure" 
because he doesn't see things exactly like Ariel Sharon and some of the 
right-wing maniacs in his cabinet do. Even before Mr. Powell arrives in 
Jerusalem he is treated to the news that Yasir Arafat's wife, Suha, has 
declared (from her luxury bunker in Paris) that had she had a son she would 
have been happy to see him "martyred" for Palestine, and the news that the 
Palestinian who recently blew herself up in a Jerusalem supermarket was a 
mere teenager. I have a teenage daughter. There is no teenager capable of 
making the political decision to commit suicide. You can bet it was older men 
who encouraged her to do this and who wrapped her in dynamite. That is not 
martyrdom, that is ritual sacrifice. 

Do they know how twisted all this looks to the rest of the world?

There is only one positive thing about this moment, when all boundaries of 
civilized behavior have been breached: It may have created an opportunity, 
which I hope President Bush will seize.

Here's what I mean: Mr. Arafat and his boys, by cynically employing suicide 
bombers, have proved that they can unsettle the Israeli public more than any 
Arab army has in 50 years — by sacrificing Palestinian kids. In doing so, 
though, they have punctured the last myths of the Israeli right that somehow 
Palestinians would reconcile themselves to Israeli settlements, or that with 
enough force Palestinians could be cowed into accepting any Israeli terms.

At the same time, Israel, under Mr. Sharon, has counter-punctured the fantasy 
that was taking wing among Palestinians that through suicide bombing they 
might finally have found the weapon to drive the Jews out of the Middle East. 
By mercilessly going after the perpetrators of suicide bombing in the West 
Bank, even when they were hiding among Palestinian civilians, Mr. Sharon 
should have ended any illusions that Palestinians can terrorize the Jews into 
fleeing without being terrorized themselves.

The Arab leaders have been taught a lesson, too. For decades they have used 
the Palestinian cause to buttress their own legitimacy or to deflect 
attention from their own failures. But in the old days, they could regulate 
how their own people saw the conflict through their state-controlled media. 
No more. This is the cyber-intifada in the age of globalization. Thanks to 
independent Arab satellite TV beaming images from Palestine to Arab youths 24 
hours a day, and thanks to the Internet, which allows those youths to tell 
each other exactly how they feel about those images, the Arab regimes are 
losing their grip on public opinion. No, these regimes will not be toppled 
tomorrow, but they are being shaken, and their economies devastated by 
fleeing investors. 

Finally, this unrestrained explosion of Palestinian-Israeli violence has 
taught the Bush team something as well: As much as they prefer to ignore this 
conflict, they can't, and if they try it will undermine their global war on 
terrorism.

All this adds up to an opportunity, not unlike the one that arose after Egypt 
crossed the Suez Canal in 1973 and punctured Israel's sense of 
invulnerability, and then Israel, led by Ariel Sharon's tanks, crossed the 
canal into Egypt, grabbed Egypt's army by the throat, and made clear that 
Egypt was just as vulnerable. 

This is not a time for some two-bit international conference. The U.S. and 
the Soviets tried that after the 1973 war, and Anwar el-Sadat, realizing it 
was a waste of time, decided instead to go to Jerusalem and put everything on 
the table. Mr. Bush has to do the same right now. He has to be the Anwar 
el-Sadat of this moment, because no one else will be. That means laying down 
a clear American peace plan calling for a new U.N. mandate for the West Bank 
and Gaza to develop a new Palestinian Authority capable of ruling those 
areas; a phased withdrawal of Israeli troops, à la the Clinton plan; and U.S. 
or NATO forces to cement the deal.

I believe one of Don Rumsfeld's Washington rules is: If you have a problem 
and you can't solve it, enlarge it. Either we now go all the way toward peace 
and demand that every party step up to it — Palestinians, Israelis and Arabs —
 or they will keep going all the way the other way, blowing out one 
civilizational barrier after another until their war touches us. 


    
    

 

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