Mideast armament
The Washington Times
www.washtimes.com
A.M. Rosenthal
Published 8/6/01
With skill, determination and
success, the Palestine movement and its allies have learned to
use versions of democratic tools that give them vastly important
political weapons against Israel. They are used by the
Palestinians every day, around the world.
Israel and other countries that
consider themselves democracies no longer notice or even seem to
care that Yasser Arafat, leader of a terroristic uprising against
one of these democracies, is one of the best-known and admired
men in the world. Compared to the world esteem of those Israeli
leaders who have tried to woo him, he is walking away in their
political pants.
It takes two sides to win or lose a
war which is what the Israeli-Palestinian struggle has been for
more than a half-century. It was not a war for pieces of paper
scratched out over years of negotiation. It was a war for
creation of a new country called Palestine, and the survival of
another nation-building itself in the same region.
The first assumption of democracy
has been that a government must have the support of the majority
of the people. Israelis knew from the beginning that the majority
of Arabs would not want them ever sovereign.
But they believed that with time
the majority of Arabs who decided to remain in the new Israel
would learn to admire its methods of government, its freedoms,
efficiency and consumer abundance. It did not happen.
Israelis also believed the Arabs
who did not remain in Israel, would be helped and absorbed by the
neighboring Arab nations. It did not happen. That would have
helped Israel, which the rulers did not want one bit.
The fury of the Arabs in and out of
Israel against Israel rose, some of it an outgrowth of defeat in
the battles. But when it looked as if the Israeli dream of two
nations in a rose garden might come true, the strength of the
Arab and Muslim apparatus was switched on to use their version of
the democratic instrument tool of informing their people and
foreigners.
Their technique was specialization
concentration on the literally satanic nature of the Jew and
Judaism, and the devil's assignment to befoul and then destroy
Islam and its worshippers. The goal was to broadcast and print
Jew-devil often enough to make it a part of the Israel-Palestine
struggle.
Jews worried, but not enough.
In my four of years reporting from
India and Pakistan I never heard or read an anti-Jewish word.
When I returned there for visits in the '60s onward, I read
anti-Jew filth and saw it on videos. A Hindu extremist party
added Jews to their hate list and Adolf Hitler to their heroes in
a country where in the '50s a man named Cohen was chief of the
Indian Navy.
The sewer flowed even more in
Pakistan, and antagonism could be smelled near the prime minister
of Malaysia -- and in European countries where Palestinian
propaganda operated efficiently.
In the West and Israel itself, the
propaganda against Israel comes often from some members of the
press and government officials, including opposition Israeli
politicians that Ariel Sharon had to take into his coalition a
hard price.
These officials and journalists, in
Israel, America and Europe, have come to believe, or did long
before the current insurrection, that there is no difference
between trying to overthrow and destroy a democracy, as the
Palestine movement is doing, and defending one. This is the
mental distortion called moral equivalency.
Reporters write that violence broke
out in Jerusalem, without specifying it was the Palestinians who
broke it out and was not the cause of insurrection in any case.
Only a few days ago, Ehud Barak,
the former Israeli prime minister who lost his job when Israelis
were sickened by his cornucopia of offered concessions to Mr.
Arafat, which were again refused as not enough, now has the
courage to say Mr. Arafat showed "little evidence" of
negotiating in good faith.
The next day Yossi Beilin, a former
Israeli Cabinet hard-core peacenik under Mr. Barak, demanded
negotiations again, quick. He does not have the courage to say it
would be with Mr. Arafat again. So he names nobody.
For years, I have written that
peace will not come to the Mideast until it opens itself to
democracy within the Arab nations themselves, not perverted
thousands of miles away to damage Israel further. And everywhere
that protecting a free country is considered the same as trying
to kill it, the practice of democracy becomes the practice of
suicide.
A.M. Rosenthal, the former executive editor of the New York Times, is a nationally syndicated columnist.
Copyright © 2001 News World Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.