Threatening to harm ourselves

[kramadas]

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/344947.html

Threatening to harm ourselves

By Akiva Eldar

The lethal terror attack at Negohot on the eve of

Rosh Hashanah confirmed the forecasts voiced in

holiday interviews. This new year, like the

previous three, apparently will belong to

religious fanatics and other intransigents

rejecting compromise.

Ariel Sharon has announced that

"there is no possibility of

forging a settlement so long as

terror continues, and so long

as the Palestinians fail to

crack down on terror."

Ehud Barak, Sharon's predecessor

as prime minister and perhaps

his rival-to-be in the next

national elections, has supported this

position, opining: "Sharon is right when he

says that it would be wrong to move one

millimeter on an a major issue before it is

clear that the Palestinians are doing their

utmost to destroy terror."

The demand that the Palestinian police succeed

in an effort that has frustrated Israel's air

force, tank corps, Border Police, and Shin Bet

security service, Sharon knows, is implausible.

Barak understands that no Palestinian

organization for national liberation has put

down its arms in the absence of a guarantee

that the occupation is to be brought to an end.

Barak himself once said in a television

interview that had he been born a Palestinian,

he doubtlessly would have joined militants who

fight Israel.

Up to three years ago, Israel's government

(under Barak's leadership) upheld the principle

that Israel ought to pursue the peace process

as though there were no terror, while also

fighting terror as though there were no peace

process. Barak conducted final status

negotiations with Yasser Arafat at a time when

Israelis were murdered in Ramallah and Tul

Karm.

Now Barak supports Sharon's position that

demands that the Palestinian Authority fight

Hamas as though there were no occupation (as is

required under the road map), but overlooks the

fact that Israel refuses to dismantle illegal

settlement outposts, and freeze settlement

construction (as is also required by the road

map), as though there were no terror. The

Palestinians, Israel's neighbors, must embark

on a civil war while Israel continues to kill

innocent civilians who have the bad luck of

dwelling in neighborhoods next to "terror

suspects." Palestinian authorities must

endanger their own lives in a struggle against

their own countrymen, and then return by

nightfall to a village or city which has been

turned into a prison compound by Israel's

separation fence.

No national movement and no government,

including Israel's government, would ever agree

to appear to play the role of collaborator with

the conqueror in order to improve the

conqueror's security situation.

Israeli security officials who are experts on

Palestinian affairs urge that Saeb Erekat's

analysis be taken seriously - the chief

Palestinian negotiator maintains that in the

absence of any progress on the peace process

(and humanitarian) track, incoming PA Prime

Minister Abu Ala will follow in the footsteps

of his predecessor, Abu Mazen; and armed,

unrestrained, militias will, under this

scenario, replace Abu Ala.

Standing on every available soapbox, Erekat

warns that he himself, and his colleagues in

the PA leadership, would be the first ones to

receive house calls by these armed militia men.

These militants belong to a generation that

came of age during the first intifada; for

them, an Israeli is the soldier who sits atop a

tank, at a roadblock or in an armed group of

security men that frightened his mother in the

middle of the night. As far as these militia

men are concerned, there is no difference

between Sharon and Barak, or between Yossi

Sarid and Effi Eitam. En route to the next

violent attack, they will sneer and laugh about

the threat voiced by Israel's prime minister -

that there will be no peace agreement so long

as terror persists.

The suicide terrorists apparently have managed

to distort the public's grasp of what

right-wing, and also opportunistic, politicians

have wrought. A growing segment of the public

takes it to be self evident that the issue

which rivets Israel-U.S. relations is a fence

built against surface-to-air missiles that

might threaten planes landing at Ben-Gurion

International Airport.

Lurking behind this position of ratcheting

conditions for resuming the peace process up to

a level that the Palestinians will never reach

is a dubious, troublesome position - viz, a

peace agreement has become the Palestinians'

interest. Should they behave well, they'll

receive such an agreement; if they behave

poorly, they won't. It's as though our own

lives, our morality, our democracy and our

economy can do without a peace agreement.