Tilting at Windmills: False Whoops Senior Screeners Amorous Profs Palm Trees in Jalalabad Canned Peas in Cameroon

Washington Monthly, Jan-Feb, 2002 by Charles Peters

ARIEL SHARON DOES NOT APPEAR to be the wisest leader Israel could have at this crucial moment. He tells Arafat to restore law and order on the West Bank, and then proceeds to blow up one Palestinian police station after another. As David Ignatius, a Monthly alumnus who later reported on the Middle East for several years, points out in The Washington Post, Sharon is the architect of past disasters in which his tough-guy policies have only inflamed the Arabs.

His order to Arafat to crack down on Hamas ignores the fact that Hamas, thanks at least in part to Sharon's policies, has more popular support than Arafat's Fatah. In a recent poll, reported by James Bennet in The New York Times, Hamas has the support of 31 percent of Palestinians, compared to 20 percent for Fatah. The numbers were the reverse just a few months before Sharon took power. Even more disturbing is the news that the situation is much worse among Palestinian youth. At a recent university election, Hamas supporters defeated Fatah by 60 percent to 34 percent.

Bennet also worked here before he joined the Times and I know him to be a perceptive and fair-minded reporter. His words are worth attention:

"Palestinians argue that the Israeli military kills civilians. Israelis argue that unlike suicide bombers they do not kill civilians on purpose. Most Palestinians do not value that distinction. It is hard to understand for those who have not experienced it the rage felt even by elite Palestinians over their treatment by Israeli soldiers." Still, Bennet finds hope in two facts. First, most Palestinians favor a two-state solution, meaning the coexistence of Palestine and Israel. Second, support for Hamas falls as prospects for peace increase.

What that means to me is that we should press Sharon to drop his relentless eye-for-an-eye policy and start talking peace. At the same rime, we and our allies should press the Arab states that support Hamas to make it stop its terrorist attacks and abandon its opposition to Israel's continued existence.

"What both sides have to give up most of all," writes Ignatius, "is the belief that they can intimidate or terrorize the other into submission."