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Welcome to USAGOLD's "Gilded
Opinion" pages.
We invite you to browse our index
of outstanding gold-based commentary.
(Back to Holger Jensen Index)
While we find Mr. Jensen's columns particularly informative with respect to foreign affairs, his opinions do not necessarily represent those of Centennial Precious Metals, USAGOLD, its management and clientele.
INSIDE FOREIGN AFFAIRS
In Mideast struggle, both
sides lose more than they gain
by Holger Jensen, International Editor
Israeli children are blown up by a Palestinian suicide bomber in a pizza parlor. Palestinian children are blown up by an Israeli booby trap intended to kill a "terrorist."
A leader of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, who bragged of killing nine Israelis, is assassinated. Revenge is swift. A 72-year-old American architect is gunned down in a Palestinian village so friendly he called it "my family." An Israeli woman is killed on her way to a wedding in a West Bank settlement.
Old and young, mostly non-combatants, keep dying in a conflict that began as a stone-throwing intifada, or uprising, by Palestinians resisting Israeli occupation and now, 16 months later, has turned into a senseless war of attrition.
It is a major irritant in U.S.-Arab relations. Even our staunchest friends and principal oil suppliers in the Middle East fault the United States for being too biased in favor of Israel and too forgiving of an occupation deemed illegal by much of the international community.
The Jewish state, they point out, was created by the United Nations, yet with the help of an American veto consistently ignores U.N. resolutions to vacate Palestinian lands captured in 1967. The Palestinian issue rankles not only Arabs but Muslims worldwide, and gives the terrorists among them one more anti-American cause.
Israel maintains that the West Bank and Gaza Strip were captured in a war started by the Arabs and the occupation is justified as long as there is no permanent peace. It has built more than 140 settlements there, now populated by more than 200,000 Jews, in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention that prohibits the transfer of civilian populations to territories captured in war.
Israel contends they are needed on security grounds, to buffer the Jewish state from hostile Arab neighbors. Many deeply religious Jews also claim a biblical right to the land, believing God gave them Judea and Sumaria.
The United States has criticized Israel's settlement policy as "provocative" and "not conducive to peace" but generally supports the Israeli position that it cannot be expected to end the occupation and create what would essentially be a hostile state on its borders until the Palestinians agree to a real peace.
The presence of the settlements, however, and nonstop settlement building after the Oslo peace process began in 1993, convinced the Palestinians that Israel never intended to give them back their land. And every peace plan presented by the Israelis before negotiations broke down -- even former Prime Minister Ehud Barak's offer to relinquish 90 percent of the occupied territories -- envisioned keeping large settlement blocs that would split any future Palestinian state into a number of disconnected islands.
This was as unacceptable to Yasser Arafat as his demand for a Palestinian "right of return" was to the Israelis. But, instead of negotiating a compromise, the Palestinian leader stormed out of a summit at Camp David and the intifadah broke out a few months later, in September 2000.
Israel says it was preplanned. The Palestinians say it was sparked by a provocative visit made by Ariel Sharon, a former defense minister then contesting Barak's premiership in upcoming elections, to the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, Islam's third holiest shrine. And so began what U.N. Middle East envoy Terje-Roed Larsen calls "the dance of death."
Both sides have suffered enormously, yet neither seems inclined to make peace. Engrossed in their own private nightmare, each has resorted to increasingly nasty tactics to add to the misery of the other. And both are losing more than they gain.
The Palestinians began with stones, moved on to guns and mortars, then suicide bombers eager to die as long as they kill Jews. They have killed more than 240 so far.
Terrorism is the poor man's way of waging war. Palestinians say it is justified because theirs is a legitimate struggle against what they call Israeli "state terrorism." They also point out that it is their only means of fighting back against the overwhelming firepower of Israel's American-supplied arms.
The Israelis began with rubber bullets, moved on to tanks and rocket-firing Apache helicopters, then finally F-16 jets. They have killed more than 800 Palestinians so far.
They have also laid siege to hundreds of towns and villages, demolished homes, destroyed olive groves, crippled the economies of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and assassinated more than 70 Palestinian militants said to have been responsible for, or plotting, terrorist attacks against Israelis.
Israeli officials maintain that these "targeted killings" of known Palestinian terrorists are not revenge but pre-emptive strikes intended to save Israeli lives. They concede that innocent civilians, stray passers-by including children, have been accidentally killed in some hits, but argue they are still more discriminating than the Islamic bombers who deliberately target Israeli civilians, blowing up buses, pizzerias packed with children and 21 teen-agers outside a Tel Aviv discotheque.
Each assassination, of course, elicits bloody reprisals, yet neither side has anything to show for this deadly tit-for-tat.
The security that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon promised his countrymen has never materialized. In fact, Israelis are less secure now than they were when he took office -- they are being killed on average at the rate of 19 a month compared to 13 a month under his predecessor, Barak.
In December, 26 people were killed in just three days. The violence has scared off tourists, a mainstay of the Israeli economy, resulting in losses estimated at $2 billion over the past year.
The Palestinian state promised by Yasser Arafat also has not materialized; in fact, it is becoming a more distant prospect every day. Sharon acknowledges the Palestinians' desire for statehood but says he will never offer them as much as Barak. The Palestinians say anything less simply amounts to a "more benign occupation," which they will never accept.
But the terrorism of a few has brought unrelenting misery to 3.2 million Palestinians. Not only are they still living under Israeli occupation, they now suffer economic blockades and other forms of collective punishment that prevent them from traveling freely between their towns or even to their jobs, schools and hospitals.
By United Nations estimate, their economy has lost between $2.4 billion and $3.2 billion. Unemployment in Gaza is about 60 percent and in the West Bank 40 percent, bringing with it more hopeless poverty and further political radicalization.
The Islamic fundamentalist group Hamas provides more charity than Arafat's Palestinian Authority, is thus more popular and and has been rewarded with a growing pool of recruits for its suicide bombings. Even though Israel's blockades make life unbearable for ordinary Palestinians, public opinion polls show consistent opposition to a cease-fire.
Arafat himself is confined to his headquarters in Ramallah under the guns of Israeli tanks parked a few hundred yards away. He has lost his helicopters, his airport in Gaza and his ability to travel abroad, which he used to do with tiresome frequency whenever things got too hot for him at home.
Sept. 11 gave Sharon the chance to equate his war against the Palestinians with President Bush's war on terrorism. Branding the Palestinian Authority a "terror-supporting entity," he called Arafat "Israel's bin Laden," then declared him "irrelevant."
But a shipload of Iranian arms, intercepted by Israeli commandos on its way to Gaza, made Arafat relevant again.
The United States, the European Union and many of Sharon's own generals still believe he is the only Palestinian leader with enough stature to make peace. Arafat may not be the best peace partner but he was duly elected by his people and, despite his waning popularity, still is "Mr. Palestine," the guerrilla leader-turned statesman who symbolizes the Palestinian quest for nationhood.
An endless succession of American envoys -- the latest is retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni -- keeps shuttling between Sharon and Arafat with two dog-eared "roadmaps for peace:" a cease-fire plan prepared by CIA Director George Tenet and suggestions for a more comprehensive settlement drawn up by former Sen. George Mitchell.
But Sharon's insistence on a complete cessation of Palestinian hostilities for seven days -- about as realistic as demanding a crime-free week in Colombia -- has stymied every attempt at a truce.
Even if he wanted to, Arafat does not exercise that much control over the Muslim militants of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and even his own Fatah faction. The most he could deliver, under international pressure after a particularly violent spate of suicide bombings, was three weeks of relative calm, with the emphasis on "relative."
That shattered when an Israeli bomb killed Raed Karmi, a leader of the Martyrs Brigade, sparking predictable Palestinian reprisals. The Palestinians and not a few Israeli commentators say Sharon is so opposed to giving up land for peace he prefers war, which is why he keeps goading the Palestinians to fresh atrocities that he then cites as proof of their "terrorism."
Sharon says it's the Palestinians who don't want peace. He and other government officials cite Arafat's rejection of Barak's "generous" offer, his duplicity in talking peace while trying to smuggle in 50 tons of Iranian arms and the anti-Jewish diatribes that pervade the Palestinian media and even textbooks in their schools.
As for Israeli public opinion, few Jews can be expected to think of the Palestinians as peace partners after seeing the mothers of "martyred" suicide bombers celebrate their sons' accomplishments. The Palestinians respond that the Israelis brought it on themselves by occupying their land. If the occupiers now regard themselves as victims of the occupied, they say, the answer is simple: end the occupation.
If anything, this war has shown that there is no military solution. Israel cannot bludgeon the Palestinians into submission and the Palestinians cannot win with terrorism what they abandoned at the negotiating table.
January 19, 2002
Send your questions to international editor Holger Jensen, who will answer one each day. E-mail: hjens@aol.com
Copyright © 2002 The E.W. Scripps Co. All Rights Reserved.
Reprinted by USAGOLD with permission of Mr. Jensen. No further reproduction without permission.
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