AS
PALESTINIAN-ISRAELI violence continues, serious and
respected analysts are making incredible insinuations
about the Palestinians: They are throwing their young
into the line of fire.
Added to this
proposition are seemingly reinforcing stories: The
Palestinian Authority "rewards" the families of those
killed with a few hundred dollars; Yasser Arafat has
called upon the youth to continue their uprising; and
the fallen are celebrated by Palestinians as heroes who
go to heaven.
We are not speaking
here of suicide bombers killing innocent civilians but
of teen-agers who take to the streets in defiance and
throw stones at soldiers in their own towns. Why do they
do it? Certainly not because Mr. Arafat asks them to.
One can argue
legitimately about Mr. Arafat's power or willingness to
restrain the demonstrations. But it is a different
matter to insinuate that these children are willing to
die for Mr. Arafat instead of admitting the obvious:
They were all born under the humiliation of occupation,
have never known full freedom and independence and have
been promised too many times that relief is around the
corner. It takes a lot of hardship to be willing to die,
whether you are an Arab, Jew or gentile. Mr. Arafat may
have the power to restrain the young, but they are not
his soldiers -- or even his admirers.
It is still worse to
insinuate that families are encouraged by Mr. Arafat to
send their children to die by the lure of financial
compensation. How many parents can imagine such a thing?
Where is it not the case that governments provide relief
to families who lose loved ones in conflict?
It is correctly
pointed out that Palestinians see their casualties as
martyrs who go to heaven, as if this is theologically
driven behavior that does not repeat itself elsewhere.
Even without conflict, how can one explain to a child,
or to oneself, the loss of another child? Who has not
used the heaven explanation to cope with the pain of
losing a loved one?
In coping with the
daily ritual of losing more young lives, Palestinians
face the choice of blaming the dead as foolhardy or
expressing pride that they refused to accept their
humiliating reality. And where, in situations of intense
civil and political conflict, have teen-agers not played
a role?
As conflict
intensifies, Arabs and Israeli moderates become
polarized. The tendency is to rationalize immoral
behavior that they normally cannot accept. Some
Palestinians cannot bring themselves to fully condemn
the public lynching of two Israeli soldiers, or to
acknowledge that some of the violence was carried out by
Palestinian snipers ("the dead soldiers were really an
assassination squad hunting Palestinians ... and look
how soldiers are killing our children in cold blood,
then blaming us for it").
Some Israelis cannot
bring themselves to see the wrong of shooting dead so
many Palestinian civilians ("our soldiers must defend
themselves ... and the Palestinians are inviting death
so they can garner international sympathy").
Israeli Prime
Minister Ehud Barak, who, at a moment of empathy, once
remarked that, had he been born a Palestinian, he would
have done more than throw stones, now finds it easier to
blame the excessive use of force on "the tough
neighborhood" -- as if the most recent case of ethnic
cleansing, and the unfathomable Holocaust, did not occur
in the civilized neighborhood of Europe.
In the United
States, many of Mr. Barak's admirers, impressed by his
courage in moving beyond any other Israeli leader, find
it hard to criticize the troubled prime minister for
excessive use of force. Instead, they overlook the
findings of credible human rights organizations and
dismiss widespread international sentiments to pin the
blame on the incredible hypothesis that Palestinians
care about their children less than others.
Mr. Arafat is
certainly not an angel and neither is Mr. Barak. In
their careers, they have both used violence for
strategic and political ends. War is ugly, and civil war
is uglier. The longer they go on, the uglier they get.
It is understandable
that, in the high-stakes information war, Israel and the
Palestinian Authority will spin events to maximize
international sympathy. But there is a responsibility
among analysts who want to see a lasting peace in the
region to avoid being drawn into the skewed and
self-defeating interpretations of events that the
combatants themselves cannot avoid.
Despite its reduced
clout in the Middle East, the United States remains best
placed to help the parties break out of the cycle of
violence. Its power does not derive from an ability to
force a solution on either side but from an ability to
persuade. Credibility, in this instance, is more
valuable than helicopter gun ships. Only by maintaining
a clear moral vision can this credibility be enhanced.
Shibley Telhami
holds the Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development at
the University of Maryland, College Park and is a senior
fellow at the Brookings Institution.
