|
SHOULD THE PALESTINIAN GOVERNMENT UNDER HAMAS BE DENIED ALL AID?
1 - Israel is in a tough spot here. It seems obvious Israel cannot provide support for a government led by a party that refuses to recognize Israel and which advocates violence against Israel. It seems likely to me, however, that "backstairs" talks have to go on as Israel has a stake in many aspects of what goes on in the PA.
2 - Advocating cutting off the Palestinians from any kind of aid strikes me as wrong on many levels. Some people like to use World War II analogies. How about this. Germany, the most civilized nation in Europe, succumbed to Nazi rule because it was a nation that had been impoverished by the Versailles Treaty compounded by the worldwide economic depression. Desperate people do desperate things. Conservative Arab regimes, Europe and the USA, as well as Israel, would not benefit from a Palestine driven to feel it has nothing to lose. Aid provided in forms that do not go into the national treasury is an intelligent, even a wise, plan. AIPAC and the US Congress are making a huge mistake. Remember their attempts to get the US to move its embassy to Jerusalem when that was more a provocation than a solution.
3 - The Palestinians did not elect Hamas either because they want an Islamic state or because of Hamas' hostility to Israel. They elected Hamas in order to throw out the Arafat political machine which was corrupt and incompetent. Hamas has the reputation of being uncorrupted and they have been delivering social services that the PA failed to deliver. The fact that Hamas did not put their hard-liners at the top of their list tells me that they recognize this about the Palestinian electorate.
4 - According to some reports Hamas is already losing political support. The most certain way to raise popular support for Hamas is to hand Hamas the role of defiant leaders standing up to a world that wants to keep the Palestinians down.
5 - If Hamas has the means to govern it will, of necessity, turn into a more political organization. They will be too busy doing the Palestinian people's business and trying to keep Fatah out of power to bother much with attacking Israel. The people leading Hamas are a lot of bad things but they are not stupid.
All of these points can be found in Israeli publications. It is not a matter of being dovish but of being sensible and realistic. If Israel cannot turn Hamas into friends or even make them see reason, relations with their government can at least be managed in a way that makes them less likely to do harm.
The Israeli government's policy regarding the Palestinians is not looking for a return to occupation and intifada. They need a PA that has turned its attention inward. We should be supporting that.
LESSONS FROM EUROPE AFTER THE FIRST WORLD WAR
Woodrow Wilson argued for US entry into the war in Europe on such slogans as making "the world safe for democracy" and "the war to end all wars." At the end of the war Wilson, along with Georges Clemenceau and Lloyd George, tried to remake Europe and much of the rest of the world to realize these slogans as policy. Their failures of judgment led not only to World War II but to the rise of fascist regimes throughout Europe and the extension of colonial power for Britain and France.
They imposed democracy on Germany, Poland, Yugoslavia, Romania, Italy, Spain, and other countries (some of which they created at the time). Every one of these countries, with the exception of Czechoslovakia, quickly saw the failure of democracy and the rise of fascism. The same happened in China and Russia (the Soviet Union). The United States, Britain, and France all had strong fascist political movements in the 20s and 30s. Democracy cannot be imposed. It has to come from within a society. We are learning this anew in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Wilson conceded to Britain and France the right to excessive reparations from Germany which, as I wrote in my earlier posting placed a fatal strain on Germany that made that country fertile ground for a fringe movement like National Socialism, giving Hitler the ability to try to carry out the program he espoused in "Mein Kampf."
Wilson also worked with Britain and France divvying up the Middle East. Itg was he who suggested taking three Ottoman states and making them one new country - Iraq. At the same time they created Kuwait as a British possession which denied Iraq direct access to the sea (leaving Britain in control of that until 1967). The British tried to rule Iraq from within closed military compounds during the 1920s-30s. They depended on superior technology (including poison gas, which they used) to keep the number of their troops there low (sound familiar?). The Brits kept control of Palestine by discouraging attempts by Chaim Weizmann and Sheikh Abd'ulla (begun in an exchange of letters at Versailles) to draw Arabs and Jews in the Yishuv towards reconciliation and co-operation. Among other things they appointed a xenophobic Arab nationalist as Mufti of Jerusalem. Incidently Ho Chi Minh was also at Versailles pleading with Wilson to get the French to allow Indochina to become independent. He was ignored and rejected.
In short the political rhetoric of World War I's victors was belied by their actual policies which were a display of unmitigated arrogance. They sought to remake the world but instead sowed the seeds of many of the conflicts that are still going on today.
After World War II we showed we had learned from our failures by establishing the Marshall Plan. We supported the reconstruction of Europe and the revitalization of the national economies of the nations on our side of the Iron Curtain. We provided this support even for nations that had socialist governments or whose politics otherwise displeased America. The result was stability and prosperity as well as peace and the firm establishment of democracy (although it took some of those nations, like Spain and Portugal, some time to succeed in this). The Marshall Plan is the proudest achievement of American foreign policy.
We seem to have forgotten these historical lessons. We have returned to arrogance and gone beyond it to a level of unilateralism that has alienated our nation diplomatically from much of the world. The idea that we can starve the Palestinians into submission is exactly the wrong way to go. It will create conditions that will breed terrorism and more terrorism as the PA grows increasingly desperate. What the PA needs is a responsible Marshall Plan, one that will actively seek to draw the Palestinians away from reliance on violence and toward the construction of a viable state. The Palestinians have already proven they choose democracy. They ran a cleaner election than the ones we have been running here lately and this was what they wanted and not something imposed on them. The PA has far greater potential as a model for regional democracy than Iraq or Afghanistan.
Aside from the moral issues raised by intentionally starving a nation, working with the PA, even under Hamas (and as a pacifist I find their advocacy of terrorist violence inexcusable and criminal). Let's stop playing good guy - bad guy politics and do what is both sensible and right.
|
