The National has been about as consistent as Jermain Defoe recently – take this opinion piece by the Daily Star’s opinion editor Michael Young. He claims that “nothing has damaged the Arabs more than resorting to wanton violence that leads nowhere.” He specifically talks about Hezbollah and intimates that peaceful Palestinian tactics would, in the long run, yield better results.
The Israeli withdrawal [from South Lebanon] came only three months before the start of the second Palestinian intifada, essentially aborting the Oslo process that the more uncompromising supporters of Palestinian rights had spent years denouncing.
The Oslo ‘peace process’ was a ruse, designed to shift responsibility to a weak Arafat, while giving nothing back, bar Arafat and his cronies being able to return to the two statelets they were allowed back to. The “uncompromising” supporters Young mentions, were the realists, understanding that Oslo was a con job, and a con job Israel would (and did) wriggle out of.
With armed resistance having won out in Lebanon, the Palestinian intifada took that logic a step further. The purists, frustrated by years of haphazard diplomatic movement, approved. Resistance was the new imperative, which they usually justified from the safety of Arab capitals or foreign universities.
The ‘purists’ approved? Obviously these purists were safely ensconced in Arab capitals or foreign universities. Young does what so many Israeli apologists do – he ignores the actual Palestinian people. Unlike Young I was not in a foreign capital in 2001, I was in the West Bank, and the Palestinians were angry at the Israelis, at the Americans and at the PLO/Fatah. What were they supposed to do? Light candles? Sing hymns? While templating Hezbollah tactics in the West Bank will not work, it was clear that the Palestinians saw that an armed struggle could work. And, historically speaking, what colonial power has ever given up land peacefully? The British only responded to violence in Northern Ireland, the same with the Americans in Vietnam or Iraq/Afghanistan/everywhere else it has invaded. The greatest example of non-violent protest is the Dalai Lama – and he has achieved none of his aims, bar the support of Richard Gere. Anyway I digress, Young finishes off the article with this classic:
Israel has undermined its Arab interlocutors over the years, but nothing has damaged the Arabs more than resorting to wanton violence that leads nowhere. Such behaviour betrays only vanity, with little chance of reversing injustices.
Young is either being incredibly naive or purposefully misleading – I suspect the latter. Nothing has damaged the Arabs more than “resorting to wanton violence?” This is nonsense; in fact much the opposite is true. Michael Young obviously does not like Hezbollah and is using his dislike of the party to find fault in Palestinian Hamas/Islamic Jihad tactics in the West Bank/Gaza.
In other news false logic of the week goes to this beauty from, you guessed it, Gulf News.
