Not much good will

Not much good will / Christmas in the Holy Land is marked by division

Wednesday, December 25, 2002

The Holy Land has never been like what most of us imagined it to be when we were young. But this year it may be experiencing one of its worst periods. The Palestinians announced Sunday they were postponing their elections indefinitely. The Israelis are building a 70-mile fence in the West Bank and forbade Yasser Arafat to attend Christmas Eve services in Bethlehem.

The Palestinians had scheduled elections for Jan. 20. Those constantly looking for hopeful developments on the Israeli-Palestinian front had put at least some stock in the Palestinian elections.

Most observers -- and certainly the Israelis -- regard the continued presence of Mr. Arafat as chairman of the Palestinian Authority as a barrier to serious negotiations. Some recent political developments among the Palestinians indicated that they are indeed ready for political change.

Even though the disavowals of Mr. Arafat by President Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon probably boosted Arafat's chances in the elections, there was still a decent chance that the Palestinians would have voted him out in January. Though still a symbol of the Palestinian cause, Mr. Arafat, 73, is a tired, failed political leader whose administration has been characterized by corruption and inefficiency.

Palestinians blame the postponement of the elections on Israeli military activities in the West Bank and Gaza, where Palestinians would have voted. Whether or not that is a pretext for delay, it is a fact that Israel has instituted unprecedented controls in recent months on the movement of Palestinians in those areas, in response to Palestinian attacks on Israelis in the settlements and in Israel itself.

Meanwhile, the Israelis are busily building a system of some 70 miles of fences and walls, some of them electrified, across parts of the West Bank, seeking to provide protection to the hundreds of thousands of settlers who continue to proliferate in the lands that Israel will have to give back to the Palestinians if an accord is to be reached under the "land for peace" formula.

It is understandable that the Israelis wish to increase their protection against Palestinian attacks. At the same time, in spite of Robert Frost's farmer's claim that "good fences make good neighbors," if people are ever to arrive at the ability to live side by side in peace, as it must be with these two economically interdependent peoples, electrified fences don't help.

Great walls and fences are, in fact, notorious for not working, from the Great Wall of China to the French Maginot Line against the Germans to the Warsaw Ghetto. They challenge those who are kept out. They constrain those who are kept in, fanning their paranoia.

The Bush administration is currently being criticized by America's European allies for dragging its feet on establishing a plan to create a Palestinian state. Delay made sense in the run-up to Palestinian elections scheduled for Jan. 20 and the Jan. 28 Israeli election. There was hope in both cases that stubborn leaders -- the Palestinians' Arafat and the Israelis' Sharon -- would have been retired by the voters, unblocking negotiations.

Now the Palestinians' elections are gone with the wind. The United States needs to push them to reschedule, in spite of whatever the Israelis are doing.

In the meantime, in the words of the old hymn about the little town of Bethlehem, the hopes and fears of all the years are once again met in that troubled, tormented part of the world.