Two flawed men fuel Middle East crisis

By H.D.S. Greenway, 4/19/2002

THE ISRAELIS HAVE turned over reams of captured documents to link Yasser Arafat and his lieutenants to attacks against Israelis. The Palestinians say these are forgeries. I have not seen any of this evidence, but I see no reason to doubt their authenticity.

One doesn't need documents to prove that Arafat and the Palestinians have not lived up to their promise in Oslo to halt violence against Israel, just as one doesn't need any more evidence that Ariel Sharon has violated Israel's Oslo promise with the Palestinians.

The proof lies with blown-apart buses and Jewish corpses in Jerusalem and in the rubble of Jenin and Nablus in the West Bank, where entire families were bulldozed to death as they cowered in terror in their homes. Suicide bombers have but one purpose, to kill and maim Israeli civilians, and you cannot fire antitank missiles from helicopters into crowded refugee camps and call the inevitable results ''collateral damage.'' Sharon has declared his war against the Palestinians. Arafat equivocates. But these two old men, mired in the past and steeped in vengeance, are both responsible for countless innocent civilian deaths in their long years in the service of inhumanity dressed up as patriotism.

Last month I met one of Arafat's chief lieutenants, Marwan Barghouthi, now in Israeli custody. I asked him about the Karine A, the ship full of arms from Iran that Israelis caught trying to sneak into Palestine. Arafat denied all knowledge. Barghouthi said: ''I'm not supposed to know about that,'' but he clearly did. He said he didn't know why his side didn't just admit that they were trying to smuggle arms in ''to defend our people.'' He spoke of the Jewish fighters against British rule half a century ago and how they smuggled in arms shipments with France playing the mischief maker that Iran plays today.

Barghouthi was one of the young political leaders fed up with Arafat's corruption and lack of progress toward ending the occupation who started the intifadah. He is a hard man at war with the Israeli occupation of his homeland. But he is also a born leader who believes there can be no military solution in the long run, that there has to be a political compromise, and that a two-state solution with Palestine and Israel side by side is the only answer. Would that Sharon held such beliefs.

Barghouthi saw no contradiction in his present violence and future compromise. He is clearly a danger to Israel in its present posture, as those old terrorists Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir were to the British during the period of their mandate. Both later became prime ministers of Israel. Who is to say that, like Begin, Barghouthi couldn't be a peace bringer? Israel's Yitzhak Rabin was able to lead his people into peace precisely because he had once been a hard man fighting Arabs.

''Barghouthi is a terrorist,'' a senior Israeli military official told reporters at a briefing, ''but he speaks Hebrew, if you know what I mean.''

The Israelis and Palestinians are at war with each other - ''in each other's bellies,'' as one observer put it - and are prepared to visit death upon each other's civilians. The question is not who is doing what to whom or who started it but how to stop it. And the second question is, what leaders are strong enough and popular enough to bring about the necessary political compromises?

Barghouthi may never again see the light of day, but a policy of assassinating Palestinian leaders can mean there are no leaders left to talk to when it comes time to talk. The kind of quisling collaborators that Sharon is looking for will never be able to speak for the Palestinian people.

Would Northern Ireland be a better place if Jerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, both implicated in terrorism, had been assassinated by the British? Nobody needed to prove that the Irish Republican Army was involved with terrorism or that the Protestant paramilitaries were up to their ears in violence when peace talks began in Northern Ireland. The point was to get beyond it. You don't make peace with your friends; you make peace with your enemies.

Sharon has no more business saying that Arafat cannot be an interlocutor than Arafat would have saying that Sharon cannot represent the Israeli people. For better or worse - and, let's face it, worse - these two deeply flawed men are the chosen and elected leaders of their respective peoples. Far from making Arafat irrelevant, Sharon has made Arafat the most relevant man in the world. And if Arafat had contained the second intifadah when it began, Sharon would not have been elected.

Former senator George Mitchell, the man who brokered peace in Northern Ireland and who helped draw up a road map for peace in the Middle East, recently said that it is ''impossible to expect'' that any negotiations will be ''entirely free of violence.'' In Belfast, violence accompanied negotiations up to the very end, but the two sides stayed at the negotiating table.

Arafat has never let go of violence as a negotiating tool, and after having failed in Lebanon 20 years ago, Sharon still hasn't learned the futility of insisting that Israel has the right to pick or veto Arab leaders.

H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.

© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.