Israel & Palestine- End Game

When discussing the word terrorism, most people visualize their worst enemy. For most Arabs, terrorism is linked to the military crackdowns (some might argue unprovoked crackdowns) of the Israeli Defence Forces. For most Israelis and people in the West, though, the real terrorists are the militant groups in Palestine, supposedly fighting for a place to live in and a right to live without occupation. Without going into a lengthy debate about the rightness and wrongness of each other's position, I shall state categorically that the region should be the home of two peoples. After all, in the Old Testament, Jewish (as opposed to Christian) Zion would be a place where lamb and wolf lay down side by side. This prophecy is especially instructive when one considers the current situation. Will the lamb and the wolf ever take the first tentative steps toward living together? The end-result is so easy to conceive, but the process, appearing under the recent guise of the Road Map for Peace, is a difficult one to implement. Why? Because there are extremist elements on both sides who want to destroy the lamb-wolf vision. Elements who believe that the question of the Holy Land should be an all-or-nothing affair.

Though militant groups like Hamas and Al-Aqsa have toned down their rhetoric about pushing Israel back into the sea, they continue to launch attacks against innocent Jewish civilians. More specifically, they target groups of people like women, children and the elderly whom the the religion specifically forbade from molesting in times of strife. This is wrong, and we should not find any excuses for such wanton aggression, nor should we turn away from our duties of denouncing it.

It is therefore heartening to note that Arun Ghandi's message of peaceful resistance, when he was visiting the occupied territories, is slowly (painfully so) gaining ground. The First Intifada (literally, a "great shaking off") was a largely passive affair, and it is that event in history that Mr Ghandi singles out as being a less-than-perfect example of what he is trying to sell to the Palestinians. He goes on to argue convincngly that the present Second Intifada, the most violent one, has brought nothing but misery to the common people.

Lest one is tempted to think that Israel is not itself gripped by the agendas of extremist elements, one has only to go back a few years when an assassin's gun took the life of a Jewish Prime Minister who had been prepared to give up land for peace, as was the orginal intention of the first pioneers of Israel, when they captured Golan Heights, Sinai, West Bank and Gaza during the tumultous days of Israel's formation.

Seen in this context, Mr Ariel Sharon's offer to give up almost the whole of Gaza and retain small but crucial parts of the West Bank should be seen as courageous, if not politically suicidal. There is no certainty that he will survive the next Likud vote, nor whether another Jewish extremist will rise up from the ready ranks of the Greater Israel following to claim the life of yet another leader who remianed, to a certain extent, true to the humanitarian ideals of Judaism, and the secular/strategic ideals (land-for-peace) of the first Zionists.

Not many Arabs appreciate this fact. Israel is essentially a Middle-Eastern and semetic society and a semetic society, like its Arab counterpart, is passionate and volatile. Israel is no different. There is a saying in Israel; that Israeli politics is no politics.

I have tended to ignore the ideological arguements coming from both sides, because ideology, like Usama bin Laden's, is absolutist. There is no ground for compromise in ideology because it stands and falls on its own. However, if one has a certain amount of foresight, one is able to realize that peace between Israel and the Arabs can only benefit the region in more ways than one.