"...maybe five more minutes left to still the tom-toms of war."

[Ha'aretz - 12 July]: What we feared has come true: Two ethno-national groups, living in each other's backyards, are going through a proces of regression to superstitious tribalism. The sounds of the drums are heard throughout the land calling both tribes to gather around the campfire, dress in the colors of war and head out to battle to eliminate the very last member of the other side. There's no left, no right - we're all Jews. There's no Fatah, Hamas, or Popular Front - they're all Arabs, Palestinians and Muslims, and shaheeds (martyrs) - and to hell with the price of war.In this kind of war, more than in any other kind of war, the difference between the front and the rear dissolves, as do the distinctions between soldier and civilian, child and adult, victim and victimizer.

Even those who say it's not their war, just a march of folly and evil, aren't immune, either to the terror attacks or to the draft, because they belong to the tribe and because of the social pressure and the distorted way the social and political "reality" is constructed and presented. At this stage in the script war appears an unavoidable fate and all it will take to spark the third Jewish-Palestinian war (after the first in 1948 and the second in 1982) is one more terrorist massacre to finally legitimize the all-out attack. And Israel isn't leaving even that to chance, since the "assassination policy" or "active defense" or whatever it's called in our Orwellian language, only provokes the Palestinian urge for revenge.

The settlers and spokesmen of the right are absolutely correct when they say Ariel Sharon was not elected by them to to make any agreement with the Palestinians or to be "restrained." Sharon was elected to dismantle the Palestinian Authority, to bury, once and for all, any chance of reconciliation with the Palestinians, and to continue the acquisition of Judea and Samaria for the Jews. Sharon knows this well, and there's no reason to believe that he doesn't plan to satisfy their aspirations, which are also his aspirations. But Sharon circa 2001 is a much more experienced and improved version of the 1982 model. He learned the lesson that one doesn't go to war simply because one chooses to, and like his spiritual forefathers in the Mapai and Ahdut Avoda political parties, he's building, with superb tactics and admirable patience, a domestic and international consensus for a war he knows will be cost many casualties, a war that won't come cheap for the Israeli side, and a war that could turn into an international catastrophe.

Domestically, he's been a dizzying success, so far. True, he received some generous assistance from Ehud Barak and Shlomo Ben-Ami - and from Bill Clinton. Each for their own reasons threw the entire blame for their failure onto the Palestinians and didn't ask what mistakes they made at Camp David, claiming "Israel doesn't have a partner for peace." That declaration alone paralyzed the Israeli peace camp even though as time goes by it becomes clearer and clearer that the Barak-Clinton offer was indeed the most generous ever officially made to the Palestinians, but it was also less generous than was claimed or leaked. Indeed, it presented to the Palestinians impossible terms on which to agree to an "end to the conflict." Among other things the Israeli proposals at Camp David called for annexing 12 percent of the territories with nothing, in return, for the Palestinians. Then the Americans said Israel was ready for 9 percent, plus one percent, apparently from the Halutza dunes, but Israel refused to make any concrete commitment to evacuate settlements.

Furthermore, Israel demanded a supervisory role over the border crossings into the future Palestinian state and, according to the map presented to the Palestinians, Israel wanted two settlement blocs that in effect cut the West Bank into pieces. Essentially, the Israeli offers by Barak (and even others less "generous") could have been a good basis for negotiations, as the details were worked out and the peoples on both sides learned to accept them, were it not for the fact that Barak and Clinton were restricted by impossible time-tables and were under pressure to reach immediate, dramatic results. Clinton, remember, was in his last month of office and wanted a grand departure from the international stage. Barak, out of inexperience and coalition pressure, set himself a time-table that was impossible to keep.

To cover up their failures, it was convenient for Clinton and Barak to lay the full blame at Arafat's feet. Thus, it is now clear that the way the Israeli proposals were presented was a fraud perpetrated on the Israeli - and international - public opinions. There wasn't even a conspiracy, but the failure of the talks and the way they failed were one of the main reasons for the outbreak of violence by the Palestinians. The failure of the negotiations, the way the failure was presented and the violent Palestinian reaction rapidly changed public opinion, paralyzed the peace camp and caused confusion and embarrassment among its spiritual and intellectual shepherds.

These contributing factors not only won Sharon the elections but worse, created a vacuum of political and ideological opposition that resulted in unprecedented dominance of the political scene by the radical religious and secular right - so much so that now it seems there's nobody and nothing that can stop the slide down the slippery slope to total conflict.

It appears the public will only sober up at 5 P.M. after the war. Nonetheless, it seems that right now there are maybe five more minutes left to still the tom-toms of war. Let's make Sharon understand that we know that this won't only be a war of our choosing, but also an evil colonial one

Mid-East Realities

www.middleeast.org

Source: http://www.middleeast.org/articles/2001/7/281.htm