Abbas Must Act

[barb162]

10/31/05
By Mortimer B. Zuckerman
Abbas Must Act

What is the price of trying to make life easier for the Palestinians? A simple answer: murder most foul. Israel voluntarily removed roadblocks; so terrorists in a Fatah group, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, put stolen Israeli license plates on a car, sped by a crowd at a hitching post, and opened fire with automatic weapons. Three young Israelis, including a 15-year-old, were killed, and four others were wounded. Now the entire Palestinian population will have to bear the burden of tighter Israeli security. To protect its citizens, Israel has to ban all private Palestinian cars from the main roads, rebuild roadblocks and barriers throughout Judea and Samaria, and end the turnover of West Bank towns (especially Bethlehem) to the Palestinian Authority.


The lamentable inertia of the PA's president, Mahmoud Abbas, has brought this on his people. The Fatah group freely boasted of what it had done, but Abbas did not pursue the terrorists nor even condemn them. Nor is he doing anything about the smuggling of people and weapons from Gaza and Sinai into the West Bank. Terrorism and the incitement to violence continue unabated outside the attention of western media, which are all too ready to scream if there is an Israeli misdemeanor.

snip

Israel and the United States try hard to keep faith in Abbas. He is not personally a bad man. He just lacks the will to control the anarchy. All we get from Abbas are nice interviews to the western media explaining how he will persuade the militias to give up their guns, and the media write upbeat stories without bothering to note that in the meantime no terrorist has been arrested, tried, or sent to prison. The lawless, virtually feudal, criminal and terrorist factions within Gaza simply refuse to obey Abbas or to stop attacking Israel. He is so scared of them he has even rejected international appeals to dismantle the armed militias, saying the world should stop meddling in Palestinian internal affairs.
snip

Hamas terrorism is a disaster for the Gaza Palestinians. They simply will not thrive unless their leadership shows some guts. As the British minister of state put it, the PA has "60,000 troops the equipment. What they need is the political will ."


snip
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/opinion/articles/051031/31edit.htm

[Spinzonner]

1. Maybe we should show him how to do it

based upon how effectively we control the situation in Iraq

[hiabrill]

3. it's actually the other way around...

Israel has shown the US Military how to do it in Iraq, based on how the IDF do it to the Palestinians.....

[hiabrill]

2. The perception of making life easier for Palestinains.....

.....doesn't necessarily mean that is the case on the ground....

The truth and reality is far from it.


The situation is extreme dire in Palestinian areas and I truly believe that if ordinary people feel a change to a better future, Palestinian terrorism and incitement to violence will stop.



There has been too much injustice for the Palestinians to suddenly believe that the withdrawal from Gaza is an overture to peace! It would seem that the withdrawal was a strategic move aimed at enacting more draconian policies in the West Bank. i.e. taking further Palestinian land to connect Jerusalem to a nearby settlement, segregation and prohibition of Palestinian Arabs from all roads in the West Bank used by Israelis.

We had the Apartheid Wall and now after the withdrawal from Gaza we have the Apartheid Roads.

Both are designed to take more land from the Palestinians and cage the Arabs into small enclaves like animals....!! (it's shocking we allow this to happen)

And let's not forget the Assassinations by Israel continue unabated!

[Colorado Blue]

4. I wish I could believe this. Unfortunately, history will prove

that the violence escalated after Oslo, when the road to statehood seemed assured.

I think, whilst acknowledging the conditions to which you allude, one must also recognize that elements within the Arab sphere do not wish Israel to exist - period.

The roadblocks, demolitions, delays, the fence itself, did not exist prior to the Intifada. Conditions for the Palestinians reflect the violence against Israelis.

Meanwhile, I keep putting up links which nobody apparently reads but here it goes again. Some history, which will show that the violence against Jews in this region predated Israel, let alone the war of 1967.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Mandate_of_Palestine

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haj_Amin_Al-Husseini

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Israeli_conflict

[hiabrill]

5. Arabs don't have a choice

but to accept the existence of Israel....


Israel refuses the principal of "land for peace".... The violence will end when Israel ends their land grab and Palestinians get a fair share of the occupied territories back.



Oslo is proof that peace is possible.

[Colorado Blue]

6. for peace - a poem, read at the Nobel Prize ceremony honoring

Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin

Wildpeace
Yehuda Amichai

Not the peace of a cease-fire
not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb,
but rather
as in the heart when the excitement is over
and you can talk only about a great weariness.
I know that I know how to kill, that makes me an adult.
And my son plays with a toy gun that knows
how to open and close its eyes and say Mama.
A peace
without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares,
without words, without
the thud of the heavy rubber stamp: let it be
light, floating, like lazy white foam.
A little rest for the wounds - who speaks of healing?
(And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation
to the next, as in a relay race:
the baton never falls.)

Let it come
like wildflowers,
suddenly, because the field
must have it: wildpeace.


Translated by Chana Bloch

[pelsar]

7. gaza...

i love how things are "twisted" to keep ones mindset closed:

how was leaving gaza related to the westbank?....no israeli policy changed in the westbank?..

gaza was a move for the palestenains to start their self rule....to show israel that they can actually rule themselves and become peaceful neighbors....

any excuses they have (or their cheerleaders) that they "cant do it becuase..." is jut that..an excuse....

time for the palestenians to actually take responsability for themselves and what they do..and time for their cheerleaders to stop with the excuses for them.