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In a Ruined Country; How Yasir Arafat destroyed Palestine

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  • In a Ruined Country; How Yasir Arafat destroyed Palestine

    In a Ruined Country

    How Yasir Arafat destroyed Palestine

    The Atlantic Monthly
    September 2005

    by David Samuels

    [The following are excerpts from the article]

    ..The war for Jerusalem that began after Israeli Prime Minister Ehud .

    Barak's failed peace offer at Camp David in the summer of 2000 has
    become the subject of legends and fables, each one of which is colored
    in the distinctive shades of the political spectrum from which it
    emerged: Yasir Arafat tried to control the violence. Arafat was
    behind the violence. Arafat was the target of the violence, which
    he deflected onto the Israelis. Depending on which day of the week
    it was, any combination of these statements might have been true...

    ..There is a school of opinion that blames Arafat's personal hatred
    of .

    Barak for the intifada. When I try it out on Barak, he dismisses
    the idea as irrational; yet as we talk, it is not hard to see why
    so many people find him disconcerting. Barak has two distinct and
    contradictory personalities. He combines the hyperactive, engaging
    manner of the smartest ten-year-old boy on the planet with a cold,
    analytical way of describing events that suggests the personality of
    the computer HAL in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Oslo,
    Barak believes, was a political adventure embarked on by Rabin,
    who distrusted Arafat but saw a strategic need to reach a political
    settlement with the Palestinians.

    "What we had in mind all the time was that if you keep moving
    toward a volcanic eruption of violence, as a result of being unable
    to stretch reigning over the Palestinians for another generation,
    we might end up with a tragedy," Barak says, tugging at the collar
    of his navy windbreaker. He recalls a meeting at the beginning of
    the first intifada, chaired by Rabin, in which the Israeli defense
    establishment confronted the nature of the rebellion and the range
    of available solutions.

    "We had a closed gathering of probably thirty people~Wthe top
    brass of the defense ministry~Wwith Rabin, and he brought several
    academics to talk about what they believed they were seeing," Barak
    remembers. "The first intifada was then two weeks old. And there was
    a brilliant presentation made by Professor Shamir, and he talked
    about the fifty precedents in the last century of such events. He
    said that throughout history only three strategies came close to
    being successful. None is relevant to our case. The strategies were
    extermination, starvation, and mass transportation. We were targets
    of extermination and the Armenians also, but it didn't work. Biafra
    was starvation, didn't work. And he analyzed what would happen~Wit's
    a brilliant short presentation."

    As chief of the IDF general staff, and later as a minister in Rabin's
    cabinet, Barak talked to the prime minister about the problems with
    the Oslo Accords very often, he says. "Many times I would ask Rabin,
    Why did you give up on this or that? and he would say, 'You know, Ehud,
    we still have wide enough margins. The moment will inevitably come when
    we'll have to pass our judgment.' Even at the time, we read Arafat's
    speeches to other audiences, in Johannesburg and other places, where
    he would say, 'Remember the false Hudna,'" Barak says, referring to a
    deceptive treaty entered into by the prophet Muhammad. By the time he
    became prime minister, Barak says, he found that a violent explosion
    was imminent and the strategic situation was not in Israel's favor.

    "I felt in all my mature life that Israel from 1947 on could never
    materialize any operational or military achievement unless we had
    two preconditions fulfilled," he explains. "One, that we occupied the
    moral high ground in the world, the other that we kept our internal
    unity. It was the case in 1947 exactly because Ben-Gurion was ready
    to take an almost impossible international plan and agree to it, and
    the Palestinians rejected it. Only the fact that Ben-Gurion accepted
    it made it possible for Israel to hold to the results of the war for
    fifty-seven years."

    http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200509/samuels
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