Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of Palestinians with guns think otherwise...
Two months ago I was really, really depressed, after running across a piece by Edward Said containing "...peace, which is a lovely word, but in the present context usually means Palestinians are told to stop resisting Israeli control over their land..." Since I couldn't think of anything Palestinians are doing now to "resist" other than sending young men (and occasionally women) to kill themselves and anyone else who happens to be handy, I read this as an endorsement of suicide bombing. "God!" I thought to myself. "If even Columbia Professors of half-Palestinian origin are endorsing suicide bombing, the sh*t is indeed deep."
Yesterday I found something that convinced me I had been wrong about Said, but that depressed me even further <http://www.counterpunch.org/said0617.html>. Said writes about how Arafat's decision to launch the suicide-bomber intifada in the hope of driving Israel out of the West Bank through civilian casualties has been a disaster for:
"the long suffering [Palestinian] people, whom... he has exposed to unacceptable pain and hardship.... Why... provoke a war whose victims would be mostly innocent people when you have neither the military capacity to fight one nor the diplomatic leverage to end it? Having done this now three times (Jordan, Lebanon, West Bank) Arafat should not be given a chance to bring on a fourth disaster.... He never really reined in Hamas and Islamic Jihad... a ready- made excuse to use the so-called martyr's (mindless) suicide bombings to further diminish and punish the whole people.... this calamitous policy of killing Israeli civilians, which further proves to the world that we are indeed terrorists and an immoral movement. For what gain no one has been able to say.... a new basis of legitimacy has to be created by the only and ultimate source of authority, namely, the people itself.... What is needed is a creative method of struggle that mobilises all the human resources at our disposal to highlight, isolate and gradually make untenable the... settlements, settlement roads, roadblocks and house demolitions.... For such a Palestinian strategy to work there has to be an Israeli component made up of individuals and groups with whom a common basis of struggle against occupation can and indeed must be established.... [O]ur society has been nearly wrecked by poor leadership and the insanity of thinking that suicide bombing will lead directly to an Islamic Palestinian state.... weapons that... kill innocents and lose us more support than ever before.... [Our] just cause can easily be subverted by evil or inadequate or corrupt means..."
The problem is that Edward Said is what Machiavelli would have called an "unarmed prophet." And during the decade since Oslo began, the Palestinian Authority has nurtured the creation of a large number of armed prophets who think very differently.
Brad DeLong