Israel’s Cruel Crossroads

by John Thompson

March 13, 2002

In playing poker with a terrorist, you have to win all the time; the terrorist only needs to win once. The challenge presented to Israel by Palestinian terrorists has been that simple.

Israel has never had an easy time, but has remained a democracy (a noisy and fractious one, but the only one in the Middle East) through its entire history. It is a nation of refugees who learned never to trust soft words from a hard enemy — and consequently have been aggressive in their own defence.

The Palestinians are a nation of refugees too, but it is a telling point about the respective value of both societies that Israel has let millions of refugees find a home there but the Palestinians are still regarded as homeless 55 years after the creation of Israel and 35 years after the Israelis occupied the West Bank.

Israel was conceived, gestated, born and matured in conflict. It has never known peace, but all of their wars have been in self-defence. Even the 1967 War and the 1982 invasion of Lebanon were pre-emptive wars designed to head off a worse threat. If left alone, Israel would be as peaceful (barring its exuberant party politics) as any other Western nation.

Yet Israel’s current tragedy is that when a victimized people created their own homeland, somebody else got victimized in the process -- although this was not Israel’s doing. The Palestinians are victims of the Arab World’s violent rejection of the 1948 UN Partition of Palestine and of the same world’s tribal passions. Worse still, the peace process urged on Israel by other nations is based on the notion that Yasser Arafat is a leader of all the Palestinian people.

When displaced Palestinians sought refuge in 1948, Israel’s hostile neighbors refused to take any more than they had to, and sought to continue to use the refugees as a poker chip against the new state. Egypt, Iraq and Syria — all rivals for leadership in the Arab world — created armed Palestinian proxies to harass Israel. There were diverse ideologies in the Middle East, all of which led to the creation of even more groups.

When the PLO was finally established, it was not a single unified body but a skeletal umbrella for dozens of different fronts, coalitions, committees, commandos, brigades and factions. There were other groups that remained outside the PLO but still exerted an influence on Palestinian politics.

Arafat has always been in the position of a man trying to herd cats — at best he can be in front of the main mass of them. He is supposed to be a leader, and certainly enjoys the perquisites of office, but for all of his self-promotion to international audiences, he has not ever really been in control of the Palestinians. To be a real leader, he has to deliver the Palestinians a state of their own (naturally with himself as the head of state).

Arafat would be a fat pigeon in a poker game for he is always trying to take the pot with a pair of fours and a lot of bluff. For decades he has always misplayed his hand, misread his situations, and used the same tactic (that of encouraging or directing violence on one hand and offering his services as a negotiator with the other). These traits were evident when he tried to take over Jordan in 1970-71, establish his own state in Lebanon in the early 1980s, and during the Achille Lauro hijacking.

Whether as a terrorist leader, chairman of the PLO, or head of the Palestinian Authority, Arafat is still a bad poker player. The problem is, that if you play long enough, it is possible to win at least once.

The Norway Peace Accord is in shreds, and the US is seeing 30 years of its own diplomatic efforts go down the drain. For those who seek to assign blame for the current fighting in the Middle East, there is certainly some for Israel — they have behaved in a high-handed manner, were unable to remove their West Bank settlers, and have generally been grudging, slow and suspicious. Anyone playing their hand would be the same way.

The Saudi Peace Plan and the UN Security Council now both insist that the Palestinians should have a state of their own in the West Bank. Arafat’s prize is now within reach and the violence that he has refused to halt is bringing his reward… sometimes a pair of fours can take the pot.

John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: mackenzieinstitute@bellnet.ca