April
5, 2002, 8:30 a.m. The
Future Is Now
Sept.
11’s continuing aftermath.
By NR
Editors, from the April 22, 2002, issue of National Review
eptember
11 is a landmark event. On that day, the disarray of the entire Muslim
world spilled over in violence and bloodshed to the United States, and
so to the democracies of the West. Many Muslims like to suppose that the
United States and the West is to blame for everything wrong with their
own states. This, of course, is specious self-pity. Muslims are themselves
responsible for the failure of their states to modernize in today's world,
and for the bad government and corruption that plague them.
How the United States
and the West deal with the inability of Muslim states to fit into the
modern world is going to determine the future. This is unmapped territory.
The one and only guide is the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians,
a conflict already more than a century old. It boils down to the simple
fact that Palestinians — and beyond them, other Arabs — have
never been willing to accept a Jewish state in their midst. To them, it
is of no concern that during the Hitler period Europe collapsed in an
anti-Semitic frenzy, and Jews had nowhere else to turn to for survival
except Palestine. They ask for the course of history to be reversed. So
it is now the strange fate of Israel to be testing out exactly how the
Muslim world can come to terms with modernity and democracy.
September 11 boosted
those Muslims for whom coming to terms with the rest of the world means
war and supremacy. Israel afforded them a prepared arena. Already over
a year old, the intifada duly intensified, substituting religious fanaticism
for political purposes, and killing Jews in a new version of pogroms.
Over 400 Israelis have been killed so far, and some 1,500 wounded. Palestinian
casualties are about three times as high. As if reluctant to believe the
evidence, Israel has pleaded for political processes. Deploying strength
symbolically, it has given warning so that buildings coming under fire
were empty. Killing over 40 people in the week of Passover, the suicide
bombers at last touched the core Israeli anxiety that once again survival
is at stake. Prime minister Ariel Sharon accepts that this is war. Defense
minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer speaks of destroying "the infrastructure
of terror." To that end, Israeli armor has moved into the West Bank
to round up terrorists and begin the destruction of their infrastructure.
There is no intention, Sharon and Ben-Eliezer stress, of reoccupying permanently
land already turned over to the Palestinians.
Responsibility for
what is happening rests wholly upon Yasser Arafat and the Palestinians.
At Camp David in the days of the Clinton presidency, Arafat could have
laid the foundations of a peaceful Palestinian state. Here might have
been a rare example of a national liberation movement achieving its ends
through political processes. But so contemptuous was he of Israeli concessions
that he was not even prepared to offer any counter-proposals of his own,
instead hastening home to launch the current intifada. In a career spanning
over three decades, he has steadily displayed the Pavlovian response that
Palestine means violence. He brought civil war first to Jordan, then to
Lebanon, and in the years after the Oslo accords he came to exemplify
the bad government, corruption, and failure to modernize of so many of
his fellow Muslim-world rulers. In their mold, he rigged the electoral
process by which he became president. For his unfortunate people, he has
been a disaster.
The United Nations,
international Muslim forums, and European politicians now raise a chorus
that Arafat must be protected. Their collective rescue of Arafat condemns
Palestinians to endure more of the same, while simultaneously they reveal
themselves unmoved by the prospect of dead Jews. Moral indifference of
this kind can only widen conflict. Many quarters of the media follow suit,
adding that Sharon's tactics are flawed, the infrastructure of terror
cannot be destroyed, and the incursion on the West Bank will only help
to recruit more suicide bombers. But nobody in the region has forgotten
that the British before the last world war also faced a Palestinian intifada,
and put down its infrastructure with a ruthlessness more extreme than
anything shown by the Israelis. Determined to survive, Israelis are likely
to succeed in their aim to damp down and control this intifada, if only
through exhausting the other side.
Gen. Zinni and the
Mitchell and Tenet plans are so many tokens of good will, perhaps better
than nothing but unable to deliver. President Bush and his administration
are in no position to remedy the bad government of Arafat or other Muslim
rulers. So far, they are blowing hot and cold. Their pronouncements for
or against Israel, for or against Arafat, are confused and confusing to
Muslims and the rest of the West awaiting a lead. Events on the West Bank
now are a portent of what is to come to the Middle East in the continuing
aftermath of September 11.
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eptember
11 is a landmark event. On that day, the disarray of the entire Muslim
world spilled over in violence and bloodshed to the United States, and
so to the democracies of the West. Many Muslims like to suppose that the
United States and the West is to blame for everything wrong with their
own states. This, of course, is specious self-pity. Muslims are themselves
responsible for the failure of their states to modernize in today's world,
and for the bad government and corruption that plague them. 
