Rage in the Middle East -- September 11, Crisis Resolution

Posted May 16, 2002
By Pamela Harris

Rage in the Middle East: Raging On!

Dennis Sandole
Prof. of Conflict Resolution and International Relations

The picture of Yasser Arafat on the first page of the Washington Post (2 May 2002) after the Israelis lifted the one-month siege of his headquarters in Ramallah says it all: "rage!" Why would Arafat or any Palestinian experience rage? Held captive and hostage, isolated and occupied militarily -- in effect, marginalized not just by Israel but by the international community for half a century -- plus Ariel Sharon's recent assaults on refugee camps and townships: these and other aspects of Palestinian life experiences might make them feel that "Death is a way of life" (see Washington Post, 24 April 2002, pp. C1 & C8).

What might rage lead to? For expressing one's frustration, suicide bombings might be considered an option, albeit a grim, indiscriminate one, especially for Palestinians who lack the trappings of state power possessed by Israel and used against them: F-16 fighter jets, Apache helicopter gunships and tanks, not to mention the ever-present, home-destroying bulldozers. So, dispossessed, disempowered, desperate Palestinians could likely blow themselves up, along with Israelis, as they have been doing, as their way to communicate their rage, to be "heard" by their occupiers and the international community at large.

In other settings, frustration-based rage has been a factor in explaining violent behaviors, including horribly violent behaviors, such as the suicide bombings. And then, as expressed in the Report of The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (the Kerner Commission Report on the urban riots in the U.S.) in 1968, long-term structural as well as short-term security measures are usually advanced for dealing with that rage, so that the horribly violent behaviors do not have to repeat themselves.

But what do we see in the Middle East, with U.S. complicity? Under the cover of the U.S.-led "War on Terror," Israeli Prime Minister Sharon has been reducing to rubble Palestinian residential areas already under Israeli siege or domination, preventing a UN mission from investigating highly probable war crimes in the Jenin refugee camp, and in the process, creating legions of future suicide bombers among the youth photographed digging through the rubble of their homes looking for loved ones and personal possessions. And yet both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives yesterday endorsed, overwhelmingly, Israel's military campaign to "dismantle the terrorist infrastructure" [Washington Post, 3 May 2002, p. A18] despite evidence of probable violations of human rights in Jenin.

As long as the deep-rooted causes of Palestinian rage are not addressed, Israel, with one of the most powerful armed forces in the world, will continue to pulverize the already vanquished who have nothing to lose -- why else would a young Palestinian girl blow herself to bits?? -- enhancing rather than decimating the "terrorist infrastructure" among the Palestinians.

When I was in Israel in 1989, during the first Intifada, a Libyan Jewish woman told me, "We may have to kill them all one day!" When Daniel Greenbaum asked, in his recent letter to the editor of the Washington Post (1 May 2002, p. A24), "if Palestinian nationalism will be satisfied only with the extermination of Israel, then shouldn't Israel do anything necessary to protect itself from such nationalism?", he was also capturing such an extreme view, including more recent examples:

"We have to kill them all, all the Arabs. Why does half the world tell us not to go to war? If we want, we could kill them in one hour" and "Let's really let them understand what the implication of their actions is... Very simply, wipe them out. Level them."

By contrast, there are the 300-plus Israeli reservists who feel that their country's "35-year occupation [of the Palestinians] has corrupted the nation," who refuse any longer to "dominate, expel, starve, and humiliate" the Palestinians (Washington Post, 28 January 2002, p. A17; 2 March 2002, p. A16). There is also the young Israeli journalist, Ilan Goren, who talks about what his generation is going through (Washington Post, 17 March, p. B2):

confusion, loss of belief, a quiet despair born of the realization that we kill them and they kill us and nobody is any better off. ... Can anyone in the government see that wrecking Palestinian houses, invading homes, killing hundreds and degrading another nation is not only an inefficient way to fight terror, but also is immoral?

These alternative voices are captured by another member of the Jewish community, American journalist Richard Cohen, who argued recently in the Washington Post (30 April, p. A19):
If I were a Palestinian living in a refugee camp, I might very well hate Israel for my plight -- never mind its actual cause -- and I even might not like Jews in general. ... The Palestinians do have a case. Their methods are sometimes -- maybe often -- execrable, but that does not change the fact that they are a people without a state. So long as that persists so too will their struggle.

The only way out of the current mess is for each side to listen to what the other is saying. To protest living conditions on the West Bank is not anti-Semitism. To condemn the increasing encroachment of Jewish settlements is not anti-Semitism. To protest the cuffing that the Israelis sometimes give the international press is not anti-Semitism either.

To suggest, finally, that Ariel Sharon is a rejectionist who provocatively egged on the Palestinians is not anti-Semitism. Clearly, there are members of the Jewish community, in Israel and the Diaspora, who are willing to negotiate with Palestinians. And unless one wants to assume that all Palestinians are terrorists (as some Israeli settlers do), there are clearly Palestinians who want to negotiate with the Israelis. Even Yasser Arafat is still willing to negotiate with his nemesis, Ariel Sharon.

So, all is not lost! But where does that leave the international community? Former Undersecretary of the U.S. Air Force, Dr. Antonia Chayes, put forward some interesting ideas in the Washington Post (28 April, p, B3) for achieving peace in the region, including: "An international peacekeeping force -- made up of NATO troops with U.S. participation," which would provide security plus the necessary separation of the parties to allow for a cooling-off period to encourage the dialogue that Richard Cohen talks about.

Such a dialogue should deal with the underlying causes and conditions and not just the symptoms of conflict -- suicide bombings, occupation, destruction of refugee camps -- because dealing only with symptoms in the absence of dealing with the deep-rooted causes helps keep the conflict alive.

That was what the Kerner Commission Report suggested some 30 years ago, with implications for rage-based conflicts elsewhere. Why reinvent the wheel? Why wait any longer for further suicide bombings and Jenins to exacerbate what is already, according to Antonia Chayes, "a threat to international peace"?

So, as the U.S., together with other members of the international "quartet, -- the UN, EU, and Russian Federation -- develop "plans for an international peace conference on the Middle East early this summer to accelerate negotiations over a final political settlement between the Israelis and Palestinians" (Washington Post, 3 May 2002,p. A1), perhaps the time has finally come to plan and deploy that international peacekeeping force that Antonia Chayes has recommended.