History Holds Its Breath
It's a picnic on a volcano. Mount Etna has been erupting off and on for over 2 million years, and that's just about how it feels in the Middle East with the Arab-Israeli confrontation. Beneath the current calm, the lava boils, and a half-attentive world is deluded into thinking peace is finally on the way, following the death of the destructive Yasser Arafat and the election of the "constructive" Abu Mazen.
Keep the champagne in the picnic basket. Nothing has changed. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, is a weak leader on all fronts. The changes he has made are only nominal. He runs the same Palestinian Authority with post-Arafat diplomacy resting on the old Arafat bureaucracy, from the personal assistants within the chairman's office to the Arafat old-timers running many of the ministries. Failure to end the Palestinian Authority's endemic corruption has so alienated the younger echelons of Fatah that the deputy speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council, Hassan Harisha, and the head of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Raji Sourani, have both publicly expressed disappointment that Abu Mazen has neither removed the dishonest bureaucrats from the organization nor restored law and order by transforming the security forces.
Third intifada. This latter failure is the smoke and ash that should alert the world to the impending danger. The officers of the dozen or so Palestinian security agencies are virtually local warlords who continue to collect bribes and protection money from the people they're supposed to be protecting. Their commanders follow Abu Mazen's orders only when they feel like it. The result is continuing disorder in Palestinian cities. Gunmen shoot at will--recently, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades opened fire on the very restaurants frequented by Palestinian Authority officials in Ramallah. These same thugs have thumbed their noses at Abu Mazen's order not to appear in public with weapons. Marauding gangs of Fatah-affiliated gunmen remain unchecked. Wanted men roam freely in Ramallah and Jenin; Abu Mazen does nothing to stop them. He promised Israel he would disarm 495 fugitives and killers on Israel's most-wanted list, remove them from their terrorist organizations, and restrict their intercity travel. He has not done any of it. Instead, he has allowed them to enter the cities turned over to the Palestinian Authority, places like Tulkarm and Jericho, because these cities became safe havens once the Israelis agreed not to enter them. Israeli intelligence has concluded that these terrorists are planning attacks for the next round of violence--in effect, a third intifada. Other than dismissing a group of aging generals, without changing the orders not to fire on the terrorists, and speaking out against terrorist violence as a tactical rather than a moral matter, the only thing Abu Mazen has accomplished is to execute dozens of Palestinians who were helping the Israelis root out Palestinian terrorists. No less a dove than Shlomo Ben-Ami, Ehud Barak's foreign minister, has written that Abu Mazen "is moderate in his strategy, not his goals, which are no different from Arafat's goals."
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