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Dear Ida Lit,
Omar would like you to read the following article from english.daralhayat.com.
The sender also included the following message for you:
-------------------------------------------------------------Can Israel Learn a New Language?
Patrick Seale Al-Hayat - 28/04/06//
For the first time in its history, Israel is to have a defence minister with no military background. This is a welcome development in an otherwise sombre Middle East scene. It raises the faint, if perhaps utopian, hope that Israel may rethink its relations with the region, choosing a language of good neighbourliness rather than of force.
Any such change would have an immediate beneficial impact on Israel's current, potentially explosive, confrontation with both the Islamic Palestinian movement Hamas and with the Islamic Republic of Iran, introducing an element of rationality in a situation which threatens to spin dangerously out of control.
Amir Peretz, Israel's defence minister-designate, is a Moroccan Jew whose family emigreated to Israel in 1956 when he was four years old. He grew up in Sderot, a poor development town in the south of the country. An accident during his military service put him in a wheel chair for a couple of year before he recovered the use of!
his legs.
He became a farmer, was elected mayor of his home town from 1983 to 1988, and rose to be head of Israel's trade union federation, the Histadrut. This gave him a launch-pad into national politics. Last November, he sprang a great surprise by defeating the veteran Shimon Peres for the leadership of the Labour Party. Labour is today the main coalition partner of Kadima, led by the prime minister-designate, Ehud Olmert.
During the recent election campaign, Peretz introduced a new tone in Israeli politics with such statements as: 'It is time for Israel to end its arrogance towards the Arabs. Peace is the best guarantee of security.' Or the following: 'I see the occupation as an immoral act… I want to end the occupation not because of Palestinian pressure, but because I see it as an Israeli interest.'
Will these sentiments survive the burden of office? Peretz's daunting task will be to take control of Israel's swollen military establishment -a veritable !
state-within-the-state, gorged with American money and American weapon
s, whose philosophy may be summed up in the phrase 'the only good Arab is a dead Arab.'
Since the creation of the state in 1948, Israel's political leaders have used the IDF to dominate the region by military force. This was the strategy of Israel's founding prime minister David Ben-Gurion, a path followed almost without exception by his successors. There is no sign that Ehud Olmert has any intention of departing from it.
The real question is whether Amir Peretz, at the head of the powerful defence ministry, will be able to steer Israel in a less aggressive direction. Unlike his predecessors in the job -- and indeed unlike anyone in the senior ranks of the IDF and the various security agencies -- he has no blood on his hands. His name is not associated with the massacres, assassinations, invasions and lethal raids which have marked Israel's relations with its neighbours. This gives him an advantage in terms of his credibility with the Arabs and the international comm!
unity.
It remains to be seen, however, whether he will be able to reshape Israel's military doctrine in a more conciliatory direction or whether, on the contrary, the defence ministry will reshape him.
How will Peretz deal with the immediate challenges from Hamas and Iran? Will his voice be heard in the Olmert government? Will he be able to argue in favour of dialogue and negotiation rather than war?
Together with the United States, Israel has already embarked on a violently confrontational policy towards both the Palestinian Islamic movement and the Islamic Republic of Iran. In both Tel Aviv and Washington, the immediate Pavlovian instinct has been to threaten Iran with military attack, and at the same time to boycot and starve Hamas.
According to the Israeli daily Haaretz, Israel and the U.S. are cooperating in efforts to prevent the transfer of funds to the Hamas government, while Washington is planning a 'financial assault' on Iran that would include targeti!
ng Iranian bank acounts in Europe and Iranian-owned financial institut
ions. Stuart Levey, under-secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence at the U.S. Department of the Treasury is in Israel this week to coordinate economic measures against both Iran and Hamas.
Israel's more hawkish leaders are inclined to liquidate their opponents, rather than simply cutting off their funds. Shaul Mofaz, the outgoing defence minister, and Danny Yatom, a former Mossad chief, have both advocated murdering Hamas leaders. 'Even Hamas government ministers are legitimate targets for assassination,' Yatom told Israel Army radio last Friday, while a well known Israeli columnist, ……, has called for a Mossad hit team to assassinate Iran's President Mahmud Ahmadinehad, widely depicted as a new Hitler.
In any normal country, such views would cause outrage, and their authors would be condemned. In Israel, they appear normal. The question is whether such belligerant attitudes are so deeply ingrained in the Israeli psyche as to resist any possibility of ch!
ange.
A handful of Israelis, such as the peace activist Galia Golan and the former Labour minister Shlomo Ben Ami, have suggested talking to Hamas rather than fighting it. But, to my knowledge, no Israeli commentator or politician has yet suggested that Ahmadinejad's rash remarks about 'wiping Israel from the map' may be nothing more than an angry reaction to Israel's brutal treatment of the Palestinians rather than an indication of a real intention to destroy the Jewish state -- an ambition, in any event, far beyond Iran's means.
Any fair-minded observer of the Middle East will recognise that Hamas is demanding no more than reciprocity from Israel: recognise Palestinian rights and we will recognise you; stop your targeted killings and we will stop our terrorist attacks (Hamas has in fact done so for the past fifteen months); declare your willingness to live at peace and respect agreements and we will do so also.
The trouble is that Israel is not prepared to deal w!
ith the Palestinians, or indeed with any of its neighbours, on a basis
of equality. It wants to dominate and dictate terms, seeing this as the only guarantee of security.
Similarly, the U.S. administration of President George W Bush prefers preventive war to deterrence and containment. It cannot conceive of a negotiation between equals with Iran, in which the interests of both sides are addressed, including security interests and the place of Iran in the highly important Gulf region. The U.S. wants submission rather than cooperation. But in the present mood of the Muslim world this will not be forthcoming.
Meanwhile, the world is getting seriously alarmed at American belligerance. After the disaster in Iraq, a war with Iran would be too terrible to contemplate. An urgent call for negotiations with Tehran was made this week by Zbigniew Bzezinski, national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, as well as by four former foreign ministers - Madeleine Albright of the U.S., Joschka Fischer of Germany, Hubert Védrine of France, and their!
Polish, Dutch and Luxembourg colleagues. (International Herald Tribune, 26 April.)
Bezezinski said that an attack on Iran would be an 'act of political folly' and 'a reckless adventure profoundly damaging to long-term U.S. national interests.' Pointing a finger at Israel and its American supporters, he denounced 'the same sources that earlier urged war on Iraq.'
But what argument, what appeal, can curb the war-like instincts of Washington and Tel Aviv? Some leaders can only speak in the language of force. Can the little Moroccan with his trademark Joseph Stalin moustache make a difference? end
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