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After Mombasa, moderation gets a
hearing
By N Janardhan
DUBAI
- Though retaliatory bloodshed by the Israeli government
is in the cards after Thursday's suicide bombing at a
Kenyan hotel and a failed missile attack on a plane
carrying Israeli holidaymakers, calls for a truce and
peace are starting to receive a better hearing now than
they did just a few months ago.
It is yet to be
established which of the three suspected and claimant
groups - al-Qaeda, Al Aqsa Brigades or the Army of
Palestine - are behind the Kenya attacks. But analysts
say that each had a message to send in Thursday's
attacks, which came less than two months after the
October car bomb blasts in Bali, Indonesia, that killed
nearly 200 people.
According to Nabil
Abdel-Fattah, assistant director of the Cairo-based Al
Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, if it
were the Palestinians, the timing appeared to coincide
with Israel's Likud party primaries, in which Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon defeated his more hardline rival,
Foreign Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
"It was to
show that the Sharon option, the Likud option, was not a
solution to the Palestine problem," he told the United
Arab Emirates' television show The Gulf Today.
If al-Qaeda was behind the Kenya attacks, it
would probably have been trying to mobilize support from
Arabs who have questioned why it had hit US targets but
not Israel or Israelis. In this case, Abdel-Fattah said,
the objective would have been to produce "a new wave of
supporters for al-Qaeda network".
But whatever
group is responsible for the attacks, the emphasis on
violence as a means to achieve a political end may cut
little ice, even among Arabs, because of concern about
retaliatory attacks by the United States and Israel
against Muslims.
Even conservative Saudi Arabia
had reservations about the Kenya attacks. Friday's Arab
News editorial, reflecting official thinking, was
scathing, "To target and kill civilians is the worst of
crimes against humanity. Killing Israeli holidaymakers,
or those waiting for buses in Israel, is no different to
Serbs slaughtering the innocents of Srebrenica, other
than in scale. Those who organized the Mombasa attacks
are on a par with the Milosevics and Karadzics of this
world - just as cruel, vile and culpable."
Thus,
the latest attacks have paradoxically provided Middle
Eastern moderates another chance to push for dialogue
over the agenda of hostility being pushed by hardliners
of all sides.
The hardliners' agenda was
accentuated by an attack by Palestinian fighters outside
a Likud party office in the northern town of Beit Shean
last Thursday. Sharon responded by ordering the
intelligence agency Mossad, which has a reputation for
ruthless pursuit of opponents, to track down those
behind the Kenya attacks. "Our hand will reach them,"
Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz said on television.
But the week also carried reports about
significant comments by Mahmoud Abbas, deputy of
Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, that sharply
attacked Palestinian resistance groups and said that the
armed uprising against Israel was a mistake and must be
stopped.
The comments by a possible successor to
Arafat, made at a closed meeting last month and reported
on Wednesday, were seen as a milestone in the debate on
the two-year intifadah or uprising.
"We should
... ask ourselves, not by beating ourselves up, but by
reviewing the mistakes we made, where we are headed," he
said. Polls predict that continued violence will give
Sharon a better chance of retaining his job as Israelis
could shift to a more hardline stance in the Middle East
conflict and take the line that Israel's moves against
the Palestinians is part of the global war against
terror.
But Labor challenger Amram Mitzna - who
argues that a peace process, not military might, is the
only long-term answer - has forced the Palestinian
National Authority to deviate from its declared policy
of not intervening in Israeli domestic politics.
For the first time, Palestinian officials are
openly urging Israelis to vote for Mitzna if they want
peace and security. In an unprecedented move,
Palestinian newspapers are full of paid advertisements
calling for an end to attacks inside Israel in order to
help Mitzna and his Labor Party.
A poll by the
Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research
released on Thursday found that the majority of
Palestinians want their police to crack down on those
attacking Israelis. The poll showed that although 53
percent of Palestinians still supported attacking
Israeli civilians and 90 percent supported attacks on
soldiers and Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza
Strip, 76 percent said that they backed efforts to reach
a mutual ceasefire. This is a sharp rise from the 48
percent who wanted an end to violence three months ago.
For many, dialogue may be worth trying since the
intifadah has yielded little in the past two years. But
for this to happen, Israel has to relent from its
position of "no negotiation until violence ceases",
because Palestinian resistance will never stop, and by
that logic, negotiations will never begin.
The
same applies to the United States. Analysts say that
rather than harp only on a military solution to end
terror, it needs to initiate genuine political dialogue
in the Arab world to strengthen the moderates' argument
against violence.
"Washington needs to remember
that terror is impossible to root out until there are
political solutions on the ground. It only takes an
individual to wreak havoc. Such individuals can be
stopped only by a just and fair solution to the Middle
East crisis, not by military power," said political
analyst Salim Al Jashi of the UAE's Al Itihad in an
interview.
"The United States also needs to
realize that Iraq is not the immediate danger. If it
needs to tackle terror, al-Qaeda must be the target
because it has a global reach, not Baghdad," Jashi said.
But there is ample scope for the hawks, who put
al-Qaeda and the Palestinian campaign against Israeli
occupation in one category, to gain ground as well.
According to an Israeli government statement, "Whether
in New York or Washington, Bali or Moscow, Mombasa or
Beit Shean, terrorism is indivisible, and all attempts
to understand it will only serve to ensure its
continuation."
(Inter Press Service)
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