April 11, 2002
The endgame of the current fighting in the Middle East is not a pretty one. In my mind's eye, I see Yasser Arafat and some of his henchmen sitting in a room and toasting their stunning victory over the infidel hordes.
And outside the building, which is the only one left standing in what used to be the Palestinian-controlled areas near Israel, there's nothing left. The cities and towns, gone. The young men, killed in suicide bombings or Israeli attacks. The women, just as dead, or refugees. The children, martyrs to the holy cause.
And the Palestinian leadership will celebrate and hail the sacrifice made in the name of a pock-marked old man and his belief in the need to settle scores thousands of years old. To Arafat and his ilk, all
this death and destruction is worth it. When people suffer from bad, self-serving leadership, sacrifice for
the cause becomes the order of the day. Bosses in high towers claim spiritual superiority over the masses, leverage that into political and material superiority, hire men with guns to defend those perks and privileges, and set off on their ruinous path.
The dead don't matter to such leaders. All those young men's lives are a sacrifice Arafat and Co. are more than willing to make. You won't see them -- or their male relatives -- on the firing line, of course. That's for the little people.
Instead of having jobs, building lives, raising families and improving their land, Palestinian men have little to do but march, protest and wave their fists -- and die for Arafat. On the Israeli side, civilians and soldiers live in fear, wanting the killing to stop but needing to respond to the provocations.
If they let the Palestinians run completely amok and the only thing left to fight over will be a smoking pit of ruin surrounded by rocks and dirt. And they'll still fight over the rocks and dirt -- with rocks and
dirt.
Greater columnists than I, in other papers, have declaimed in a similar mode. Training a new generation for nothing more than fighting and dying does the present generation few favors and the future ones none.
There will eventually be a winner in the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but even then there will be plenty of losers. Israel's tourist economy has taken a beating, the economy on both sides is a shambles and the fear that, even if a peace accord is ever signed, someone will decide to settle old scores means that fear and anxiety will reside in the minds of the inhabitants long after the last shot is fired.
Maybe if Arafat and his crew would spend more time thinking about how to make life better for his people than how to get them killed to make a political point, the life they keep claiming to want might come to pass.
The alternative is oblivion -- for both sides.
Vincent F. Safuto is a copy editor for the Press Journal. Reach him at Vincent.Safuto@scripps.com.
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