At the beginning of the Oslo Process, I said to friends that Rabin was acting, to my mind, like someone with a deep psychological disability, as if he knew that he was getting into trouble but figured that, damn it all, he'd just rush through and finish with it and then turn around to see if he could fix things. But to stop in the middle and take stock and make alterations, that he was mentally incapable of doing.Going a step further, I think we can draw an altogether different comparison of sorts between the previous movie, Pirates of the Carribean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, and Palestinian politics.
In the movie, the crew of the Black Pearl is cursed to exist as undead until the entire Aztec treasure they have stolen is returned in it's entirety. Jack Sparrow, the former captain of the ship against whom the crew mutinied, was marooned by them and now he is to both regain his ship and get revenge against his former crew.
How does one wreak vengeance against the undead? Sparrow facilitates their ability to recover all of the cursed treasure, at the right moment--killing the captain and putting the rest of the pirates at the mercy of the authorities.
This, of course, is the basic plan of the West in dealing with Hamas.
The underlying attitude of the West towards the January elections was that taking Hamas from an existence of terrorism and putting them into a life of politics, where they would have the responsibilty for the day-to-day affairs of the Palestinians, would somehow mellow Hamas and make them easier to deal with.
Of course, this assumption failed because of a fundamental difference between the crew of the Black Pearl and Hamas: the crew of the Black Pearl wanted to live and enjoy all the sensations that life entails. On the other hand, Hamas is willing--or so they make a point of claiming--to die and is not attached to life to the extent that Israel is.
True, Pirates of the Carribean, is only a movie...a pretense put on for an audience.
Then again, Hamas and the Palestinians know how to play to their audience too.
Technorati Tag: Israel and Hamas and Rabin and Oslo.
2 comments:
Nice development of the theory. I recall Golda's phrase "we won't forgive the Arabs for causing us to kill them" and thinking, well, it sounds nice but totally impractical in the long roun.
Either way, whether it is as a result of counter-terror operations or even in actual war, the emotional toll has been enormous. This in additional to the tragic loss of life on both sides.
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