What can we learn from this ungracious about-face? Again, the answer surely is not that we must mediate more, "work harder" on public relations, or learn more about Kuwait. What we know about it is already depressing enough. Since there is not a single democracy or free media in the Arab Middle East, there is almost no chance that religious figures, politicians, academics, intellectuals, and average people can debate honestly the growing contradictions between Islam and the modern world — or Islam's need for Western expertise and the ensuing resentment that such dependency apparently incurs. Instead the success and power of the United States — and to a lesser extent of Israel — in Pavlovian outbursts become the cheap targets when venting Middle-Eastern frustration at internal economic failure, religious hypocrisy, government autocracy, and endemic cultural contradiction, whether in an impoverished Egypt or the affluent Gulf."
Beichman on Arab demands: "Richard C. Hottelet, the CBS correspondent, once asked Maxim Litvinov, Stalin's erstwhile Soviet foreign minister: "Suppose the West were suddenly to give in and grant all Moscow's demands? Would that lead to good will and easing of the present tension?" Litvinov answered: "It would lead to the West's being faced after a more or less short time with the next series of demands." What applied to Stalin applies in even greater measure to Mr. Arafat, Prince Abdullah, Saddam Hussein, Hosni Mubarak, the whole kit and kaboodle. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat tried to make peace. His reward? Assassination, Oct. 6, 1981, at the hands of Islamic fundamentalists." (Arnold Beichman, Mar. 8)
Questioning Israel's tactics in war: Reknowned Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld has declared that the Israel Defence Force (IDF) will lose its war with the Palestinian terrorists. He says they have their strategy and tactics wrong.
Creveld's analysis is not wholly defeatist. He says that Israeli intelligence remains good and allows the IDF to avert many outrages. Shin Beth, the intelligence agency, has agents throughout the Palestinian community, some Arab, some Israeli passing as Arab. It also uses money, blackmail and intimidation to extract information. At present, Creveld says, Israel is winning, or at least not losing the war. However, he believes that the factors he identified during the first intifada are gaining in strength. The IDF, he says, was raised and is trained and equipped to fight wars of national survival against conventional armies in face-to-face battles. During the first intifada it was required to become a police force, which sapped its self-image as a heroic fighting force. It performed that task quite successfully, but now it is committed to reprisal missions, which often kill innocents and do not advance the object of deterring terrorists from further atrocities.This article in the Telegraph outlines some possible solutions.
... Creveld's words will have a bitter sting, for the ethos of the IDF is defined by the doctrine of "purity of arms", which allows Orthodox Jews to perform military service without violating their religious beliefs. The doctrine - an equivalent of the Christian Just War doctrine - holds that the use of violence is permissible as long as it is directed against enemies who are able to defend themselves. Once the prohibition against fighting the defenceless is broken, Creveld predicts, the army's ethos will be broken also. Worse, the breach will divide Israel and eventually provoke civil war.
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