The Arafat Generation and the Jihad Generation
From the David Samuels piece in Atlantic, In a Ruined Country, the story of Arafat’s missed opportunity to create a functioning Palestine, through corruption, cronyism and his narcissistic but charismatic leadership (recommended by Christopher Hitchens):
For the members of the old guard questions about how a few million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza were to be governed were not of any particular interest. The Palestinian question was part of the larger pan-Arab discourse that had occupied the Nasserite and anti-colonialist study groups of their student days in Cairo, Damascus, and Beirut. As the symbolic leader of the Palestinian people, Yasir Arafat was the incarnation of a revolution that presented itself as a model for the rest of the Arab world—a symbol of secular revolutionary purity and anti-colonial zeal that had been supplanted in the eighties by the success of the Iranian revolution, the Sunni fundamentalist jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and Hizbollah’s war against the Israelis in Lebanon.
The predominant note in the old guard’s reminiscences of their leader is nostalgia for the sense of the historical centrality of the Palestinian national struggle that Arafat provided, which was as addictive to his followers as any drug.
The Arafat Generation was confusing to understand, as a result of its mix of Islam, revoltiuon and anti-colonialism, as well as its rampant corruption. The mix of a bit of sacred and a lot of profane made it easy to see in the West as a movement whose leaders could be bought off, and its followers co-opted. The Jihad Generation is something else entirely. The Jihad Generation has, as one of its rare virtues, a crystalline mission. Khaled Maashal, whom we cited below, describes the Hamas mission in Palestine today in the Guardian:
The US and EU could have used the success of Hamas to open a new chapter in their relations with the Palestinians, the Arabs and the Muslims and to understand better a movement that has so far been seen largely through the eyes of the Zionist occupiers of our land.
Our message to the US and EU governments is this: your attempt to force us to give up our principles or our struggle is in vain. Our people who gave thousands of martyrs, the millions of refugees who have waited for nearly 60 years to return home and our 9,000 political and war prisoners in Israeli jails have not made those sacrifices in order to settle for close to nothing.
Our message to the Palestinians is this: our people are not only those who live under siege in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip but also the millions languishing in refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria and the millions spread around the world unable to return home. We promise you that nothing in the world will deter us from pursuing our goal of liberation and return.
“Home” to Maashad is the real estate currently called Israel, and it has no business being on the map, as we have discussed; Palestine is a Muslim land and must return to Muslim control. Hamas, the Sunni jihadis, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad share goals they identify as specifically Islamic and religiously dictated, for Muslims to control their historic lands, and to then achieve worldwide dominance of Islam by persuasion or the sword. So far this has been a Holy War on one side, and a war-of-no-particular-rationale on the other side. How long that will persist is still an open question. With the Jihad Generation of Hamas and Ahmadinejad now in power, there will likely be explosive moments of clarity in the future.
January 31st, 2006 at 3:09 pm
Israelis have learned to tolerate the Jihad Generation; more than a few of the many crazed lefties ( ” smolim ” in Hebrew ) quietly support the palestinians to harbor such views.
As much as I abhor palestinian views tacitly ( and sometimes not so tacitly ) comparing zionism with nazism and blaming Israel for every evil found in the Middle East, and of course the empty skirts and empty suits that host the alphabet soup MSM and al-Reuters and AP or Arab Press, the Israeli Establishment must be blamed as well.
The elites that run the country’s government, corporations and military have decided that their pensions and trade are more important than the country’s well-being ( not unlike many CEOs that have made their own cost-benefit analyses and will sell anything to the arab muslims; products or hotel chains or shares in many corporatons).
The Govt of Israel has allowed mesages and symbols of hatred to appear in Palestinian media
( according to Daniel Pipes, MEMRI and other groups ) as well as hate filled schoolbooks to be distributed in schools and Universities.
The Israeli Military is very well armed but its leaders based upon their judgements of the people of Israel, have neither the will nor the desire at this time to use their tanks, helicopters, airplanes, missiles and bombs to wipe out their enemy. Afraid of the bad press they will receive in either the NY Times or LA Times or The Guardian or TIME magazine, etc..
They have decided that a terrorist explosion every two months is something they must live with if there is to be any peace with their arab muslim neighbours, some day.
It is just my opinion that they have come to believe the words in the Dusty Springfield song
” Wishin’ and Hopin’ ” instead of seeing reality.
If Israel was a territory belonging to either The Peoples Republic of China or the former Soviet Union, I believe that the palestinains and perhaps the entire arab world would have been wiped off the map decades ago
The problem is that the arab muslims hate them but the Israelis, not only do not hate them back but a generation has been wrongly taught that ” a few bad apples don’t spoil the whole bunch “.
Jeff Burke
Montreal, Canada