Transmeta (Semiconductor) (TMTA)

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A Palestinian State is inevitable, but it is so difficult to envision a workable plan to get there. My favorite writer on the Middle East is Tom Friedman of the NYT. He wrote a column yesterday which I feel is well worth reading:

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/03/opinion/03FRIE.html

April 3, 2002
The Hard Truth
By Thomas L. Friedman

A terrible disaster is in the making in the Middle East. What Osama bin Laden failed to achieve on Sept. 11 is now being unleashed by the Israeli-Palestinian war in the West Bank: a clash of civilizations.

In the wake of repeated suicide bombings, it is no surprise that the Israeli Army has gone on the offensive in the West Bank. Any other nation would have done the same. But Ariel Sharon's operation will succeed only if it is designed to make the Israeli-occupied territories safe for Israel to leave as soon as possible. Israel's goal must be a withdrawal from these areas captured in the 1967 war; otherwise it will never know a day's peace, and it will undermine every legitimate U.S. effort to fight terrorism around the globe.

What I fear, though, is that Mr. Sharon wants to get rid of Mr. Arafat in order to keep Israeli West Bank settlements, not to create the conditions for them to be withdrawn.
President Bush needs to be careful that America doesn't get sucked into something very dangerous here. Mr. Bush has rightly condemned Palestinian suicide bombing as beyond the pale, but he is not making clear that Israel's war against this terrorism has to be accompanied by a real plan for getting out of the territories.

Why? Because President Bush, like all the other key players, doesn't want to face the central dilemma in this conflict —— which is that while Israel must get out of the West Bank and Gaza, the Palestinians cannot, at this moment, be trusted to run those territories on their own, without making them a base of future operations against Israel. That means some outside power has to come in to secure the borders, and the only trusted powers would be the U.S. or NATO.

Palestinians who use suicide bombers to blow up Israelis at a Passover meal and then declare "Just end the occupation and everything will be fine" are not believable. No Israeli in his right mind would trust Yasir Arafat, who has used suicide bombers when it suited his purposes, not to do the same thing if he got the West Bank back and some of his people started demanding Tel Aviv.

"The only solution is a new U.N. mandate for U.S. and NATO troops to supervise the gradual emergence of a Palestinian state —— after a phased Israeli withdrawal —— and then to control its borders," says the Middle East expert Stephen P. Cohen.

People say that U.S. troops there would be shot at like U.S. troops in Beirut. I disagree. U.S. troops that are the midwife of a Palestinian state and supervise a return of Muslim sovereignty over the holy mosques in Jerusalem would be the key to solving all the contradictions of U.S. policy in the Middle East, not new targets.

The Arab leaders don't want to face this hard fact either, because most are illegitimate, unelected autocrats who are afraid of ever speaking the truth in public to the Palestinians. The Arab leaders are as disingenuous as Mr. Sharon; he says ending "terrorism" alone will bring peace to the occupied territories, and the Arab leaders say ending "the occupation" alone will end all terrorism.

Like Mr. Sharon, the Arab leaders need to face facts —— that while the occupation needs to end, they independently need to address issues like suicide terrorism in the name of Islam. As Malaysia's prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, courageously just declared about suicide bombing: "Bitter and angry though we may be, we must demonstrate to the world that Muslims are rational people when fighting for our rights, and do not resort to acts of terror."

If Arab leaders have only the moral courage to draw lines around Israel's behavior, but no moral courage to decry the utterly corrupt and inept Palestinian leadership, or the depravity of suicide bombers in the name of Islam, then we're going nowhere.

The other people who have not wanted to face facts are the feckless American Jewish leaders, fundamentalist Christians and neoconservatives who together have helped make it impossible for anyone in the U.S. administration to talk seriously about halting Israeli settlement-building without being accused of being anti-Israel. Their collaboration has helped prolong a colonial Israeli occupation that now threatens the entire Zionist enterprise.

So there you have it. Either leaders of good will get together and acknowledge that Israel can't stay in the territories but can't just pick up and leave, without a U.S.-NATO force helping Palestinians oversee their state, or Osama wins —— and the war of civilizations will be coming to a theater near you.



regards, wsh