[Congressional Record Volume 148, Number 37 (Tuesday, April 9, 2002)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E447]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 THE HARD TRUTH, BY THOMAS C. FRIEDMAN

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. MARCY KAPTUR

                                of ohio

                    in the house of representatives

                         Tuesday, April 9, 2002

  Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, I submit the following article.

                [From the New York Times, Apr. 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     not to create the conditions for them to be withdrawn.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 a disingenuous as Mr. 
     Sharon; he says ending ``terrorism'' alone will bring peace 
     to the occupied terrorities, 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.

     

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