Into the Fray: Brain dead on the Right?

[Ken Burch]

92. I never said Palestinians are "limited" and you know it.

And I wasn't talking about democracy on the "need to be rewarded" thing either...I was talking about changes in tactics.

Stop twisting my words.

The Democratic Front didn't get many votes in the last election because they didn't have much of a program...not because Palestinians didn't care about democracy.

Besides which, none of the authorities leading the Occupation ever tried to teach Palestinians about democracy anyway, or did anything
to encourage it...instead, they often worked against it, such as when they arrested elected officials and refused to let them carry out the duties of their offices. That doesn't encourage democracy, and it wouldn't have encouraged democracy to bar Hamas from running in the PA elections-the only way you have actual democracy is to let people actually vote for the parties they want to vote for. Barring Hamas wouldn't have caused anyone to vote for a party that YOU would have preferred...instead, it would simply have driven those who were backing the party(most of whom did so for its anti-corruption image and the social service network it ran, not for the unpleasant parts of the program, as post-election interviews with many Hamas voters have borne out)to refuse to participate in elections at all, but to make other choices instead...many, many more of them would likely have chosen violence, and chosen it for the same sad reason everybody who chooses that does so...a sense that nothing else gives them a chance.

I'm all for Palestinians educating themselves about democracy...but it needs to be THEM doing it, especially since this isn't a postwar Germany situation in which the populace has been defeated(as I've pointed out, military victory is impossible for either side)and since your troops don't actually have the capacity to FORCE Palestinians to listen to your notions of civics lectures.

That's why negotiations have to happen, that's why there needs to be face-saving and sense that nobody was beaten or humiliated...because this can only end in compromise, and both sides need to come out of it with their self-respect intact. If you were, in defiance of reality and perhaps the laws of physics, to actually get the sort of crushing victory you'd need to act on post-world war II occupation terms, that wouldn't even be the end of the fighting...because all that would do would cause somebody ody else to rise up on the Palestinian side vowing to "avenge the shame", and then you'd be right back to where you started. Why go through out that because you think you can't be sure it WON'T work? Why place so much on what is clearly a long-shot bet?