Key to Peace: Wean Arabs From Self-Pity

According to popular rumor in the Arab world, the Sept. 11 attacks weren’t committed by Muslims but by the Israeli Mossad. Who, the thinking goes, had the most to gain by blackening the name of Islam if not the Jews? The blame-the-Jews approach is hardly confined to poorly educated circles. It is amplified by state-controlled Arab media, and even the Syrian defense minister, Mustafa Talas, has repeated the canard to foreign dignitaries.

That demented conspiracy theory is only the most extreme example of a widespread refusal among Arabs to examine their own culpability in legitimizing terrorism. Hardly any Arab voices have been raised against the grotesque Islamic war against Israel that turns young men into human bombs and desecrates the name of God and Islam. According to Arab apologists, Muslim terrorism doesn’t exist. That’s because suicide bombers who blow themselves up aren’t terrorists but freedom fighters driven to desperation by the Israeli occupation.

The desperation argument is as pathetic, in its way, as the conspiracy rumors about Sept. 11. Last year at Camp David, then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered to redivide Jerusalem. He also offered to create a Palestinian state on about 90% of the territories; six months later, he offered nearly 100% of the territories, including full contiguity on the West Bank. These offers were violently rejected by the Palestinians, who insist on the “right” to destroy Israel by inundating the Jewish state with hostile Palestinian refugees.

Two years ago, Barak’s concessions--especially on Jerusalem--would have been inconceivable. Yet almost no Arab voices have questioned whether Yasser Arafat made a mistake in turning down the offer, or whether a few percentage points of contested territory justify terrorism.

In their self-perception, Arabs are victims of history, never its initiators. Others are always to blame for the Arab world’s corruption and suppression of independent thought and crushing poverty. Terrorism is merely self-defense against aggression; political rejectionism is insistence on absolute justice. In the name of justice, the Arabs have rejected every fair solution to the Palestinian problem, beginning with the British government’s Peel Commission in 1937, through the U.N. partition plan of 1947, to Camp David in 2000. No people has rejected statehood more often than the Palestinians.

Unlike the Arab world--which insists that justice belongs exclusively to its side--the Israeli public has largely abandoned its own simplistic notion that the occupation of the Palestinians is compatible with maintaining a democratic and Jewish state. Aside from the hard right, most Israelis now concede that both sides share ample rights and wrongs, and are themselves ready to make far-reaching compromises--provided that the Arab world genuinely accepts the legitimacy of a Jewish state. Tragedies like last week’s accidental death of five Gaza children, killed by an Israeli mine, remind Israelis of why we initiated the Oslo process.

But after months of Arafat-approved terrorism, most Israelis now suspect that even a full withdrawal won’t bring peace, but only draw Palestinian gunmen within range of our population centers. That is why a majority of Israelis voted for the once unelectable Ariel Sharon.

As Gen. Anthony Zinni launches yet another American mediation mission to the Middle East, well-intentioned outsiders need to understand that the key to peace is to wean the Arab world away from self-pity and force it to be accountable for indulging terrorism. Indeed, one reason Arabs remain addicted to self-pity is because the international community lets them get away with it.

The challenge is no longer to find the right balance of mutual concessions between Arabs and Israelis--as Secretary of State Colin Powell now seeks to do--but to insist that the Arab world examine its own failures. Without the kind of self-criticism to which Israeli society routinely submits, Arabs will continue to blame everyone but themselves for their share in perpetuating the conflict.