"Fellow Arabs..."

[Slide On The Ice]

http://www.spme.net/cgi-bin/articles.cgi?ID=798

DEAR BRETHREN, THE WAR WITH ISRAEL IS OVER BY YOUSSEF IBRAHIM
By Yousseff Ibrahim
Published in: The New York Sun July 7, 2006

Dear Brethren, the War With Israel Is Over

By YOUSSEF IBRAHIM
July 7, 2006

As Israel enters the third week of an incursion into the same Gaza Strip it voluntarily evacuated a few months ago, a sense of reality among Arabs is spreading through commentary by Arab pundits, letters to the editor, and political talk shows on Arabic-language TV networks.The new views are stunning both in their maturity and in their realism. The best way I can think of to convey them is in the form of a letter to the Palestinian Arabs from their Arab friends:


Dear Palestinian Arab brethren:

The war with Israel is over.

You have lost. Surrender and negotiate to secure a future for your children.

We, your Arab brothers, may say until we are blue in the face that we stand by you, but the wise among you and most of us know that we are moving on, away from the tired old idea of the Palestinian Arab cause and the "eternal struggle" with Israel.

Dear friends, you and your leaders have wasted three generations trying to fight for Palestine, but the truth is the Palestine you could have had in 1948 is much bigger than the one you could have had in 1967, which in turn is much bigger than what you may have to settle for now or in another 10 years. Struggle means less land and more misery and utter loneliness.

At the moment, brothers, you would be lucky to secure a semblance of a state in that Gaza Strip into which you have all crowded, and a small part of the West Bank of the Jordan. It isn't going to get better. Time is running out even for this much land, so here are some facts, figures, and sound advice, friends.

You hold keys, which you drag out for television interviews, to houses that do not exist or are inhabited by Israelis who have no intention of leaving Jaffa, Haifa, Tel Aviv, or West Jerusalem. You shoot old guns at modern Israeli tanks and American-made fighter jets, doing virtually no harm to Israel while bringing the wrath of its mighty army down upon you. You fire ridiculously inept Kassam rockets that cause little destruction and delude yourselves into thinking this is a war of liberation. Your government, your social institutions, your schools, and your economy are all in ruins.

Your young people are growing up illiterate, ill, and bent on rites of death and suicide, while you, in effect, are living on the kindness of foreigners, including America and the United Nations. Every day your officials must beg for your daily bread, dependent on relief trucks that carry food and medicine into the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, while your criminal Muslim fundamentalist Hamas government continues to fan the flames of a war it can neither fight nor hope to win.

In other words, brothers, you are down, out, and alone in a burnt-out landscape that is shrinking by the day.

What kind of struggle is this? Is it worth waging at all? More important, what kind of miserable future does it portend for your children, the fourth or fifth generation of the Arab world's have-nots?

We, your Arab brothers, have moved on.

Those of us who have oil money are busy accumulating wealth and building housing, luxury developments, state-of-the-art universities and schools, and new highways and byways. Those of us who share borders with Israel, such as Egypt and Jordan, have signed a peace treaty with it and are not going to war for you any time soon. Those of us who are far away, in places like North Africa and Iraq, frankly could not care less about what happens to you.

Only Syria continues to feed your fantasies that someday it will join you in liberating Palestine, even though a huge chunk of its territory, the entire Golan Heights, was taken by Israel in 1967 and annexed. The Syrians, my friends, will gladly fight down to the last Palestinian Arab.

Before you got stuck with this Hamas crowd, another cheating, conniving, leader of yours,Yasser Arafat, sold you a rotten bill of goods - more pain, greater corruption, and millions stolen by his relatives - while your children played in the sewers of Gaza.

The war is over. Why not let a new future begin?

****

Youssef M. Ibrahim is an Egyptian-born American reporter serving for twenty-four years as a senior Middle East regional correspondent for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, mainly covering political, economic, energy and military issues. Mr. Ibrahim has been based throughout the world, filing hundreds of reports detailing the conflicts and issues between the Middle East and the West.

http://www.fandy.us/experts/youssef-ibrahim.html

[Slide On The Ice]

Here's a first.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5293854.stm

Hamas figure slams Gaza 'anarchy'

Security forces have struggled to contain the lawlessness

The Gaza Strip is in the grip of anarchy and Palestinians must stop blaming Israel for all their problems, a senior Hamas figure has said.
Ghazi Hamad, chief spokesman for the Hamas government, said the hope that followed Israel's pull-out last year had been replaced with "a nightmare".
Gaza is at the mercy of thugs, he said, and pleaded for an end to deadly clan rivalries. "Let Gaza breathe," he said.
Such frank self-criticism is rare among Palestinian leaders, analysts say.
Mr Hamad's comments came in an article, which was published in Palestinian newspapers on Monday.
He said they were his own views and did not represent the position of his government.
"I am not interested in discussing the ugliness and brutality of the occupation because it is not a secret. Instead, I prefer self-criticism and self evaluation," Mr Hamad wrote.

Overwhelming problems
He said life in Gaza City now involved "unimaginable chaos, careless policemen, young men carrying guns and strutting with pride, and families receiving condolences for their dead in the middle of the street."
And he was also critical of militants who fire crudely-made rockets into Israel, saying ordinary Palestinians paid a high price when Israel responded militarily to such attacks.

Mr Hamad said Gazans should stop laying the blame for their mistakes at the door of the Israeli occupation.
"Our extreme joy at their departure made us forget the most important question: What is our next step?" he went on.
Hamas swept to power in elections in January and promised to bring law and order to the Gaza Strip.
Mr Hamad's remarks would seem to be an admission that it has completely failed to do so, the BBC's Alan Johnston in the West Bank says. But he adds that the best government in the world would have struggled to cope with Gaza's overwhelming social and economic problems. Hamas has also been paralysed by the crushing Western and Israeli economic boycott imposed because it has refused to renounce violence and accept Israel's right to exist.