Zealots & Martyrs

Last week, before President Bush switched signals on the Mideast yet again, thousands demonstrated at the U.S. embassy in Beirut, beaten back by police firehoses and clubs. In Yemen, a more peaceful crowd delivered to our embassy a statement denouncing the United States as a "sponsor of terrorism." The Saudi peace plan is virtually dead?smothered between the Hamas rejectionists who authored the Passover suicide atrocity and Israel's assault on the West Bank.

The similarity in outlook between Sharon and the most radical Arabs is unavoidable: both oppose any settlement resembling the latest Saudi or August 2000 Camp David proposals (which are not themselves that far apart). Both prefer solutions written in blood: Sharon's idea is to pummel the Palestinians until they accept an existence in non-sovereign bantustans (while the right-wing members of his coalition chant for full-bore ethnic cleansing); Hamas seeks to destroy Israel and drive its inhabitants into exile. Curiously enough, Israel initially encouraged the rise of Hamas, hoping it would draw support away from the secular and nationalist PLO during the 1980s. Now the Israeli right and the Arab rejectionists each work their side of the street to ensure the Arab-Jewish hate will remain toxic for generations.

Some parallels go deeper still: a friend points out that you don't have to go so far afield as Japanese kamikazes or the Sri Lanka killers to find instances of zealotry and martyrdom in the service of nationalism. Officers of Israel's elite units take their oaths of allegiance at Masada, site of Herod's besieged fort of Roman times, a place of nearly cosmic symbolic importance to the Jewish state. Rather than surrender to the Romans, Masada's defenders slit their own throats and those of the women and children with them, a mass suicide of 960. My friend adds that given their frame of mind, had they explosives they would have tried to take some Romans with them.

The Bush administration is clearly without a clue as to how to deal with such passions, seeming to reverse its position every two days. One moment, the U.S. backs a Security Council resolution calling for Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank towns it has occupied; the next, President Bush emerges from his ranch, unprepared and in his shirtsleeves, to ramble at great length and little coherence before the cameras and endorse whatever Ariel Sharon wants to do. Then Secretary of State Powell quietly intimates that in America's eyes, Sharon's military actions are not helpful. Now the President goes out to the Rose Garden and calls for an Israeli retreat.

The schizoid stance does not signal internal disorganization so much as a deeper ideological incoherence that was hardly visible during the campaign. Despite the swings, the more moderate Powell side, with views similar to the previous Bush administration, is losing ground. Nicholas Lemann's well-informed piece in The New Yorker, outlining the growing influence of the neoconservative hawks within the administration and their future military plans, suggests what lies ahead. The hawks view the exploding anti-Americanism in the Arab street, or its quieter version in European living rooms and Chinese embassies, as something that will melt away if America only shows the will to throw its military weight around. They plan for wars or proxy wars against as many as six or seven Mideastern countries.

Curiously, few of the key hawks?not Paul Wolfowitz or Richard Perle or the editorial war claques at The Weekly Standard or National Review?ever served in the American military. I don't believe military experience is a prerequisite for sound foreign policy judgment, but it would be interesting to research the correlation between military service and enthusiasm for military solutions to political problems.

There is still no major piece of investigative reporting about the Israeli "art students" who were arrested and detained by the FBI after 9/11. This extremely murky story is covered most comprehensively (and with all the necessary sourced links) by Justin Raimondo in his invaluable antiwar.com columns. Thus far European papers such as Le Monde have shown more interest than have the big wheels of the American press, though Fox News' Carl Cameron did a four-part series in December?which then mysteriously dropped off the Fox website. So the story is now in news limbo, rather like the tales of Clinton's Monica dalliance before Newsweek picked it up.

It seems to be established that prior to 9/11, dozens of young Israelis, many with military intelligence backgrounds, were posing as art students and tailing around Drug Enforcement Agency and other federal agents in various parts of the U.S. Some of them seemed to be tailing the Al Qaeda terrorists as well?one Israeli group had rented an apartment a few hundred feet down the street from 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta. And one witness reported that some Israelis were visibly celebrating on 9/11?from a site in New Jersey that had full view of the flaming towers; disturbed Americans called the cops on them.

That is all so weird. The logical explanation for the celebrations is that these guys felt the U.S. would now understand what terrorism is, and thus align its policies more closely with Israel.

Spying on allies is hardly unheard of. And Israel has good cause to want to keep track of Arab extremists. Whoever finally does the original reporting to pull together the strange strands of this very curious episode will be in the running for a Pulitzer.