Strengthening Palestinian Moderates

Ray Hanania has a very insightful and open commentary in Arab News on the challenges facing the Palestinians:

Palestinians suffer under two occupations, the occupation by Israel and the occupation of Palestinian extremists who believe that continued suffering is a better alternative to compromise.

...

But the greater threat to peace is the challenge facing Palestinian moderates from within their own confused and battered community. Palestinians are too defensive and consumed with their suffering and anger. The hatred sometimes produced prevents them from seeing past these emotions. Yet they must see beyond.

Hanania also takes pro-peace Israelis and Jews to task for failing to support moderate Palestinians: "Rather than receiving full support from moderate Israelis and Jews, they [Palestinian moderates] are being challenged, not on issues of larger substance but on smaller issues of vanity." Presumably, he is referring to Israeli complaints about the performance of Mahmoud Abbas, although Abbas curiously remains unnamed in the article.

It's important to realize the true difficulty in determining who is really a moderate in this context, though. In the 1990s, Arafat was accepted by Israel as a peacemaker, even though he never took off his military uniform. After the intifada, in which Arafat and his allies returned to sponsoring terrorism, many Israelis came to doubt the existence of true Palestinian moderates--hence their apprehension about Abbas. Meanwhile, many Arabs still view Sharon as an intolerable extremist based on his past, even though he has been unequivocal about his support for the creation of a Palestinian state and is the only Israeli leader since 1967 to begin a plan of concrete action to evacuate settlements.

The article makes an excellent point about those with vested interests in continuing the conflict indefinitely:

The extremists are exploiting Palestinian suffering. They need that suffering to continue, just as all extremists need the conflict to rage on endlessly.

These rejectionists have a direct stake in the conflict. If it ends, they end, too. They have created an industry of exploitation that thrives on the suffering. They have jobs, salaries, lives and a soapbox from which they can continue to preach uncompromising hatred to their choir of disillusioned, disheartened and lost.

Hanania is right, and there is no easy way to end this situation.