Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Sunni leaders are going Shiite: Slain Jihad operative's son: My entire family has turned Hezbollah
Instead of a Britney Spears ring tone, Shehadeh Shehadeh's cell phone emits a recording of a speech by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. "Our entire family has turned Shi'ite," he boasts.
Last week, Israeli security forces operating in the West Bank town of Bethlehem killed his father, Mohammed Shehadeh, who was a senior commander in Islamic Jihad.
"My father decided to become a Shi'ite after he was deported to Marj Al-Juhur in Lebanon in 1992," the son recounted. "He met there with all sorts of Shi'ite people and he saw that the oppression the Shi'ites have had to endure is very much like the oppression that the Palestinians have suffered."...
...Sitting in his house in Bethlehem's Wadi Maali neighborhood, the young man entertained a group of friends, all devout Muslims filled with extremist zeal. They were there to mourn his father's loss with him.
The son is outspoken about his disdain for Israelis. "The Jews killed the prophets," he reiterated several times in his conversation with Haaretz.
"Some Jews are all right and my father valued them, like Neturei Karta," he conceded, referring to a fringe ultra-Orthodox sect that is rabidly anti-Zionist. "But most Jews are the enemy."...
In typical Haaretz fashion, the slant of the article is to show how young Arabs have become more radical and attuned to violence since peaceful negotiations never seem to bear fruit...because of Israel. There are two basic flaws here. The most obvious is in placing blame for the continuing sequence of violence on Israel alone, who cannot possibly sit idle while its citizens are targeted by groups whose goals are explicitly not in peaceful coexistence, and the second is in questioning just what "fruits" these young Arabs are hoping to harvest. The fact is that their goal is not to build their own state, but in the continuing fantasy of rewinding the clock 60 years and eliminating their neighbor. At least, there are a sufficient number who seek this goal to scuttle any deal.
THAT's why they're destined, always, to become frustrated with the "progress" of any process -- it's never going to lead to where they want it. And we're destined to continue to read articles that bemoan and sympathize with Arab frustration without ever honestly addressing its source. Any peace process is an illusion until young Shehada and his friends adjust their expectations, and that will never happen until the world holds them accountable for their goals.
