Sisyphus in the Middle East. (The Last Word).(Brief Article)(Column)

Following World War II, wrote Zbigniew Brzezinski in the April 7th New York Times, "America stepped into the Middle East as British and French colonial domination receded," thereby becoming "the chief guarantor of the region's peace...." This is another way of saying that we were chosen to take over from Sisyphus, the tragic hero of Greek mythology condemned to spend eternity daily rolling a large boulder up a steep incline, only to have it roll back down as it neared the top at day's end.

The Passover massacre in Israel and the most recent Israeli military campaign in the West Bank are the natural outgrowth of the Oslo agreement -- the most recent undertaking in the Middle East's Sisyphean peace process. Oslo's chief achievement was to entrench Yasser Arafat's PLO in the West Bank and Gaza, where it morphed from a terrorist operation into a gangster regime protected by a half-dozen secret police organs. After compounding the misery of the long-suffering Palestinians, Arafat and his allies created a nihilistic cult of "martyrdom": Those volunteering to serve as suicide bombers were promised a spot in paradise, and material comfort (underwritten by Saudi and Iraqi cash) for their families.

As a senior veteran in the Soviet-created Terrorist International, Arafat is well-schooled in terrorism's diabolical logic. The "urban guerrilla," wrote Marxist theoretician Carlos Marighella, must give the targeted government "no alternative except to intensify repression" by "resorting without let-up to sabotage, terrorism, expropriations, assaults, kidnappings, and executions...." In Ariel Sharon, Arafat has a foil. Sharon's peculiar sense of proportionality was visible nearly five decades ago when he led a punitive raid on the Arab village of Qibya: To avenge the death of three Israelis, Sharon and his troops blew up 45 houses and killed 69 people.

Sharon insists that the most recent Israeli West Bank offensive is of a piece with the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan -- a brutal but necessary campaign sanctified by the cause of national survival. He and his allies accuse the U.S. of hypocrisy for conducting an anti-terrorist war halfway around the globe while condemning Israel for launching a similar invasion next door. Compelling though this argument may be, it hasn't worked for Slobodan Milosevic. Sharon is not Milosevic; however, many leftist "human rights" activists (the sort of people who swoon over Arafat) yearn to see Sharon join Milosevic at the UN war-crimes tribunal at The Hague.

Serb paramilitaries in their counter-terrorist war in Kosovo did commit some atrocities, and ample evidence exists that Israeli troops have committed criminal abuses against non-combatants in the West Bank. Again, this ...