Achieving a Palestinian Democracy Should be the US Goal
Reader comment on item: Hope for the Middle East

Submitted by Leon Segal (United States), May 22, 2002 at 10:44

Agreed totally with your article #213 on "Hope for Middle East", as always.
For another related article/subject for you to consider:

There is a real possibility that the only true Arab democracy to emerge out of all this could be a Palestinian State, once they get rid of Arafat of course. This may seem unreal and far-fetched at this point, but the Palestinians are in the best position to see (and envy) what their enemy/neighbor has accomplished and how its (even Arab) citizens live, vs. how they live under Arafat's dictatorship/militias AND how their Arab cousins live in Syria, Lebanon, and Saudia Arabia. If Palestine could be democraticized (is that the correct verb?) ---in that case, the larger U.S. interest of starting to get rid of Arab dictatorships would be started from within the disfunctional Arab world.

When some of the other nearby Arab countries start to envy/see the hope and living conditions the Palestinians could likely achieve once they stop their stupid and counter-productive--and futile--war against Israel, Palestine would become the real motivator for democratization of the backward Arab world, more so than Turkey, which while Moslem is largely non-Arab, and of course is not in the midst of the geography.

Does anyone in our myopic and Arabist State Department see this far ahead? If so, they should be pushing Arafat out as soon as possible, in line with their recently stated goal of seeing Arab democracies emerge. In any case, Israel is the key, and the ally of the U.S. in all this---AND in our (the U.S.) war on terrorism. If Israel were a dictatorship, the Palestinians would have no role model.

Right now, the countries that might fear a Palestinian democracy the most are Saudia Arabia and the military dictatorships. They would not want Palestine to be the role model for their people.

I'm sure you get the idea, there are other benefits (such as minimization of the stupid suicide killers--does any democracy produce any of these?) and you can elaborate on this if you are interested.

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