Fouad Ajami: The ballot is not infallible, but it has broken the Arab pact with tyranny.
[Mr. Ajami, Majid Khadduri Professor and director of the Middle East Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, is the author, among other books, of "Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation's Odyssey" (Vintage, 1999).]
So, some now say, a people led for more than three decades by Yasser Arafat, a man who dodged all moral and political responsibility, have flunked a great democratic test. It wasn't a pretty choice that the Palestinians were presented with: the secular autocracy of plunder and pretense represented by Arafat's inheritors on the one side and the cruel utopia of the Hamas hard-liners on the other. This was where Palestinian history led. Ever since the Palestinians had taken to the road after 1948, that population had never been given the gift of political truth. Zionism had built a whole, new world west of the Jordan River, but Palestinian nationalism had insisted that all this could be undone.
An Arab intellectual of discerning intelligence, the Moroccan historian Abdullah Laroui, caught the logic of this refusal to accept history's verdict. "On a certain day," Palestinians believed, "everything would be obliterated and instantaneously reconstructed and the new inhabitants would leave, as if by magic, the land they had despoiled; in this way will justice be dispensed to the victims, on the day when the presence of God shall again make itself be felt." There is, then, nothing distinctive or unique about Hamas's refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of a Jewish state on the land. Its secular predecessors and alternatives had not been possessed of much greater realism.
This was not a defeat of President Bush's "diplomacy of freedom" that has just played out in Gaza and the West Bank. The claim that the bet on Arab democracy placed by the president has now been lost is shallow and partisan. These were Palestinians who voted a mix of incoherence and legitimate wrath at a ruling political class that had given them nothing but false bravado and fed them on a diet of maximalism. For decades, the outside world had asked precious little of the Palestinians. Arafat, the Maximum Leader of their movement, had never owned up to any historical responsibility, and there were always powers beyond waiting to bail him out, to wink at his deeds of terror, to subsidize the economy of extortion and plunder that he and his lieutenants, and his security services, had brought with them to the Palestinian territories in the aftermath of the peace of Oslo.
It was with this ruinous indulgence of the Palestinians that George W. Bush was to break in the summer of 2002, when he gave the Palestinians a promise of American support contingent on their renunciation of terror. Where American diplomacy during the Clinton years had averted its gaze from Arafat's cynical use of deeds of terror, Mr. Bush had put that Palestinian leader beyond the pale. The claims of "victimhood" would no longer acquit the Palestinians; they would now be held responsible for the politics, and the history, they made. It proved hard for the Palestinians to make that adjustment, but there can be no denying that a measure of sobriety came into their world. The Arabs who had granted the Palestinians everything and nothing at the same time had drifted away from the cause of Palestine. The center of political gravity in Arab lands had shifted from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf; Ramallah was of little consequence when compared with the sea lanes of the gulf, and the fight in the Arabian Peninsula between the forces of order and those of religious bigotry. The romance of the "children of the stones" had subsided. Heartless and unsentimental, Arab society, in the midst of another windfall of oil wealth, now sought a reprieve from political and religious furies. A stock frenzy has taken hold in the Arabian Peninsula and the gulf; the tales of Palestinian woes would no longer hold other Arabs....
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So, some now say, a people led for more than three decades by Yasser Arafat, a man who dodged all moral and political responsibility, have flunked a great democratic test. It wasn't a pretty choice that the Palestinians were presented with: the secular autocracy of plunder and pretense represented by Arafat's inheritors on the one side and the cruel utopia of the Hamas hard-liners on the other. This was where Palestinian history led. Ever since the Palestinians had taken to the road after 1948, that population had never been given the gift of political truth. Zionism had built a whole, new world west of the Jordan River, but Palestinian nationalism had insisted that all this could be undone.
An Arab intellectual of discerning intelligence, the Moroccan historian Abdullah Laroui, caught the logic of this refusal to accept history's verdict. "On a certain day," Palestinians believed, "everything would be obliterated and instantaneously reconstructed and the new inhabitants would leave, as if by magic, the land they had despoiled; in this way will justice be dispensed to the victims, on the day when the presence of God shall again make itself be felt." There is, then, nothing distinctive or unique about Hamas's refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of a Jewish state on the land. Its secular predecessors and alternatives had not been possessed of much greater realism.
This was not a defeat of President Bush's "diplomacy of freedom" that has just played out in Gaza and the West Bank. The claim that the bet on Arab democracy placed by the president has now been lost is shallow and partisan. These were Palestinians who voted a mix of incoherence and legitimate wrath at a ruling political class that had given them nothing but false bravado and fed them on a diet of maximalism. For decades, the outside world had asked precious little of the Palestinians. Arafat, the Maximum Leader of their movement, had never owned up to any historical responsibility, and there were always powers beyond waiting to bail him out, to wink at his deeds of terror, to subsidize the economy of extortion and plunder that he and his lieutenants, and his security services, had brought with them to the Palestinian territories in the aftermath of the peace of Oslo.
It was with this ruinous indulgence of the Palestinians that George W. Bush was to break in the summer of 2002, when he gave the Palestinians a promise of American support contingent on their renunciation of terror. Where American diplomacy during the Clinton years had averted its gaze from Arafat's cynical use of deeds of terror, Mr. Bush had put that Palestinian leader beyond the pale. The claims of "victimhood" would no longer acquit the Palestinians; they would now be held responsible for the politics, and the history, they made. It proved hard for the Palestinians to make that adjustment, but there can be no denying that a measure of sobriety came into their world. The Arabs who had granted the Palestinians everything and nothing at the same time had drifted away from the cause of Palestine. The center of political gravity in Arab lands had shifted from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf; Ramallah was of little consequence when compared with the sea lanes of the gulf, and the fight in the Arabian Peninsula between the forces of order and those of religious bigotry. The romance of the "children of the stones" had subsided. Heartless and unsentimental, Arab society, in the midst of another windfall of oil wealth, now sought a reprieve from political and religious furies. A stock frenzy has taken hold in the Arabian Peninsula and the gulf; the tales of Palestinian woes would no longer hold other Arabs....