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These People Deserve a State?
(Jerusalem Post) - Yosef Goell There is no doubt that the frenzied mobs of tens of thousands of uncontrollable young men who prevented the unloading of Arafat's casket from the helicopter in Ramallah truly mourned their leader. They chose to express that mourning in an ethos of savagery, many frenziedly firing AK-47 assault rifles. By contrast, the pre-funeral rites for Arafat at Cairo's airport were conducted with exemplary order and formal respect because Mubarak's moderate but effective military dictatorship ordered that it be so, and kept the Egyptian populace away from the airport. Nor are such armed mobs permitted in the Jordanian, Syrian, and other Arab dictatorships. The problem all along was not merely the murderer Arafat but the Palestinian people whom he truly represented and led. It is a population with an unprecedentedly high proportion of violence-prone young men. Such a population does not deserve an independent state, even if it does hold superficially democratic elections. Such an armed independent state would constitute a great danger to Israel, to the surrounding Arab world, and to the stability of the Middle East and the world as a whole.