It is hard to determine if the Palestinians are players in a comic opera, simply nuts, or showing the effects of a culture shaped by a tragic history.
The latest flap concerns a plot that was supposed to shoot up the motorcade of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert when he was on his way to Jericho for a meeting with Mahmoud Abbas. Israeli intelligence uncovered the plans, and Olmert never set out on that trip. Israelis informed Palestinian authorities about the men involved, who included members of elite Palestinian Authority security forces. The Palestinians arrested some of them, but may never have asked them about the plan, and released them after a few days. We have seen this before. It is called the revolving door of Palestinian jails for individuals accused of taking part in operations against Israel. A big show is made of enforcement, and shortly thereafter the captives go home quietly.
When Israeli media began to expose this story, and some politicians suggested that there was no point in negotiating with an Authority that could not do any better to keep the peace, the Palestinians put on another show of arrest. Some of those involved are in Israeli hands, and they will not go free so easily.
No surprise in all of that.
And not too much in the news that a group of Israelis are campaigning to demand the freedom of Yigal Amir, who killed Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Reports are that they have enough money to produce and distribute 50,000 copies of a film meant either to de-demonize Amir, or turn him into a hero. Leaders of the campaign are remnants of Meir Kahane's Kach Movement, and a prominent spokesperson is Larisa Trembovler, a Russian immigrant who married Amir in absentia, and then was allowed conjugal visits by the Supreme Court against the decision of the Prison Authority. She is scheduled to produce a little boy sometime in the next month, close to the 12th anniversary of Rabin's assassination. That birth will get media attention, and give a push to the campaign. The organizers are putting the emphasis on Amir's service to the nation, according to them, insofar as the Oslo Accord that Rabin signed with the Palestinians was a national disaster, and should not be repeated by any subsequent concessions.
Politicians are pressing the media to avoid coverage of the Free Amir campaign. One poll indicates that 10 percent of the population supports the definition of some limit to Amir's life sentence, a formal step that must be taken before any body may consider his release.
If anyone reading this wants to participate in a celebration of Amir's release, I would not advise buying tickets any time soon. The movement in his behalf may be no more popular than the people who make an occasional pilgrimage to the grave of Baruch Goldstein. He was the American-Israeli physician who killed a few dozen Palestinians while they were praying, and then died at the hands of those remaining when he ran out of ammunition.
Is it worth pondering the source of Palestinian or Israeli extremists? For one we can look at conquest, or a lack of national independence, plus six decades or more of education and media emphasizing that it is all Israel's fault. For the other, we might start with Jewish suffering culminating in the Holocaust, or some language in the Book of Genesis that all this land should be ours.
The supporters of Amir are more a sad curiosity than a problem. Israeli intelligence has a department that looks after Jewish extremists, and usually keeps them from doing any damage. More worrisome is the much larger number of Palestinian extremists, well represented among political and religious leaders. The source of potential assassins in their security services, and the revolving door policy of their law enforcement require us to ask if it is possible to reach agreements with such a people, or if it is even worth an effort.