A friend of a friend from a Southern town wrote an interesting letter to the Jeusalem Report. I've seriously modified it and posted it here (all with permission).

Sirs,

The recent Jaffe Center for Strategic Studies report (Jerusalem Report "Study", Jan 11) stated "if the Intifada was supposed to undermine the foundations of Israeli society and to bring it to a state of imbalance and destabilization, it has failed."

In November 2000, when the Intifada just began, Fatah leaders Marwan Barghouti and Ahmed Qurei stated clearly in public interviews that the short-term goals of the Intifada were to pressure Israel to dismantle settlements, leave territories, and introduce multinational mediation with the objective of implementing Resolution 242.

Since then, Israel submitted to the Quartet designed Roadmap (which explicitly calls for the end of the 1967 occupation as per Resolution 242 and the Saudi Plan). Israel destroyed 25 settlements, abandoned Gaza, and allows Egypt to oversee the Rafah crossing essentially unsupervised.

Objectively, all the (Arab) openly stated short-term goals of the Intifada have been achieved.

What the Jaffe Center should be studying is why the Israeli government took actions which realized the Intifada's goals - when Operation Defensive Shield already proved in 2002 that there is a military solution to terrorism.

That would be a worthwhile study with practical and far-reaching implications.

The long-term goals of Fatah are to establish a state which would pose a military threat, and to pressure Israel into accepting a large number of so-called refugees.

If we don't study what really went wrong in the past three years, as opposed to some imaginary conjecture as to the Intifada’s motivations and objectives, we may very well conclude the next Intifada by repeating the same mistakes.

Robert Klein
Beer Sheba