Expensive Kisses

Israeli leaders have devised another method of "targeted assassination" against Palestinian leaders: Kissing them. Uri Avnery on Olmert's "kiss of death."

Remember the good old days when Palestinian leaders, Arafat in particular, deployed kissing as a weapon of mass destruction? Who can forget that kiss between him and Saddam during the first Gulf War! It must be the costliest kiss in Palestinian history! In addition to the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians kicked out of Kuwait, it gave us Oslo. In his book, The Iron Cage, historian Rashid Khalidi lists it as one of the Palestinian leadership's strategic mistakes. (it's a polite way of saying it's one of Arafat's biggest bloopers).

At least then we had the initiative in our lips and didn't just stand there risking being kissed by elli yeswa welli ma yeswash, i.e. anybody.

Defenders of Abu Mazen might say: but what could the poor man do? It's a power thing.

True. Still, whenever I kiss my 7-year-old son while he's mad with me because of an unresolved conflict between us, he wipes away my kiss. He passes his hand on his cheek in an unmistakable gesture of "You can't buy me with a kiss, Mom). Sometimes he does it with flare so I see him, and sometimes he does it quietly.

My point is that if a 7-year-old can do that, Abu Mazen could too. Instead of turning the other cheek.