Let's punish them for doing what we asked

I am reminded today of events back in the Reagan administration. You may recall that back then, the administration, along with the Israelis, wanted to get the PLO (or at least many of them) out of Lebanon. Reagan pleaded with many Arab states, asking them to allow the PLO to move to their territory. Most, including Egypt, refused. Finally, one country that had good relations with us agreed. It was Tunisia, which had agreed to accept the Palestinians because of its friendship with the US. Then, Reagan had to plead with the PLO to move. They eventually agreed, and a large number of Palestinians under control of the PLO were moved to a suburb of Tunis.

Not long after that, in 1985 a yacht owned by some Israelis was blown up while it was docked at a port in Italy. Then, Reagan, apparently forgetting that he had pleaded with the Tunisians to accept the PLO and pleaded with the Palestinians to move there, decided to authorize the Israelis to bomb Tunis for harboring terrorists. Many Tunisians were killed along with many Palestinians.

That was October 1985, and I remember it vividly because I flew into Tunis on a business trip only a few days later. I was flying in on a Tunis Air flight that was struck by lightning while landing. All the power in the plane was out for a second or two (it seemed much longer), and all of us on board feared that the Israelis had shot us down. As it turned out, we landed safely.

At any event, the point here is that we ended up punishing these people for doing exactly what we had asked them to do.

Today, I see the following headline:

The United States has asked the Palestinian Authority to return $50 million in US aid because Washington does not want a Hamas-led government to have the funds.

Here we go again. We pleaded and then demanded that the Palestinians hold democratic elections. They finally did so, and the elections turned out to be run surprisingly cleanly, given the chaos over there. Now, we are going to punish them once again for doing exactly what we asked them to do.

There is never going to be any progress on this problem if we keep behaving like this.