Posted on 04/15/2002 6:14:39 AM PDT by aynrandy
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 15, 2002
LET US STRETCH THE COLLECTIVE IMAGINATION TO ITS FURTHEST LIMIT.
Arafat has put an end to his Palestinian death machine and its relentless, merciless attacks against the civilian population of Israel. The Arab world has stopped contaminating the minds of its citizens with Nazi-like propaganda in schoolbooks and state-controlled newspapers. Arafat and other Arab autocrats decide they truly seek an autonomous state for the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and not the annihilation of Israel. Let us then imagine, if possible, that the Jewish population of the West Bank might be allowed to remain in a newly created state of Palestine, granted property rights, voting rights and the religious freedoms that Arabs enjoy in Israel.
We have to fantasize, since none of this will ever be fact. History has revealed that Arafat excels only at terror. His suicide squads will proceed with their missions as soon as the first Israeli tank begins rolling out of the West Bank. Arab leaders will carry on their caustic anti-Semitism with the apparent goal remaining the extinction of the Jewish State. Israel’s willingness to make peace with bellicose neighbors, sometimes foolishly undermining its strategic and economic advantages, is also a historical lesson worth noting.
The Palestinians, who have so far only half mastered the art of negotiation, demand, among other suicidal concessions from Israel, the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and Gaza. Anyone born a Jew – Zionist and non-Zionist -- would be violently removed from the region in the name of peace. Imagine the spasms of European indignation if Israel would dare, as one of its conditions for peace, demand all Arabs leave Israel. The international community’s uneven moral standard, their legitimization of murders and their taskmasters, has given Arab leaders the freedom to choose the hostile alternative to peace.
Israel’s requirements for peace have always been rather modest. In its agreements with Egypt (1979) and Jordan (1994), Israel made significant compromises for the sake of normalized relations and security assurances that would be normally afforded countries without any concessions. Recently, at Camp David, Israel offered Yasser Arafat an extraordinary deal, which included the transfer of 95 percent of West Bank territory to the Palestinian Authority (making up the missing 5 percent with other land), the forced ‘evacuation’ of 50,000 Jewish settlers, the return of a number of Palestinian refugees and the surrender of Jerusalem neighborhoods. This offer of peace was met with unprecedented terror.
That wasn’t the first time Israel put itself in peril for the prospect of tranquility. In 1937, eight years after Arab pogroms against Jews in the Hebron and Bethlehem, Jews accepted a Partition Plan from Britain that offered only Galilee and a short 20-mile strip of land above Gaza. It was met with an unqualified ‘no’ from Arabs, who would have acquired three quarters of Palestine to structure an autonomous state. In 1947, the General Assembly of the United Nations voted with a 2/3 majority to partition western Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. The Jews were allocated land that amounted to 75 percent desert, and a third of the size of present-day Israel proper. They accepted. Arabs rejected this agreement outright and launched a war of annihilation against the Jews in 1948. To clarify any confusion regarding the goal of that war, Arafat’s hero and mentor, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al Husseini sums it up for us: "I declare a holy war, my Moslem brothers! Murder the Jews! Murder them all!"
From 1949 to 1956, 1,300 Israelis were murdered by terrorists, many of them by fedayeen raids emanating from the Egyptian-controlled Gaza strip, Lebanon and Jordan. Yet, Israel continued to offer peace to all Arab countries, including compensation to all refugees, who were, and still are, confined to camps by the Arab nations with some help from the UN. In contrast, by 1956, an estimated 600,000 sephardic Jews expelled by Arab nations had been assimilated into Israel society.
Settlement of the West Bank, a major contention of the PLO, began only several months after the Six-Day War, and after the Arab League’s Khartoum Conference rejected any peace negotiations with Israel even in exchange for the return of those territories. The often-cited U.N. Resolution 242, which focuses on the occupied territories, has been distorted beyond recognition by Arab crusaders and their advocates. It states that Israel is to administer the territories it occupied in 1967 until "a just and lasting peace in the Middle East" is achieved. Only when such a peace is reached is Israel required to withdraw "from territories" it occupied during the Six-Day War. Not "the" territories, nor from "all" the territories, but from some of the territories, which included the Sinai Desert, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.
The Israeli Army had an emotional confrontation after ousting settlers from the town of Yamit in 1982, fulfilling its obligation of returning the Sinai desert to Egypt. Despite the emotional scar on the nation and the potential for civil upheaval, Israel completed its side of a bargain for peace. In this historic deal with Egypt, Israel also gave up the Alma oil field in southern Sinai in November 1979, surrendering any chance at becoming an energy-dependent nation. They did this for the privilege of being recognized and launching diplomatic relations with a nation that had tried to eradicate it four times in the previous 30 years. The PLO, incidentally, refused from the beginning to participate in this peace process, which would have granted them a state as early as 1982.
So why is Israel now so cautious? Notwithstanding the obvious state of affairs and a nation’s right to defend itself, Arafat has created three pseudo-terror states on Israel’s borders. The present Palestinian Authority is one, and by far the most dangerous for Jews. But by the late ‘60s Jordan almost came under Arafat’s rule as PLO members had moved into the major cities and turned themselves into armed gangs beyond the control of the local authorities. When Palestinians began carrying out terrorist attacks on the Jordanian government, in addition to their traditional Jewish targets, King Hussein took action. A civil war broke out and some 3,500 Palestinians were killed in harsh reprisals by troops loyal to the King.
The third was Lebanon. By 1982, the Lebanese-Israel border had 15,000-18,000 PLO terrorists, 5,000-6,000 of them mercenaries from around the Arab world, perpetrating acts of terror against Israeli civilians. With Syria’s blessing, they used Katyusha rockets and imported hundreds of tanks and surface-to-air missiles, creating civil war and intolerable danger for Israel. To grant him yet another shot at creating a belligerent, despotic state, would be certain suicide for Israel.
David Harsanyi has written for the Associated Press, CNN/Sports Illustrated as well as numerous magazines and is based in NYC. Visit his Website or email him at David_Harsanyi@yahoo.com.
To clarify any confusion: Haj Amin Al Husseini was not merely Arafat's hero and mentor. He was Arafat's uncle. Al Husseini also wasn't satisfied with murdering Jews in what is now Israel - he felt it necessary to advise Hitler to exterminate all of Europe's Jews, rather than deport them.
I sincerely hope that Arafat will soon join his uncle in the lowest circle of Hell. I also hope that his exit from our world is exquisitly painful, in partial repayment for the agony he has inflicted upon the people of this world.
It is very weird, indeed, that the other Arab states are providing financial and logistical support to the Palestinian terrorist operations while at the same time they exhibit absolute contempt for the Palestinians. If, however, their goal is essentially to use the Palestinians to turn the world against Israel, however, it all makes sense, especially if a bonus outcome would be the destruction of Palestine.
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