Posted on 12/09/2001 6:31:51 AM PST by CrossCheck
That Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat was a terrorist is not in doubt. The more important question is whether he's capable of being anything else. And the answer to that, too, is not in doubt.
Under the terms of the Oslo "peace process," Arafat has been a head of government--not of a sovereign state, but of an embryo state. The "Palestinian Authority" is not a viable entity in and of itself, being merely selective areas of Israel's "occupied territories," but within it "the Palestinians" had, give or take, the same degree of autonomy that the Province of Quebec does today or the Irish Free State did in 1922. Arafat had an opportunity to demonstrate he was capable of governing--in matters of law and order, health, education, the economy. Had he done so, the movement toward a fully fledged Palestinian state would have been unstoppable. He didn't have to be perfect. The expectations in the reformed-terrorist category are not high--Kenya's Jomo Kenyatta, Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe--but Arafat has failed to make even this minimal grade. His Palestinian Authority is a swamp of corruption and organized crime presided over by trigger-happy goon squads from the chairman's dozen competing state security agencies. If you gave this guy Switzerland to run, he'd turn it into a sewer.
At one level, this is a crisis for Israel: As George Will noted last week, more of their citizens have died from terrorism in the eight years of the "peace process" than in the 45 years before. But in a more profound sense, Arafatism is a crisis for the Palestinians: If their cause remains mortgaged to the chairman, his stunted lieutenants and their dark subsidiaries, the prospects of any kind of viable future are precisely zero. Invited to choose between building a country or killing Jews, they choose Jew-killing. Every time.
That's why last weekend's carnage usefully clarified the situation. Once upon a time, professional Arab armies were prepared to fight for Palestine. Unfortunately, they kept losing. (Not to be mean-spirited but Arab armies are among the lousiest in the world, at least since King Hussein sacked General Sir John Glubb in the '50s.) So they contracted the job out to the PLO, which in the '70s waged a campaign of vicious but targeted terrorism. Then came the '80s and the intifada, in which the new frontline warriors were rock-throwing 9-year-olds. And now it's down to suicide bombers detonating themselves in shopping malls for the glory of killing kids and pregnant women--the final stage of Palestinian nationalism's descent into the abyss. What other once credible liberation movement has so willingly embraced such awesome, total self-degradation?
Arafat has been successful only in one particular: landing Israel with the blame for the situation and convincing the Arabist romantics in the west to frame the debate entirely in his terms--for example, the "occupied territories." They're occupied because the Arabs attacked Israel and lost. And, unlike, say, Alsace-Lorraine or Hong Kong, Israel uniquely is prevented from returning the occupied territories to the guys they occupied 'em from. The West Bank cannot be given back to Jordan (a majority Palestinian state), because in 1974 the Arab League declared Arafat's PLO to be the "sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people," an impressive claim for an organization only five years old.
The Arabs did this to punish King Hussein because they were steamed at him for sitting out their 1973 war against Israel. What's amazing is that they've talked the entire world into accepting their little exercise in political muscle as the only valid position on the issue. There are no equivalent situations anywhere where the global community has instructed a country to hand over conquered territory not to the sovereign state from which it was won but to a third-party terrorist.
The Arab League didn't choose to fetishize the PLO because it cares a fig for the Palestinian people but because the "Palestinian problem" is more useful to them than a resolution of it would ever be. Since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Arab leaders have tried and failed to promote a viable, sustained pan-Arabism. Today, the only tattered remnant of the pan-Arab cause is Palestinian nationalism, and very helpful it is, too. Why, only the other day a wealthy Saudi assisted by Egyptian lieutenants and Iraqi intelligence blew a hole in the middle of New York and the world rushed forward to insist that this proved the need for a Palestinian state. For the squalid thug regimes of the region, giving the impression to their hapless peoples that they're engaged in an epic struggle with the Jews helps excuse their own failures as nation states, and costs very little in blood or treasure.
The Arab League's 1974 coronation made Arafat, a pipsqueak militarily, into a political powerhouse. The United Nations began treating him as the leader of a sovereign nation, as if to underline his inevitability: He's already a head of state; all he needs is for those "intransigent" Israelis to give him a state to be head of. And so in 1993, Israel consented to the creation of the Palestinian Authority. For Hamas and Islamic Jihad, this offered the prospect--since taken up with gusto--of being able to kill Jews from within Israeli territory! But for their protector Arafat, it also offered an opportunity for a little bit of what the IRA calls "internal housekeeping": since moving into the PA from their most recent lodgings in Tunis, Arafat's boys have successfully cowed into silence or interrogated to death many of the less radical, more accommodating West Bank Palestinians who might have made the Authority a going concern. Whether or not a second Palestinian state (after Jordan) is desirable, it's perfectly obvious that this particular second Palestinian state is not in the least bit so, and after last weekend there's no reason for Israel to pretend otherwise.
So the question that whatever's left of the respectable nationalist movement needs to ask itself is: Do you want the rule of law, economic liberty, representative government, hospitals, schools and roads? Or do you want a pit in which the only consolation is that a few Jews will get sucked down to oblivion along with Palestinian aspirations? As we now know, that's all the chairman can deliver.
I see the New York Times is warning the Israelis not to try getting rid of Arafat. They have a point. It's time the Palestinians got rid of him.
So the question that whatever's left of the respectable nationalist movement needs to ask itself is: Do you want the rule of law, economic liberty, representative government, hospitals, schools and roads? Or do you want a pit in which the only consolation is that a few Jews will get sucked down to oblivion along with Palestinian aspirations?
Looks like it's the latter.
Delicious! Thanks for the growl, Sabe.
This pretty much says it all.
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