U.S. News & World Report
12/15/03
The price of intransigence
By Mortimer B. Zuckerman • Editor-in-Chief
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/031215/opinion/15edit.htm
Hearts leapt that bright morning 10 years ago when the prime minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin, and the Palestine Liberation Organization leader, Yasser Arafat, shook hands on the White House lawn and President Clinton declared "the peace of the brave is within our reach." Never has faith been so brutally betrayed, hope so utterly supplanted by despair. Who could have imagined that Israel would now face the worst terrorism in its history, with about 900 people killed in just three years--the equivalent of 50,000 murders a year in the United States?
Today there are headlines once again about formulas for a settlement, but it is clear that the Palestinians are far less prepared for peace than they were a decade ago. Suffused with messages of hate, indoctrinated early in the schools, and subjected to poisonous broadcasts in the media and the mosque, they nurture a culture that longs not for the creation of a Palestinian state but for the destruction of the state of their Israeli neighbors. In a recent poll, 59 percent of Palestinians wanted to see terrorism against Israel continue, even after the creation of a Palestinian state, and in all of the territories, including East Jerusalem. Only 26 percent wanted to give up the armed struggle.
Is it any wonder the Israelis have concluded that the reason the Palestinians reject peace is not because Jews live in the West Bank city of Hebron but because they live in Tel Aviv and Haifa?
Thugocracy.
The Palestinian leaders have made no bones about it. Their own magazine stated long ago their aim clearly: "Not to impose our will on the enemy but to destroy him in order to take his place." Palestinians have few qualms in admitting that the original accord negotiated in Oslo was worse than a sham. The bloody bookends are a statement--within days of the signing by Arafat--that Oslo was part of the "plan of stages" to destroy Israel and the June 24, 2001, affirmation by the relatively moderate Faisal Husseini that the Oslo agreement constituted a "Trojan horse," whose pure essence was deception.
But why reiterate the deception? Why ignore the naked declaration of bad faith? Because the presumption, widely shared, is that the Middle East is very much as it was before Camp David. But that's just not so. There has been a huge shift in Israeli sentiment since then. The peace camp has virtually collapsed. And most Israelis no longer expect anything but more Palestinian terrorism--72 percent of Israelis today believe that they or a family member will be killed or injured in a terrorist attack.
The intensity of the world's desire for a peaceful outcome in the Middle East is understandable. The trouble is that this desire has resulted in a flight from reality that will have just the opposite effect, encouraging Arafat and his henchmen in their cynical incitement to violence. In such circumstances, what hope can there be for any moderate elements? For the West and Israeli peacemakers to turn a blind eye to this behavior will foster only contempt for rational compromise.
Arafat's road map could not be clearer. As he put it in an interview on Radio Palestine on June 6, 2001: "War is a dream. Peace is a nightmare." This is a man who will neither dismantle the terrorist infrastructure nor allow anyone else to do it. He has the power to crush Hamas and Islamic Jihad, whose military wings comprise about a thousand men while the Palestinian Authority has about 35,000 people in a variety of police, intelligence, and security forces. Instead, Arafat finances and honors them, and has smuggled in huge quantities of weapons for his armed militias.
Despite American and Israeli efforts, Arafat's malevolent influence and control over the Palestinian leadership has not diminished. Nor has the terrorism. It is only the spectacular attacks that gain the world's attention. But there are dozens of credible warnings every week of imminent suicide bombings--30 have been foiled just the past several weeks. And this when the head of the Israeli security service warns that "Hamas is today 90 percent busy with survival and only 10 percent with planning terror attacks." These are the reasons the majority of Israelis have concluded that a comprehensive peace is not possible in the foreseeable future. Land once ceded is hard to reclaim. Peace can be revoked at a whim, as Arafat has demonstrated time and again. Can anyone really still buy the fiction that the Palestinians want to end the occupation in order to get on with their lives? The Israelis want a negotiating partner who will live up to its commitments. Arafat's Palestinian Authority, by contrast, wants the rights of a state while conducting itself like a terrorist thugocracy.
What, then, is to be done?
Freelance diplomacy from left-wing Israelis and some Palestinians has led to considerable support in European capitals for a so-called Geneva Accord. This, sadly, is fantasy. Already a key Palestinian delegate, Kadoura Fares, has renounced a concession not to demand a full "right of return" of displaced Palestinians (tantamount to the destruction of Israel). As for the Israeli negotiators, their program and their leaders were overwhelmingly rejected in the last election. Imagine Sean Penn, Jane Fonda, Ramsey Clark, Ralph Nader, and George McGovern negotiating American policy in Iraq.
There are many difficult elements to the proposed Geneva Accord. For starters, its monitors and arbitrators are supposed to be the United Nations, the European Union, Russia, the United States, and various other countries, including Syria and Lebanon. That's what's known as a stacked deck. How could Israel possibly accept rulings from such a group on sensitive security issues?
But the most critical problem, once again, is that the "accord" relies on promises by the Palestinians to disarm their militias and destroy the terrorist networks--the very same pledges that have been made in five different previous agreements--every one of which has been violated. To rely on Arafat to uphold these commitments is absurd.
Given that wishful diplomacy is dead, there is only one course for Israel. That is to continue building its defensive physical barrier between itself and the West Bank.
Good fences.
The fence has attained a certain credibility because none of the suicide bombers over the past three years have come out of the Gaza Strip, where such a fence has been in place. It reflects the geography of the West Bank, with its relatively short distances between major towns--literally, in some cases, a 15-minute walk or drive. Prevention of terrorist attacks emanating from the West Bank without a physical barrier is virtually impossible. Now, because they are prevented from striking in the northern part of the West Bank down to the coastal plain of Israel, the terrorists have been forced to shift their attacks south, toward Jerusalem. The fence, as the head of Israel's Shin Bet security service put it, has already paid for itself many times over in lives saved. No wonder that 80 percent of Israelis from both the left and the right consider the fence an absolute necessity as a last resort in protecting themselves and their children from terror. Their calculation is simple: Fences can be built and torn down; human lives are irreplaceable.
For the most part, the fence lies close to the Green Line of the 1967 border, but not exclusively. It has been attacked as a massive land grab because to secure the high ground and protect substantial Jewish communities, it deviates from the Green Line into the West Bank by several miles. It is critical, however, to understand why the fence is taking the route it is. To build exactly along the 1967 line would play directly into the Palestinian strategy. How? By creating the outline of a de facto Palestinian state in the West Bank, without requiring the Palestinians to cease terrorism, without requiring them to recognize Israel's right to exist, without their abandoning the use of the right of return--without formally ending this terrible conflict.
Some argue that the fence is a barrier to peace. Wrong. It is the very lack of a fence that has made it possible for Hamas and Islamic Jihad to hold the peace process hostage, since they initiate attacks every time progress seems possible. By taking the strategic threat of suicide bombings off the table, both sides would have more latitude for serious negotiations.
Everyone knows that the Palestinians will not negotiate seriously as long as they believe the terrorist attacks will demoralize the Israelis and push them back without the Palestinians paying a price.
The real reason for Palestinian objections is that, deprived of the terrorist card, they will have to rethink their unwillingness to confront their own terrorists. They also know that the fence would transform the Israeli role from that of fighting terrorists in the West Bank to preventing terrorists from breaching the security fence. This would make it possible for the Israelis to withdraw their soldiers from the West Bank, to end their roadblocks, and give up their remaining responsibility over the Palestinian population. Thus, the Palestinians would lose the propaganda benefit of TV pictures of the Israeli Army in the West Bank.
There are positive benefits, too. Such a political separation would contribute to the two-state solution. On the one side would be a culturally Jewish, democratic society; on the other, a Palestinian sovereignty whose contours one now might only guess at.
The fence is a warning to the Palestinians that their unwillingness to negotiate a compromise will result in the unilateral imposition of a border that might be less advantageous to them than a negotiated outcome. It is also a warning to Israeli settlers determined to remain on the eastern side of the fence that their evacuation is a foregone conclusion--not a matter of if but when.
If there were ever a successful negotiation between Israelis and Palestinians resulting in a peace agreement truly worthy of the name, the precise location of the fence could be discussed and, perhaps, changed. But until such time, a fence will remain an imperative, given how many Palestinians still want to see the onslaught of terrorism against Israel continue. Until then, the message must be that when one society declares war on another, there will be a price to pay. A substantial price.
12/15/03
The price of intransigence
By Mortimer B. Zuckerman • Editor-in-Chief
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/031215/opinion/15edit.htm
Hearts leapt that bright morning 10 years ago when the prime minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin, and the Palestine Liberation Organization leader, Yasser Arafat, shook hands on the White House lawn and President Clinton declared "the peace of the brave is within our reach." Never has faith been so brutally betrayed, hope so utterly supplanted by despair. Who could have imagined that Israel would now face the worst terrorism in its history, with about 900 people killed in just three years--the equivalent of 50,000 murders a year in the United States?
Today there are headlines once again about formulas for a settlement, but it is clear that the Palestinians are far less prepared for peace than they were a decade ago. Suffused with messages of hate, indoctrinated early in the schools, and subjected to poisonous broadcasts in the media and the mosque, they nurture a culture that longs not for the creation of a Palestinian state but for the destruction of the state of their Israeli neighbors. In a recent poll, 59 percent of Palestinians wanted to see terrorism against Israel continue, even after the creation of a Palestinian state, and in all of the territories, including East Jerusalem. Only 26 percent wanted to give up the armed struggle.
Is it any wonder the Israelis have concluded that the reason the Palestinians reject peace is not because Jews live in the West Bank city of Hebron but because they live in Tel Aviv and Haifa?
Thugocracy.
The Palestinian leaders have made no bones about it. Their own magazine stated long ago their aim clearly: "Not to impose our will on the enemy but to destroy him in order to take his place." Palestinians have few qualms in admitting that the original accord negotiated in Oslo was worse than a sham. The bloody bookends are a statement--within days of the signing by Arafat--that Oslo was part of the "plan of stages" to destroy Israel and the June 24, 2001, affirmation by the relatively moderate Faisal Husseini that the Oslo agreement constituted a "Trojan horse," whose pure essence was deception.
But why reiterate the deception? Why ignore the naked declaration of bad faith? Because the presumption, widely shared, is that the Middle East is very much as it was before Camp David. But that's just not so. There has been a huge shift in Israeli sentiment since then. The peace camp has virtually collapsed. And most Israelis no longer expect anything but more Palestinian terrorism--72 percent of Israelis today believe that they or a family member will be killed or injured in a terrorist attack.
The intensity of the world's desire for a peaceful outcome in the Middle East is understandable. The trouble is that this desire has resulted in a flight from reality that will have just the opposite effect, encouraging Arafat and his henchmen in their cynical incitement to violence. In such circumstances, what hope can there be for any moderate elements? For the West and Israeli peacemakers to turn a blind eye to this behavior will foster only contempt for rational compromise.
Arafat's road map could not be clearer. As he put it in an interview on Radio Palestine on June 6, 2001: "War is a dream. Peace is a nightmare." This is a man who will neither dismantle the terrorist infrastructure nor allow anyone else to do it. He has the power to crush Hamas and Islamic Jihad, whose military wings comprise about a thousand men while the Palestinian Authority has about 35,000 people in a variety of police, intelligence, and security forces. Instead, Arafat finances and honors them, and has smuggled in huge quantities of weapons for his armed militias.
Despite American and Israeli efforts, Arafat's malevolent influence and control over the Palestinian leadership has not diminished. Nor has the terrorism. It is only the spectacular attacks that gain the world's attention. But there are dozens of credible warnings every week of imminent suicide bombings--30 have been foiled just the past several weeks. And this when the head of the Israeli security service warns that "Hamas is today 90 percent busy with survival and only 10 percent with planning terror attacks." These are the reasons the majority of Israelis have concluded that a comprehensive peace is not possible in the foreseeable future. Land once ceded is hard to reclaim. Peace can be revoked at a whim, as Arafat has demonstrated time and again. Can anyone really still buy the fiction that the Palestinians want to end the occupation in order to get on with their lives? The Israelis want a negotiating partner who will live up to its commitments. Arafat's Palestinian Authority, by contrast, wants the rights of a state while conducting itself like a terrorist thugocracy.
What, then, is to be done?
Freelance diplomacy from left-wing Israelis and some Palestinians has led to considerable support in European capitals for a so-called Geneva Accord. This, sadly, is fantasy. Already a key Palestinian delegate, Kadoura Fares, has renounced a concession not to demand a full "right of return" of displaced Palestinians (tantamount to the destruction of Israel). As for the Israeli negotiators, their program and their leaders were overwhelmingly rejected in the last election. Imagine Sean Penn, Jane Fonda, Ramsey Clark, Ralph Nader, and George McGovern negotiating American policy in Iraq.
There are many difficult elements to the proposed Geneva Accord. For starters, its monitors and arbitrators are supposed to be the United Nations, the European Union, Russia, the United States, and various other countries, including Syria and Lebanon. That's what's known as a stacked deck. How could Israel possibly accept rulings from such a group on sensitive security issues?
But the most critical problem, once again, is that the "accord" relies on promises by the Palestinians to disarm their militias and destroy the terrorist networks--the very same pledges that have been made in five different previous agreements--every one of which has been violated. To rely on Arafat to uphold these commitments is absurd.
Given that wishful diplomacy is dead, there is only one course for Israel. That is to continue building its defensive physical barrier between itself and the West Bank.
Good fences.
The fence has attained a certain credibility because none of the suicide bombers over the past three years have come out of the Gaza Strip, where such a fence has been in place. It reflects the geography of the West Bank, with its relatively short distances between major towns--literally, in some cases, a 15-minute walk or drive. Prevention of terrorist attacks emanating from the West Bank without a physical barrier is virtually impossible. Now, because they are prevented from striking in the northern part of the West Bank down to the coastal plain of Israel, the terrorists have been forced to shift their attacks south, toward Jerusalem. The fence, as the head of Israel's Shin Bet security service put it, has already paid for itself many times over in lives saved. No wonder that 80 percent of Israelis from both the left and the right consider the fence an absolute necessity as a last resort in protecting themselves and their children from terror. Their calculation is simple: Fences can be built and torn down; human lives are irreplaceable.
For the most part, the fence lies close to the Green Line of the 1967 border, but not exclusively. It has been attacked as a massive land grab because to secure the high ground and protect substantial Jewish communities, it deviates from the Green Line into the West Bank by several miles. It is critical, however, to understand why the fence is taking the route it is. To build exactly along the 1967 line would play directly into the Palestinian strategy. How? By creating the outline of a de facto Palestinian state in the West Bank, without requiring the Palestinians to cease terrorism, without requiring them to recognize Israel's right to exist, without their abandoning the use of the right of return--without formally ending this terrible conflict.
Some argue that the fence is a barrier to peace. Wrong. It is the very lack of a fence that has made it possible for Hamas and Islamic Jihad to hold the peace process hostage, since they initiate attacks every time progress seems possible. By taking the strategic threat of suicide bombings off the table, both sides would have more latitude for serious negotiations.
Everyone knows that the Palestinians will not negotiate seriously as long as they believe the terrorist attacks will demoralize the Israelis and push them back without the Palestinians paying a price.
The real reason for Palestinian objections is that, deprived of the terrorist card, they will have to rethink their unwillingness to confront their own terrorists. They also know that the fence would transform the Israeli role from that of fighting terrorists in the West Bank to preventing terrorists from breaching the security fence. This would make it possible for the Israelis to withdraw their soldiers from the West Bank, to end their roadblocks, and give up their remaining responsibility over the Palestinian population. Thus, the Palestinians would lose the propaganda benefit of TV pictures of the Israeli Army in the West Bank.
There are positive benefits, too. Such a political separation would contribute to the two-state solution. On the one side would be a culturally Jewish, democratic society; on the other, a Palestinian sovereignty whose contours one now might only guess at.
The fence is a warning to the Palestinians that their unwillingness to negotiate a compromise will result in the unilateral imposition of a border that might be less advantageous to them than a negotiated outcome. It is also a warning to Israeli settlers determined to remain on the eastern side of the fence that their evacuation is a foregone conclusion--not a matter of if but when.
If there were ever a successful negotiation between Israelis and Palestinians resulting in a peace agreement truly worthy of the name, the precise location of the fence could be discussed and, perhaps, changed. But until such time, a fence will remain an imperative, given how many Palestinians still want to see the onslaught of terrorism against Israel continue. Until then, the message must be that when one society declares war on another, there will be a price to pay. A substantial price.
