The previous issue noted that in 1991 the U.S. administration of President
George H. W. Bush made this formal pledge:
"In accordance with the United States traditional
policy, we do not support the creation of an independent Palestinian state.
[. . . .] Moreover, it is not the United States' aim to bring the PLO into
the process or to make Israel enter a dialogue or negotiations with the PLO."
This
pledge was indeed consonant with history, strategy, justice and common sense.
But it was not to be honored.
In
2001, President George W. Bush announced that it was a "vision
of long standing"
of U.S. policy to create a Palestinian State west of the Jordan River, carved
out of the heartland of the historic Land of Israel. This newly-discovered
long-standing vision was quickly sanctified in a UN Security Council resolution.
This
is a drastic flip-flop, with vast and potentially dire consequences. Some
elected and non-elected officeholders in Israel have performed comparable
political gymnastics.
A
decade-long chain of events leads from the first resolute position to the
new opposite resolute position. They should be considered and reconsidered,
not obscured by shadows of selective memory and selective forgetting, ulterior
motive, and wishful thinking, to discern just how the lavish reward of statehood
has been earned.
The disastrous consequences of the Oslo Accord were foreseen and
predicted, but ignored by its dedicated proponents. Such reckless disregard
of consequences ought not to be repeated.
1]
The Oslo Accords were perpetrated almost nine years ago. Since then, the PLO
has refused to honor a single one of the commitments it made in those accords,
and has not fulfilled a single responsibility.
The PLO pledged itself to an end to violence, and has instead used
its land bases and the financial means bestowed upon it to raise terrorism
and bloodshed beyond any previous level.
2]
The PLO has done nothing at all to benefit the Arab population placed under
its control. The generous contributions of the United States and Europe have
been purloined by its leaders for their own enrichment, or gone to finance
terrorism.
Human
rights and the rule of law do not exist. Dissidents are imprisoned. Anyone
accused of "collaboration" is likely to be lynched. Corruption, exploitation
and abuse are the rule rather than the exception.
It
has planted no single seed from which the fondest optimism can expect democracy
to blossom.
4] It was granted control over education and schools, largely subsidized
by the doting European Union. It runs its own news media, newspapers and broadcasting
stations, dedicated to instilling hatred and inciting murder. Slanders, threats
and curses are hurled at America as well as at Israel and Jews everywhere.
Children from the most tender age are indoctrinated to carry on the obsessive
hatred and violence into the next generation.
5] Speeches, writings, lectures and sermons assert that the Jewish
people have absolutely no historical connection with the Land of Israel. It
is alleged that no evidence testifies to their presence there in any period.
It is alleged that the First and Second Temples never existed in Jerusalem.
(At the same time, the Muslim authorities that the Israeli government permits
to control Temple Mount, assiduously destroy the archaeological relics of
what never existed.)
6] A majority of the inhabitants of the PLO-controlled regions say
that they want the destruction of Israel, not peace with it. A majority also
says that it approves of terrorist slaughter of Israeli civilians as a means
to that goal.
They take pictures of their babies and toddlers with weapons, decked
out as suicide-murderers, to adorn their family albums. The fad among older
children and teenagers is to wear necklaces hung with pendant-portraits of
suicide-murderers. The most prized is the visage of an 18-year-old who killed
a middle-aged woman and her baby granddaughter at an ice cream stand.
In speech, writing or prayer, the words "Israel" and "Jew" are used
only with loathing and contempt. The death of a Jew is a cause for joy. The
fate decreed for the Jews and for Israel is death. "Peace" and "Israel" cannot
co-existence in their own imaginations, much less in any forthcoming reality.
7] The attacks on Americans on September 11, and the heartbreaking
toll they took, were celebrated throughout the PA regions with cheers, singing
and dancing, and distribution of candy. A very large majority intend to support
Saddam Hussein in any confrontation with the United States.
8] Every withdrawal by Israel has left the PLO in control of more
land. Of the local Arab populations, 98 percent now live under the rule of
the PLO. These are concessions by Israel, that could not have been forced,
are never taken as gestures of good will to be reciprocated, but always as
weakness to be exploited.
There has never been an even infinitesimal shift toward compromise
and co-existence. Instead, it is supposed that terrorism won this much, so
more terrorism will win all. Murderous violence against Israelis and the casualties
it inflicts have risen since the Oslo Accords, not diminished. Indeed, the
years since Oslo have been many times bloodier than any earlier years.
Experience
shows that the more land the PLO controls, and the more freedom of action
granted to it, the greater the opportunities for war, destruction and bloodshed.
There is no experience at all to suggest that the ultimate control of statehood
would change this pattern.
9]
The fancy that statehood would satisfy the ambitions of the PLO, and induce
it to refrain from more war, is born of the notion that it aspires to a state
next door to Israel. This notion is held in disregard of the avowals of its
own leaders:
As
only one example among many [see more below] Faisal el-Husseini, a high-ranking PLO
official that media persons dubbed "moderate", stated in June 2001:
"If
we agree to declare our state over the West Bank and Gaza, our ultimate goal
is the liberation of all Palestine from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean]
Sea. We distinguish the strategic long-term goals from the political phased
goals, which we are compelled to temporarily accept due to international pressure"
Such
flaunting of intent suggests a cynical assurance that it will be ignored,
even in some quarters in Israel. Such reckless disregard of reality is not
unknown when the reality is incompatible with the favored theories of the
day.
[See
further, "Ten Bad Reasons for a State of Palestinian"]
THE
THREE-YEAR PLAN:
At
the moment, there is a proviso attached to the promise of statehood, that
it will come only after the PLO and its subjects in Judea, Samaria and Gaza
have become democratic and peace-loving. A period of up to the three years
has been allotted for Mr. Hyde to permanently transmogrify himself into
Dr. Jekyll.
The conditions of democracy and peacefulness may not be too rigidly
scrutinized. After all, withholding certification would delay the realization
of the brand new ancient vision of the Palestinian State. It is not clear
how much more would be required than a new chieftain who looks more presentable
on TV, and rants in more cultivated tones.
It is also not clear who will issue the certification. Perhaps it
will be:
1] a presidential administration that already reneged
on promises of previous administrations.
2] the State Department that
-- tricked and betrayed Israel in the prelude to the
Yom Kippur War. [See Issue 7]
-- recently issued its annual Report on Terrorism with
an egregious whitewash of Arab terrorism against
Israel. [See Issue 17]
-- still insists that it knows of no proof that Arafat
has been involved in terrorism.
….--
that is so addicted to appeasement in the Middle East that it refuses even
to protect American
citizens trapped and oppressed in Arab states.
3] the CIA -- that has trained terrorists for the PLO,
under the pseudonym of "security forces" and
intends to go on doing it.
4] a policymaking establishment that consistently, year
after year, lied to Congress in the required reports
on PLO compliance with the Oslo Accords, and stamped "classified"
any date it did not want to reveal to the elected representatives
of the citizens.
5] the United Nations . . .
I had a nightmare. I dreamed President Bush gave a speech and called for a new leadership of Al-Qaida. He told the terrorists all they had to do to placate the United States was pick a new leader -- anyone other than Osama bin Laden. All would be forgiven if the organization just cleaned up its act and found some new faces to represent it. [. . . .]
Sadly, the nightmare continues for Israel and the
international war on terrorism Bush himself proclaimed. Because this is precisely
what Bush has done with another group of terrorist murderers in the Middle
East. He has told the Palestinian Authority all it needs to do to get support
from the U.S. for statehood is to replace Yasser Arafat as leader . . . .
It's unthinkable. It's unconscionable. It's cowardly.
It's unbelievably bad policy. It's rewarding terror – something the U.S. has
always claimed it would never do.
Why does President Bush believe the Arab-Israeli
conflict has anything to do with a Palestinian state or real estate?
In 1948, when Israel was created, the Arabs turned
down the idea of an Arab Palestinian state – something that has never existed
in human history. For the next 20 years, there was no talk by the Arabs about
a Palestinian state. Only when Israel captured Arab lands from Egypt and Jordan
in 1967, did the demands for a Palestinian state begin. Suddenly, a group
of Arabs discovered a new national identity.
Nonsense. There will be no placating Arafat or other
successor terrorist leaders with land. The only land that will appease them
is the entire land mass of Israel. That land mass, by the way, is about the
size of the state of New Jersey. [. . . . ] The Arabs control land some 100
times bigger than Israel. They have 22 states of their own – all varying degrees
of dictatorships. Only Israel in the region is a free country. But, the Arabs
say, it's too big. The Arabs, with land totaling 100 times the size of Israel,
need more land for Arabs.
It's ridiculous. Yet President Bush buys it. [.
. . . ] America's one reliable and meaningful ally in the global war against
Islamism is Israel. It's a front-line state. It maintains a powerful military
force and awesome intelligence capabilities. It's time to stop backing our
friends into a corner. [. . . . ]
We wouldn't negotiate with al-Qaida if it dumped
bin Laden. We wouldn't let al-Qaida off the hook. And we sure wouldn't give
al-Qaida a state. We must not ask our allies to do something we ourselves
would never do.
* * * * * * *
"From
the end of the Judean state in antiquity to the beginning of British rule
over the area now designated by the name, Palestine was not a country and
had no frontiers."
-- Professor Bernard Lewis
Princeton University
"There
is no such thing as Palestine in history. Absolutely not. "
-- Professor Philip Hitti, Arab historian
When invaders from Arabia seized this land from the Byzantine Empire in the seventh century CE, they made it a province of a series of distant empires. They did not bother to give it a name. They simply picked up the ancient Greek-Roman designation "Palestina" and mispronounced it "Falastin". At no time thereafter did the sparce local population that adopted Islam and the Arabiclanguage define themselves as a distinct people or seek nationhood or statehood.
So far from cherishing the land, they abandoned it, left to barren
desert and deadly swamp, sparsely inhabited. Ancient cities like Jerusalem,
Bethlehem and Hebron, renowned to Jews and Christians for their place in biblical
history, were left to decay and squalor. Western travelers found there no
resemblance to the Holy Land of their reading and their dreams. Mark Twain,
after a tour in 1867, summed it up: "Palestine
sits in sackcloth and ashes, desolate and unlovely".
From the 1880s onward, it was the Jewish pioneers who began to redeem
the land from wilderness. Only thereafter and therefore, did Arabs come from
other lands to benefit from what the Jews built and try to take it away from
them.
Whether
there is any historical or moral justification now to invent an Arab-Palestine
State west of the Jordan River has been discussed in several past issues of
A Time To Speak [see, especially, Numbers 2, 6, 8 and 10]. A separate question
is whether the invention of such a state would be expedient. That is, would
it work as a bribe to the Arabs to give up terror and war?
The
Three-Year Plan predicates giving them only Judea, Samaria and Gaza, and leaving
what remains of the Land of Israel to the Israelis. There are no grounds
free of shadow to suppose that this would be accepted as an adequate bribe.
-- Head of PLO Military Department
--
PLO Broadcast of sermon in a Gaza mosque
"The first thing we have to recognize is that today's
conflict is not an 'intifada' - a popular uprising - but a premeditated war;
chapter two of the Palestinian war of independence . . . . The Palestinian
state that Yasser Arafat is building will be a hostile state, for which the
1967 borders mean nothing. Palestinians today speak of reversing the results
of 1948 and of absorbing Jordan."
-- Ehud Ya'ari, Israeli
journalist
As
stated explicitly by Faisel en-Husseini quoted above, the Arabs regard all
of Israel as part of their Falastin. Maps and emblems show it exclusively
theirs, from the Jordan to the Miediterranean. Israel is already obliterated
symbolically as they mean it to be in reality.
All
speeches, writings, and sermons refer to cities, regions, rivers, lakes and
hills within Israel as "Palestinians". Yet theThree Year Plan is predicated
on the resolutely unrealistic supposition that that the Arabs aspire to --
or at least will settle for -- merely part of the Land of Israel. The shadow
of reckless disregard is cast on the undisguised intent that taking part of
the Land for a start is a stepping-stone to taking all of it.
The discovery that a PLO state is a blessing devoutly to be wished is a recent one outside of the Arab sphere. The makes it only slightly newer than it is within the Arab sphere. There, the revelation did not come until 1967. In 1948, the Arabs rejected the offer of an independent state west of the Jordan, and were content to have it snatched up by Trans-Jordan. The series of wars launched againswt Israel were never to establish an Arab-Palestine state next to Israel. They were to destoy Israel, and divide the conquered land among Jordan, Syria and Egypt.
The
PLO was founded in 1964 when Judea and Samaria (erroneously dubbed West Bank)
was held by Jordan, and Gaza by Egypt. Its charter does not define its goal
as taking territory from Jordan and Egypt and turn it into a separate state.
The goal is defined as the total annihilation of Israel, killing, expelling
or subjugating all Jews. That charter has never been changed, regardless of
diplomatic flimflam to the contrary.
The
Six-Day War in 1967, intended to destroy Israel, instead brought about the
restoration of the historic Land of Israel to the Children of Israel. That
outcome made it necessary for the Arabs to adopt a new tactic: Pretend to
the world that they struggle only to regain what they lost. But there is no
such pretense in their own Two-Stage Plan adopted in 1974: Stage One -- take
any part of "Palestine" that Israel can be induced to yield. Stage Two --
use it as a base to proceed to wiping out Israel and the Jews and establishing
Arab rule from the river to the sea.
The
plan is still in effect. Stage One has been accomplished. Stage Two is deemed
within reach. If the Three-Year Plan is implemented, it will encourage and
facilitate that ultimate goal.
* * * * * * *
Discussions and comments, political and journalistic, are dappled
with the shadows of currently popular expressions, phrases, platitudes and
clichés:
1] Land for Peace
Meaning: Give Arabs land to which they have to right in exchange for
them saying they will give up a war to which they have to right.
2] Occupation
Meaning: Children of Israel living in the Land of Israel. Despite the juridical
rulings of newscasters and columnists, this is not illegal. Israel is not
"occupying" Judea, Samaria and Gaza. They do not belong to any other nation,
nor has any other nation any claim to them. [See especially
Issues 6 and 8]
3] Palestinian Territory
There is no such thing and never has been. Even the Oslo Accords gave the
PLO only administration over certain areas, not sovereignty. That administration
was neither unconditional nor irrevocable, but contingent on the fulfillment
of obligations that have never been fulfilled.
These terms reserved to Israel full security control, and the right
to implement it. When Israel, driven by relentless terrorist murder of
its citizens, implements that right there are loud bleats from a safe distance:
"Leave Palestinian territory!". This is impossible, because there is
no Palestinian territory to leave.
4] Hopelessness
A variety of public personages interpret the fad for suicide-murder in terms
of their own cultural norms and so suppose that the perpetrators must
be driven by hopelessness and despair. This makes the murderers the
object of pity and sympathy, and their victims become somehow guilty of driving
the killers to kill them. This notion supplements, but does not replace,
the notion that murderous rampages are triggered by "frustration at the
lack of progress in the Peace Process".
Unpalatable as it may be to such personages, suicide-murderers
are full of hope: Hope for glory, for the honor of martydom and the reward
of a paradise of eternal debauchery, for bringing pride and status to their
families, and of course for killing Jews. Children are taught at home, in
school, in mosques, and in public media, that they can have no more noble
aspiration. Young children announce the age at which they plan to join the
heroic band, not with hopelessness but with eager anticipation.
The head of the Department of Psychiatry at a university in Cairo
understands why this is unfathomable to the unenlightened: "Western civilization has no concepts such as self-sacrifice
and honor, which is why Americans fail to understand that the sucide-bomber
experiences the height of ecstasy and happiness" [translation by MEMRI].
5] The Two-State Solution
There already are two states. Under the terms of the League of Nations Mandate
for Palestine, it was designated as The Jewish National Home, and the British
mandatory authorities were instructed to keep it open to "close Jewish settlement".
In 1922, in violation of the Mandate, the British detached the entire
region east of the Jordan River to create its own puppet kingdom of Trans-Jordan;
a kingdom with so little national identity that it had to take its name from
a river. This removed 76 percent of Palestine from the Jewish National Home.
In the following decades, the British proceeded to ban Jewish settlement
in much of the land west of the Jordan, ban Jewish immigration -- even before,
during and after Holocaust -- and fill up the space with Arab immigrants.
[See further, Issue 2] The partition plan of 1948 offered the Arabs half of
even this remnant. The wars, terrorism and attendant tactics since then have
been to bloat the Arab share of the Jewish National Home to 100 percent.
That the Three Year Plan will persuade them to reconcile themselves
to a fraction of a percent less has not been demonstrated or persuasively
argued. To follow some moral imperative to raise the number of Arab states
in the world from 22 to 23 is to encourage their imperative to reduce the
number of Jewish states in the world from 1 to 0.
6]
Israel Must Make Painful Sacrifices
This mantra is intoned even by some of Israel's own officeholders and
personages, who would be more suitably concerned with sparing their nation
and people more pain and sacrifice.
How far the quota of pain and
sacrifice has already been filled is suggested in excerpts from "Jenin Lies",
by Mark Steyn, National Review, 18 April 2002, previously quoted
in Issue 17:
So even the so-called "two-state solution" subscribes
to an Arafatist view of the situation. Creating yet another fetid Arab dictatorship
in the West Bank would be, technically, a "three-state solution" and, indeed, a second
Palestinian state, Jordan, whose population has always been majority Palestinian.
It was created in the original 'two-state settlement'
80 years ago, when the British partitioned their new Mandate of Palestine,
carving off the [eastern] three-quarters into a territory called 'Transjordan'
and keeping the surviving [western] quarter under the name 'Palestine'. [.
. . .] Churchill, as Colonial Secretary, thought the fairest way to fulfill
Britain's pledges . . . .] The only thing he got wrong was the names: If instead
of inventing the designation 'Transjordan', he'd just called the eastern
territory 'Palestine' and the west 'Israel' (or 'Judah'), the . . . claim
would be a much tougher sell.
The Zionists have been trading 'land for peace'
ever since the Great War, and the result is they've got hardly any land and
less peace than ever before. As early as 1921, Chaim Weizmann wrote to Churchill
protesting the ever shrinking borders of the potential Jewish homeland.
To the north, Britain had surrendered traditionally Palestinian land to France
in fixing the Mandate's border with Lebanon and Syria and, by giving the eastern
three-quarters to Abdullah, had removed the rich fields of Gilead, Moab and
Edom. The 1947 UN Partition took more land -- a partition of the previous
partition -- but the Zionists accepted it.
In 1993, Oslo was the biggest gamble yet, the creation
of a mini-fiefdom for their bloodiest enemy. The 'Palestinian Authority' was
an unlikely bet for a state but, from Arafat's point of view, it would make
an ideal launch-point from which to kill Jews in the very heart of their tiny
sliver of territory.
* * * * * * *
A young Arab woman decided to emulate the fashionable
suicide-terrorists and offered her services. She was assigned to explode herself
in the midst of a crowd of Israeli civilians. She was told that to be inconspicuous
she should dress like a typical Israeli girl.
That meant uncovered hair and clothing the would-be
martyr regarded as immodest, so she rejected the assignment. She explained
that donning such garb is "against my religion".
END