| A few days of fighting and a wall around Jerusalem |
| George Will |
| WASHINGTON POST |
| Among reasonable people, who are now impervious to the diplomats' anesthetizing imbecilities about "preserving" the Middle East "peace process", there is a crystallizing consensus: Israel needs a short war and a high wall. To understand the context of such thinking, consider what USA Today's Jack Kelley saw at the Aug. 9 terrorist bombing that killed 15 at the Jerusalem pizza restaurant. Kelley was 30 yards away when the terrorist detonated a bomb packed with nails: |
| "The blast . . . sent flesh flying onto second-story balconies a block away. Three men were blown 30 feet; their heads, separated from their bodies by the blast, rolled down the glass-strewn street. . . . One woman had at least six nails embedded in her neck. Another had a nail in her left eye. Two men, one with a six-inch piece of glass in his right temple . . . tried to walk away. . . . A 3-year-old girl, her face covered with glass, walked among the bodies calling her mother's name. . . . The mother . . . was dead. . . . One rabbi found a small hand against a white Subaru parked outside the restaurant." |
| As with the June bombing that killed 21 at a Tel Aviv disco, children were not collateral victims -- they were the targets. Abdallah al-Shami, a senior official of Islamic Jihad, celebrated "this successful operation" against "pigs and monkeys." That is a familiar rhetorical trope among those whom the calamitous Oslo "peace process" cast in the role of Israel's "partners for peace." |
| In yet another of the constant violations of the Oslo requirement to stop anti-Jewish incitements, this was a recent broadcast from the moral cesspool that is the official television station of Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority: "All weapons must be aimed at the Jews . . . whom the Koran describes as monkeys and pigs. . . . We will enter Jerusalem as conquerors. . . . Blessings to he who shot a bullet into the head of a Jew." |
| Al-Shami boasts that "no border restriction will stop" suicide bombings. It is time to test that proposition, which surely depends on where the border is, and what precedes the establishment of it. Arafat's Palestinian Authority, in brazen violation of the Oslo undertaking to abandon violence, has chosen to wage a kind of urban guerrilla warfare against Israel. But Israel is skilled at combating such warfare. And now Israel should show that it, not Arafat, will dictate the intensity of the conflict. |
| A short war -- a few days; over before European and American diplomats' appeasement reflexes kick in -- should have four objectives. First, to kill or capture those terrorists (and those who direct them) whom Arafat has permitted to remain at large, in violation of his Oslo undertaking and of his promise to CIA Director George Tenet after the disco bombing. |
| Second, to destroy the Palestinian Authority's military infrastructure built up in violation of detailed Oslo restrictions. Third, to destroy other physical infrastructure useful to the Palestinian Authority, including all newspaper and broadcasting facilities. |
| Fourth, and most important, to define, with finality, Israel's borders, around which a wall should be built. All of Jerusalem should be within the wall. Israel's seizure of the Palestinian Authority's East Jerusalem headquarters, Orient House, which has been constantly used for political activities forbidden by Oslo, should signal the end of all talk about the indivisibility of Jerusalem. |
| The State Department, that brackish and bottomless lagoon of obtuseness, where Secretary of State Colin Powell has gone native with disgusting speed, will respond with the rhetoric of moral equivalence -- "both sides" must stop "the cycle of violence" -- to whatever Israel does in self-defense. On Tuesday, the department sank to self-caricature when it denounced as "provocative" Israel's brief incursion into the West Bank in pursuit of the perpetrators of suicide bombings. |
| It is instructive that the assault against Israel was not slowed by the intervention there of former Sen. George Mitchell, whose achievements in Northern Ireland are just now proving similarly illusory. Under his promptings, the IRA -- like the Palestinian Authority, a terrorist organization masquerading as a normal political entity -- made various false promises about "decommissioning" arms, abandoning violence, etc. Like Arafat, IRA leaders say the continuing violence is committed by entities beyond their control. |
| Mitchell cannot be blamed for failing to reconcile irreconcilables. But blame, and complicity in murder, attaches to all those who willfully refuse to recognize the limits of diplomacy and the duty of active self-defense. |
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| Palestinian's goal is showing: Israel's destruction |
| Austin American Statesman |
| No Partners For Peace |
| [Washington Posting] |
| By George F. Will Sunday, October 22, 2000 |
| JERUSALEM - Since 1948, when Israel was founded on one-sixth of one percent of the land carelessly called "the Arab world, " the conflict has been not about what land Israel should occupy but whether it should occupy any land. The conflict has been constantly violent, but now, in today's world climate of appeasement, the Palestinians' violence is self-legitimizing: The assumption always is that they must have been provoked. |
| Today, and as usual, the problem is not that Israel is being provocative, but that Israel's being is provocative. And now the potentially lethal asymmetry in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is this: Israel's government desperately wants to end the conflict; the Palestinian Authority fiercely wants to win it. |
| Israel has more dimensions of interlocking and overlapping divisions--religious, political, ethnic, social--than any other democracy. However, right now it is more united than it has been in years. United, but not enjoying it. The left's peace movement is morose, feeling refuted by events. The right is gloomy, as conservatives everywhere usually are when their bleak realism is confirmed by events. |
| At Camp David in July, Ehud Barak offered Yasser Arafat concessions (regarding land, Jerusalem and the "right of return" of Palestinian refugees) so sweeping they shattered public support for his government, which means he must now have early elections or cobble together a ";national emergency" government. But Barak, gifted at looking on the bright side, says, "I made it possible for our people . . . at least to be united by the sense of no choice." That counts as the bright side here. |
| Barak's discovery, if indeed he has made it, that Arafat wants nothing less than the liquidation of Israel, is akin to Jimmy Carter's discovery, rather late in the 20th century (the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan), of Moscow's evil. Never mind Arafat's decades-long career of terrorism and genocidal rhetoric. In 1993, on the day he signed the Declaration of Principles of the Oslo peace process, Jordanian television broadcast an Arafat speech vowing that the Palestinian flag "will fly over the walls of Jerusalem, the churches of Jerusalem, the mosques of Jerusalem." And immediately after Barak's reckless offer to Arafat at Camp David, Arafat vowed to a Gaza audience that "Jerusalem is ours, ours, ours." |
| Here is another belated discovery: Israel's principal enemies are antisemitic. They always have been. |
| In 1921, in a memorandum to Britain's colonial secretary, Winston Churchill, Palestine's most prominent families argued against a Jewish settlement: "If Russia and Poland, with their spacious countries, were unable to tolerate them, how could Europe expect Palestine to welcome them. . . . Will the Jew, on coming to Palestine, change his skin and lose all those qualities which have hitherto made him an object of dislike to the nations?" |
| Eight decades later, 5 1/2 decades after the Holocaust (which Palestinian Authority propaganda denies happened) and five years after agreeing at Oslo to stop antisemitic propaganda, the Palestinian Authority's newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida (Nov. 7, 1998) said: |
| "Corruption is a Jewish trait worldwide . . . one can seldom find corruption that was not masterminded by the Jews or that Jews are not responsible for . . . they would use the most basic despicable ways to realize their aim, so long as those who might be affected were non-Jews. A Jew would cross any line if it were in his interest." |
| Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, warns that "as the rejection of Israel has taken on a less secular and more Islamic complexion, it has also gained a deeper resonance among ordinary Arabs, with Israel's existence now cast as an affront to God's will." Even Egypt's government, which is formally at peace with Israel, not only permits but, Pipes says, sponsors "the crudest forms of antisemitism," which in effect communicates this to Egyptians: "We have to be in contact with Israelis and sign certain pieces of paper, but we still hate them, and you should, too." |
| Unlike Egypt's Anwar Sadat or Jordan's King Hussein, who prepared their publics for acceptance of Israel, the Palestinian Authority is tutoring another generation in "rejectionism." But, then, Palestinians have long been execrably led. In World War I their leaders sided with Turkey, which ruled Palestine and was on the war's losing side. Palestinian leaders sided with Hitler in World War II, with the Soviet Union during the Cold War and with Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War. Today, sad to say but necessary to say, there are no Palestinian leaders who can be Israel's "partners for peace." |
| � 2000 The Washington Post Company |
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