Bibi's Tunnel, Yasser's War
KRAUTHAMMER, CHARLES
Bibi’s Tunnel, Yasser’s War By Charles Krauthammer Netanyahu opened a tunnel. Arafat started a war. It is hard to find a publication or a government on the planet that has not denounced the...
...The Israeli Labor government had invited its erstwhile mortal enemy to bring these 40,000 armed men into its midst—mortgaging everything against the hope of Palestinian adherence to Arafat’s public renunciation of violence...
...Then she rails about Netanyahu’s tardiness on Hebron and some such...
...Dunkirk, Churchill noted, was a miracle and a disaster...
...Netanyahu has the intelligence to see the forest from the trees...
...Two years later, at the Oslo 2 accords—which gave him (1) control of Kalkilya, Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Tulkharm (all the West Bank cities save Hebron), (2) broad new powers, and (3) a gradual turning over to him of the vast uninhabited “state” lands of the West Bank—he sold that rug to Peres a second time...
...About the starting of the war, silence...
...And Gingrich, mind you, did not order the Capitol Police to fire on the White House to avenge his dignity...
...It is due two weeks from now...
...Peace cannot just mean no violence today...
...IV Aterrible realization is emerging from the smoke of the “tunnel” riots: Oslo has become untenable, yet irreversible...
...Now the War of Arafat’s Pride...
...4) Dignity: We are down to the bottom of the barrel...
...Express they did, storming Israeli checkpoints and installations...
...Anthony Lewis, for example, finds it significant that Arafat was once denied the “ability to make a helicopter trip by the Israelis...
...And the forest here, the main objective, has to do with the renewal of the renunciation of violence...
...II Missing among all this talk of grievance is any mention of Israeli complaints about Palestinian violations of Oslo...
...2) Closure of the West Bank: By not allowing Palestinian workers to come to work in Israel, Netanyahu has caused severe economic misery and hardship...
...Arafat first pledged to change it immediately after the Oslo 1 accords were signed in 1993...
...When Israeli soldiers responded, predictably, with tear gas, rubber bullets, and warning shots, Arafat played his trump...
...That—not the tunnel—is why he decided on war...
...Which is why it was a failure for Israel...
...But he has made it equally clear that he has no intention of doing so...
...Indeed, it was an evasion of the Palestinians’ original commitment to actually change the charter, not just to say they did...
...He needs to formally promise to do it again...
...Netanyahu, in his 100 days in office, had already eased these restrictions considerably, more than doubling the number of Palestinians allowed in daily from 22,000 to 50,000...
...Yet ever since Netanyahu came to power, Arafat and his Palestinian Authority leadership have been brandishing the threat of renewed violence...
...What was the provocation for that violence, then...
...Sure, Netanyahu did not give away the store under world and Clinton administration pressure...
...But holding on makes for deliverance, not success...
...And he broke it wantonly last month with impunity...
...It is hard to find a publication or a government on the planet that has not denounced the opening of the tunnel...
...That is why the next round of negotiations must end with a tripartite reaffirmation of the renunciation of violence—and an American commitment to, this time, enforce it...
...Those who believed there really was such a promise have had their illusions shattered...
...It not only signals an ominous escalation of the violence...
...The change in the charter Arafat merely avoided...
...The immediate agenda for the peace process is obvious...
...The tunnel was a trumped-up charge...
...He promised non-violence in Oslo...
...Netanyahu, it seems, was not sufficiently solicitous of the dignity of the Palestinians and, in particular, did not accord proper respect to Arafat, their president...
...Anything less, and the peace process will not survive...
...Yet even to raise the issue of this fundamental non-compliance appears odd...
...You have not heard from this committee in six months...
...Netanyahu did not get that at the Washington summit...
...And irreversible not because, as naively believed by many, of a true change of heart of the Palestinians...
...Arafat has just demonstrated that he could turn it into Beirut, his old home turf, a killing ground of armed militias...
...What are these violations, these casi belli...
...During the intifada, the stone-throwing disorders of 1987-93, the West Bank was Belfast...
...She was one of the 54 (vs...
...What really happened...
...That is the only possible deterrent to Arafat’s playing it again...
...When Newt Gingrich shuts down the U.S...
...Israel has rendered itself hostage...
...The starting of the war is the single most important event in the Middle East since the signing of the Oslo peace accords in September 1993...
...Arafat’s playing the war card fundamentally undermines the very premise of the Oslo accords...
...They haven’t been...
...III But it is the other pledge Arafat made to Rabin in his Sept...
...Peres did it as a security measure to make it more difficult for terrorists to infiltrate into Israel...
...It was demanding, for example, that he honor the Oslo understanding that permitted no PLO offices in Jerusalem...
...What is the status of these two commitments...
...For months they have been warning that they were prepared to restart the intifada, this time with machine guns...
...504) voting against this extraordinarily tepid (indeed, essentially meaningless) gesture of compliance with Oslo...
...it means the promise of no violence tomorrow...
...The Arab League issued an incendiary libel that the tunnel was “part of an Israeli Zionist plot to destroy the Aqsa Mosque [and] set up the Temple of Solomon...
...One would think that an event this momentous— and bloody: it has left, as of this writing, 70 people dead—would come in for some serious criticism around the world...
...The tunnel did...
...Thus the declaration of inoperativity already occurred in 1993...
...Netanyahu, who before the tunnel riots had every intention of withdrawing from Hebron with appropriate security arrangements, will find a way to do so within a few weeks or perhaps months...
...He has yet to live down his resulting reputation for pettiness and petulance...
...He cannot afford to alienate the one true arbiter in the region...
...There was a mere shifting of the ground...
...The world press, the American government, and indeed Shimon Peres nodded and applauded...
...It didn’t...
...He did nothing of the sort...
...3) Settlements: Netanyahu is accused of building new and expanding old Jewish settlements in the territories...
...You will not hear from it in two weeks...
...So dead that when Hanan Ashrawi makes her daily appearances on American television denouncing Israelis for this or that violation of the Oslo accords, not one American reporter ever asks her to explain why on April 24 in the PNC she voted against revision of the Palestinian charter...
...By Saturday, when he realized that the toll was mounting and that he could not sustain the war any longer, he finally called for his men to cease fire...
...The pledge of non-violence, however, he has now brazenly flouted...
...Arafat may not fear the Israeli response to another round of war...
...In fact, the closure, like the Hebron delay, was instituted by the sainted Shimon Peres, also in response to the suicide bombings of February and March...
...This is a Palestinian army...
...Where in the United States do police walk the streets carrying AK-47s...
...He would show Netanyahu that he had the ultimate card to play: his men under arms...
...Netanyahu’s key task is not simply to get Arafat to recommit himself to non-violence...
...Yes, Arafat once again gets to sell a rug twice...
...That swelling of support for Arafat for just that reason should make peace dreamers question their cherished assumption about a fundamental Palestinian change of heart...
...But the Palestinian violence could be understood— read: justified—as an expression of pent-up anger over accumulated offenses by the “intransigent” (a perennial Likud-linked adjective once again hauled out for easy use) government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu...
...An airport in Gaza, too, will be granted to Arafat...
...To date, not a single change...
...First, the War of Jenkins’s Ear...
...What Arafat may really fear, however, is the wrath of the United States...
...WITHIN A FEW DAYS EVEN PALESTINIAN SPOKESMEN WERE ADMITTING THAT THE TUNNEL WAS A PRETEXT—AND STILL THE WEST JUSTIFIED THEIR VIOLENCE...
...After all, Arafat can just as easily break a new pledge as his old one...
...But as soon as the West began to catch up with this reality, there was no rethinking of the justification for Palestinian violence...
...The war was on...
...Mobs then descended on Israeli checkpoints and settlements...
...Violations are always understood to mean Israeli violations...
...Indeed, he would do so within two months of the inauguration of the Palestinian legislative council...
...What Israel needs now, in return for all it is about to concede, is but one thing: a firm American commitment to back Israel to the hilt next time Arafat plays the war card...
...Arafat was indeed frustrated...
...The tortuous saga of the PLO charter is by now almost comical...
...He was frustrated to encounter an Israeli administration that did not see the peace accords as a one-way street, a process of sequential Israeli concessions in return for which Arafat need do nothing but smile during photo-ops...
...If playing the war card doesn’t draw fire just from the Israelis—Arafat has shown that he can survive, indeed thrive on, that—but from the United States, he might think twice...
...Peres, eager to show some tangible Palestinian gesture before the Israeli election, fatuously hailed this as the greatest ideological change in the Middle East in 100 years...
...In return for what...
...In decreasing order of seriousness, if not frequency of citation, they are: 1) Hebron: Israel is now six months behind its promised schedule of withdrawal from this last occupied Palestinian city...
...Well, yes...
...Netanyahu’s key objective is to get the United States, as the arbiter of the peace process, to declare non-violence a norm it will hold Arafat to...
...His soldiers opened fire...
...The Oslo accords are quite explicit on the issue: “The PLO commits itself to . . . a peaceful resolution of the conflict...
...He was negotiating with Arafat for further increases when Arafat called his little war...
...Yes, he has many dead, but they serve as martyrs, fuel for the cause...
...And, as seen in the last few weeks, war-making is a source of great public support for Arafat...
...The next Mideast milestone should be an Oslo 3: an ostentatious hand-shaking ceremony on the White House lawn in which (1) Israel gives a grab bag of Oslo 2 goodies to the Palestinians, (2) Arafat smiles—he’ll promise, too, but his promises are not worth the paper they are written on—and (3) the United States solemnly declares that from now on it will monitor war-making...
...Yet in return for the myriad of compromises and concessions, territorial and political, granted by the Israelis, the Palestinians committed themselves to only two: changing their national charter that calls for the destruction of Israel and renouncing violence...
...9, 1993, letter that constitutes the gravest breach of Oslo...
...And perhaps its death...
...It does not, in fact, go under, on, or even touch the Muslim holy sites on the Temple Mount...
...Within a few days, even Palestinian spokesmen were admitting that the tunnel was a pretext...
...It constitutes a fundamental breach of the Oslo bargain, which was founded on the unequivocal renunciation of violence...
...In fact, under the rule of Labor prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Peres, Israeli settlements grew in population by 25,000 over the life of the Oslo agreements...
...And yet Arafat emerged from the Washington summit with no condemnation of his little war and no commitment on his part not to start it again...
...Arafat echoed the lie, inviting Palestinian mobs into the street “to express their anger” over this “desecration of the holy places...
...Arafat is allegedly slighted—and Palestinian apologists find in this a justification for war...
...On April 24, as the deadline approached, Arafat convened the Palestinian National Council and claimed that it had changed the charter...
...He demanded changes to security arrangements that might leave these Jews vulnerable to attack by the local Arab population and perhaps even by the armed Palestinian police in the hills above...
...Closures will be eased and, if there is no violence, Israeli forces will withdraw their armor from the West Bank...
...Its repetition by the PNC in 1996 was a redundancy...
...First she opposes even the pretense of living up to one of the two major peace commitments the Palestinians undertook...
...Arafat was finally facing an Israeli government that was demanding reciprocity...
...After last month’s sacking and murder at Joseph’s Tomb, an even smaller Jewish enclave in the Palestinian town of Nablus, one would think that Netanyahu’s concerns would be accorded a little more respect...
...He chafed at these demands and resented that Israeli concessions were made dependent on them...
...But that is not the real prize for Israel in the coming negotiations...
...In the American mind, the charter is considered a solved—a dead—issue...
...Yes, he reserves the right to establish new settlements...
...Netanyahu has indicated absolutely clearly that he intends to do precisely what Labor did: allow the thickening of existing settlements...
...He pledged that now he would really change the charter...
...Since taking office, Netanyahu has raised questions about the safety of those 400 Jews left living near the ancient Jewish shrine in Hebron...
...He used the tunnel to incite the crowds to restart the intifada...
...But peace dreamers never question their assumptions...
...The violence stopped...
...Turning the guns of the Palestinian police against Israel was the truly historic event of the “tunnel” riots...
...If the Palestinians may declare war whenever they deem themselves “frustrated” with the pace of negotiations, then “peace process” become just a euphemism for step-by-step Israeli surrender...
...The claim that he lost control of his army is simply false...
...government in part because Bill Clinton made him exit by the back door of Air Force One, he is called a cry-baby...
...The prospect of losing the leverage and patronage that come from the American connection may stay his hand...
...Shimon Peres, the archetypal dove who fell over himself to accommodate Yasser Arafat, was prime minister at the time...
...It was Peres who halted the Hebron withdrawal...
...What makes this latest Arafat maneuver so farcical is that Arafat thereby managed to sell Peres the rug for a third time—again without delivery...
...Yes, but the reason that the redeployment was postponed beyond the March 28 deadline is that in February and March Palestinian terrorists set off four terror bombs in Israel, killing 59...
...Consequently, the PLO undertakes to submit to the Palestinian National Council for formal approval the necessary changes in regard to the Palestinian covenant” (my italics...
...Untenable because Arafat has shown this “peace process” has achieved no peace...
...These are concessions easily granted...
...The PNC resolution said that the charter was amended, but changed not a single word, promising instead that a committee would return with new wording within six months...
...What to do...
...Netanyahu’s concerns were deemed disingenuous, an excuse for indefinite delay...
...In Gaza and the West Bank, he has never been as popular as today, now that he has turned his guns on the Jews...
...In his letter to Rabin of September 9, 1993, Arafat declared that “the PLO affirms that those articles of the Palestinian covenant which deny Israel’s right to exist . . . are now inoperative and no longer valid...
...But because, having now planted a 40,000-man armed force in its midst, Israel has no other recourse but to continue...
...Such are the bitter fruits of Oslo...
...Israel cannot afford that Arafat’s next deployment of violence and war go unremarked, uncondemned, unpunished by the United States...
...In fact, the application of the very word “police” to these people is risible...
...Accordingly, the PLO renounces . . . acts of violence and will assume responsibility over all PLO elements and personnel in order to assure their compliance, prevent violations and discipline violators...
Vol. 2 • October 1996 • No. 5
