Arafat's War
KRAUTHAMMER, CHARLES
Arafat's War How to End It BY CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER I. Peacekeeping? What passes for the great Middle East debate in Washington centers upon whether the Bush administration is "doing enough." The...
...No one remembers how we got there...
...Taken in by Oslo for the entire eight years, the New York Times's Tom Friedman, for example, now rationalizes the collapse of his illusions by characterizing Arafat's war as senseless and self-defeating, "a grievous error" and an "idiotic uprising...
...They are afraid to go to the movies...
...And he wants to do it again...
...Israelis are afraid...
...Israel offered it, and what did it get in return...
...Well, we do know that there is no diplomatic solution...
...Every Israeli death sows more fear and despair in the enemy...
...Arafat's war will give rise to Israel's war, a massive conventional attack on Arafat and his entire political-military infrastructure...
...Now the direction is clear...
...Badly...
...Eventually it will...
...The premise of Oslo was "land for peace...
...Israel will, of course, be accused of creating a ghetto around the Palestinians...
...He tried first to make war from Jordan and was expelled in 1970...
...Jews are no lovers of walls...
...It proved worthless...
...An observer or peacekeeping force would be a deathtrap for outsiders...
...Here is how it happened: After years of being attacked by the Palestine Liberation Organization from Lebanon, Israel invaded in 1982...
...It tried to erase the Green Line between Israel and the territories, allowing Palestinians to work within Israel...
...Israel took those risks, giving Arafat his armed mini-state and adding steadily to its territory under relentless pressure from secretary of state Madeleine Albright...
...Yasser Arafat and his PLO soon found themselves surrounded in Beirut by Israeli forces...
...The Clinton administration wooed and cooed Yasser Arafat for eight years...
...What does "doing" mean...
...At some point either this government will act, or it will fall and a new government will do what needs to be done...
...But it misses the point...
...And look at the Oslo accords...
...They stayed to pacify the region and became sitting ducks for Islamic terrorists...
...And it will need to remain in place until a Palestinian leadership arises willing to sign a real peace, accept the Jewish state, and forswear violence...
...The rescuers then withdrew...
...In 1943, the United States deliberately shot down the plane carrying Admiral Yamamoto, architect of the attack on Pearl Harbor...
...This is precisely the program laid out by the Palestinians in the 1974 Cairo "Phased Plan...
...At the same time, Israel will have to strike and destroy the headquarters and leaders of Arafat's most deadly allies, Hamas and Islamic Jihad...
...He is an obstacle to peace...
...These denunciations are the epitome of hypocrisy...
...Precisely the opposite...
...But because the fate and political direction of the Palestinians will remain uncertain, Israel must then take one supreme protective measure: enforce a separation between Palestinian and Israeli populations, until the Palestinians decide they actually want to live in openness and peace with the Jewish state...
...In it, the Palestine National Council decided to accept any piece of land within Greater Palestine as Phase One, from which to carry on Phase Two, the war for the extinction of Israel...
...At the Durban conference on racism, dozens of countries will join not only to brand Zionism as racism but to devalue the Holocaust by deliberately using the word to apply to a myriad of other national tragedies...
...Israel will withdraw...
...After all, it was not "land for cease-fire...
...The choice is clear...
...The whole point of the Oslo experiment, and the terrible risks Israel undertook in the name of peace, was to stop being an occupying power and to give the Palestinians self-government and dignity...
...Not only is the world silent...
...Strike, expel, separate, and evacuate...
...Nonetheless, the wall will need to be built...
...It will have to launch a massive lightning strike on the Palestinian Authority...
...Look what happens when he is momentarily frightened and trying to avert an expected massive Israeli response, as after the Dolphinarium massacre...
...For 34 years, since it came into possession of the West Bank (in another war it never sought), Israel has offered the Palestinians open borders, open traffic, open commerce...
...Having outlived its usefulness, the "recognition" has been openly and boldly repudiated...
...And it will have to be quick...
...The status quo of endless guerrilla war, Arafat's war...
...The Arab states will be in the Security Council within hours, calling for the world to restrain Israel from trying to win a war that it did not start and did not want...
...That means erecting a fence separating Israel and Palestinian territory...
...And now...
...Facing massive coun-terforce, he calls for international peacekeepers to save the Palestinians...
...But it must give Israel the few days it needs to disarm and defeat Arafat...
...The Westerners returned to protect the Palestinians...
...Israel stands alone, except for the United States...
...Why should he stop...
...Apart from directly damaging Israel's economy and morale, apart from driving wedges between Israel and its allies, the war has helped radicalize the Palestinian people, embitter them against Israel, and mobilize them for a long, bloody, death struggle...
...The list is endless, idealistic, generous, and, of course, delusional: a one-handed handshake...
...It is now clear that Arafat's intention from the beginning was "land for war"—to use whatever West Bank and Gaza territory he would be granted in any "peace" as a base for waging war against Israel proper...
...After the French and Americans were massacred, they all finally sailed away...
...Because there is a wall between Gaza and Israel...
...They were undoubtedly saying the same to King Hussein in 1970...
...But the root of the problem is intent...
...And Arafat's intentions have been laid bare for all to see...
...Mindlessly, the call to "do more" grows...
...The illusion that assuaging the Palestinians and granting them their own state would bring peace is shattered...
...It is only a matter of time...
...The suicide bombings and drive-by shootings have forced Israel to impose strict security measures...
...His counter-offer was war...
...We now know, eight sorry years later, that the PLO's recognition of Israel was just paper, without an ounce of true intent—a token to be withdrawn as soon as Israel had exhausted its grant of extraordinary and irreversible concessions...
...The beginning of wisdom is to understand how we got here...
...but after the one after that...
...As demonstrated by Mao and Ho and countless other guerrilla leaders, revolutionary war isolates and eliminates the opposition...
...Arafat's War We are now at Phase Two...
...If anything, it means sending high-level people over to jawbone...
...But the U.N...
...He then tried to make war from Lebanon and was expelled in 1982...
...III...
...The Oslo Illusion What then to do...
...They are afraid to send their children to the mall...
...It proved very temporary and soon led to the tribe's final conquest by Mohammed's forces...
...It is the classic dialectic of guerrilla war...
...A video clip repeatedly shown on Palestinian TV features a children's song with the lyric, "How pleasant is the smell of martyrs, how pleasant the smell of land, the land enriched by the blood, the blood pouring out of a fresh body...
...Perhaps not after the next nail-bomb massacre...
...Instead, basking in international acclaim for his forbearance, he accepted the Tenet cease-fire...
...conference on racism, no less...
...This is the war Arafat has coveted all his life: the war against Israel from within Palestine...
...Nor will Sharon's antiterrorist "assassination" campaign stop this war...
...Whatever voices for peace there might have been among the Palestinians have been silenced: Many have been driven out (there has been an especially large emigration of Christians under duress), some have been radicalized, others executed as "collaborators...
...I don't believe that Arafat ever really gave up violence as a tool to achieving his objectives," outgoing ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk confessed in his parting interview with the Jerusalem Post, published on July 6. It took Indyk and the rest of the American "peace team" eight years— and oceans of blood—to figure this out...
...The fact that the last such presidential engagement—the Camp David debacle of July 2000—led directly to the worst fighting and the worst Arab-Israeli crisis in 20 years seems not to deter the critics...
...We have been here before, but no one seems to remember...
...Less acclaimed is his attempt at counter-terrorism...
...Meaning from the river Jordan to the Mediterranean: no Israel...
...After the Dolphinarium disco massacre in which a suicide bomber murdered 21 youths and maimed dozens of others, Sharon did nothing...
...The policy of targeting terrorist ringleaders has been called "assassination" and widely denounced...
...The overture culminated in Ehud Barak's astonishing July 2000 offer of a Palestinian state with its capital in a shared Jerusalem...
...Terrorists attack innocents outside a Tel Aviv discothèque, in a Jerusalem pizzeria, in a Haifa café—and even the highly restrained, entirely bloodless Israeli responses are denounced by the State Department as "provocative," "escalation," and "disproportionate...
...So long as one could imagine him as a peace partner, simply wanting a better deal but ready in the end to accept a Jewish state living side-by-side with Palestine, one could imagine needing him...
...Which is why he must be stopped...
...In 1998, President Clinton ordered cruise missile attacks on Usama bin Laden's bases in Afghanistan...
...Killing those who arise to kill you is a universal and perfectly legitimate tactic of war...
...The border must be rational: defensible for Israel, livable for the Palestinians...
...And even worse, they are demoralized...
...The tentative ties Israel had established with moderate Arab states like Morocco, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates have been cut...
...but even the basest of anti-Semitic calumnies, the "Zionism is racism" canard, has been resurrected—at a U.N...
...Wisely, he has not returned...
...And what did America get in return for this diplomatic largesse...
...How do we know...
...conceals film of the kidnapping from Israel, the victim country—film that might have helped it find its soldiers or track down the perpetrators...
...The mask of "recognition" is off...
...It means doing to him what King Hussein did in 1970 when Arafat tried to destroy both the king and his Hashemite state: defeat him and expel him...
...The violence miraculously abates—on his command and that of his eight separate security services...
...Perhaps it will be chaos, but chaos is preferable to the current unholy alliance of Arafat's Palestinian Authority and the Islamic terrorists...
...The president is criticized for not "engaging" in Middle East diplomacy...
...The obvious objective was to kill him...
...Not only do the Palestinians speak candidly to their own public and the world of taking all of Palestine and destroying Israel...
...On the one hand, the structure of the government militates against it...
...At every opportunity, Arafat insisted that the Oslo peace accords were only a means, and that if they did not get him what he wanted, he would revert to "other means...
...In 1947, when the Palestinians were offered a state side-by-side with a Jewish state, they rejected it in favor of a war of extermination, a war that failed...
...Arafat did not just turn that down, he never made a counter-offer...
...They have lost hope...
...And when in 1986 the United States found Libya responsible for a terrorist bombing that killed two American soldiers in a Berlin discothèque, it did not send Qaddafi a subpoena...
...First, he tried moderation...
...to reaffirm America's determination to stand with you as you take risks for peace...
...Nonetheless, the fact that these congenital Panglosses have themselves finally come to this conclusion—after constantly, vociferously, belligerently maintaining otherwise—makes it unanimous: That pledge of nonviolence, made in Arafat's famous September 1993 letter to Yitzhak Rabin in the Oslo accords, the foundation of the whole "peace process," was a fraud and deception from the very beginning...
...Everyone remembers that 241 American servicemen were massacred in Beirut during the last American peacekeeping operation (as were 58 French paratroopers, killed Charles Krauthammer is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard...
...How did it end last time...
...A largely overlooked fact in the current bloodshed is that not a single suicide bomber has come from Gaza...
...Again, the self-deception by Israeli doves and American foreign policy elites is, in retrospect, simply staggering...
...To have that effect, the Israeli strike will have to be massive and overwhelming...
...This is diplomatic malpractice that verges on manslaughter...
...On the other hand, no country can tolerate the bloodshed daily inflicted on Israel by Arafat's war...
...To a man who has dedicated 40 years of his life to molding his people to refight (and reverse) Israel's War of Independence, it makes perfect sense...
...Israel is dazed and reeling—economically, diplomatically, and politically...
...The war is the war Arafat always wanted...
...not only does the Arab League threaten to revive the Arab boycott...
...Sharon is locked in a national unity government with the very Labor doves who brought on the catastrophe of Oslo and feel the need to justify that folly by making yet more peace agreements with Arafat...
...After that acutely embarrassing exercise in futility, Powell left...
...not only do even pro-Western Arab states, like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, talk of making war on Israel again...
...They groan with dozens of clauses inserted at Israel's insistence about joint cooperation—economic, environmental, educational, industrial...
...But legitimacy does not guarantee efficacy...
...Arafat's war has secured the future: a new generation, raised on hate, mobilized and ready to carry the fight long after Arafat and his generation are gone...
...As it should...
...V. The War to Come The diplomats prattle on that there is no military solution to this conflict...
...They were shortly sent back, however, after Christian Lebanese massacred Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla...
...Meaning, not just nonviolence, but recognition by the Palestinians and the Arab world of the legitimacy of Israel...
...The PLO rejected the offer root and branch...
...Above all, psychologically...
...The hope behind that illusion— to demilitarize Israeli society, to relax its isolation, to live without fear—has utterly evaporated...
...It has no intention of occupying Palestinian cities and people...
...It cannot meander through every nook and valley of Judea and Samaria...
...Israelis see nothing but indefinite struggle, continued bloodletting, for the endless future...
...Clinton's obsessive intervention and eternally open door showed Arafat that there was no price to be paid for either humiliating the United States, as he did at Camp David, or plunging the region into crisis, as he did weeks later when he began his now year-long guerrilla war against Israel...
...Yet even the United States speaks the language of moral equivalence in the face of a war begun by the Palestinians after rejecting a generous peace...
...Israel will not stay to rule...
...army), and granted him international legitimacy, foreign aid, and the territorial base of every city in the West Bank and Gaza...
...Or Israel's war: attack, followed by evacuation and separation...
...This is Arafat's war...
...Neighbors who broke out in dance and song upon news of the massacre of innocents at the Jerusalem Sbarro...
...Why, within days of the conquest of Jerusalem in 1967, Israel returned the Muslim holy places at the Al Aqsa Mosque to Muslim authority...
...Given what he has achieved in the last 11 months, why would he stop...
...Unemployment is at the highest level in Israeli history...
...Having overplayed his hand, Arafat asked for rescue...
...Oslo's basic premise was even more fundamentally violated...
...They are afraid to drive the open road...
...But we know the futility of this approach...
...Sharon's Way Arafat won't...
...Sound familiar...
...The victimizer cries foul again...
...U.S., French, and Italian forces were sent to evacuate Arafat and his troops to Tunisia...
...The objective, he said openly, has always been "Palestine from the river to the sea...
...What country would not go after those who were sending bombs into the middle of its cities...
...He was invited to the White House more often than any leader in the entire world...
...not only has the Arab world broken the few low-level relations it opened during the Oslo interlude...
...The United States has issued an advisory for its citizens not to visit the area...
...With every act of Israeli retaliation, with every long wait at a security checkpoint, with every day of economic hardship made worse by the closures, popular anger at Israel is stoked...
...When Arafat arrived eight years ago, no one knew what political direction the Palestinian population in the territories would take...
...That response is coming...
...That did not stop the Pacific war...
...This analysis is sheer nonsense...
...For the West to fall into that trap is truly insane...
...Not in order to make peace with Israel, but, on the contrary, in order to establish a territorial base from which to fight and destroy Israel...
...Israel knows where they are...
...Of one thing we can be certain...
...Today I come to Israel to fulfill a pledge I made," declared President Clinton in Jerusalem in December 1998...
...it was "land for peace...
...Arafat is the master of bringing in others to save him from wars that he starts...
...More leverage with Arafat...
...Those Palestinians wishing minimal civil relations with Israel live in fear for their lives...
...Some settlements must be abandoned, but only in the context of an Israeli war that reshapes the landscape by removing Arafat and the PLO, enforcing separation, and defining the new border between the Jewish and Palestinian states...
...Arafat's war serves an even larger purpose, however...
...And this wall will be an admission of a great historic failure—the failure to find a genuine partner for peace among the Palestinians...
...Within months of Oslo, in a speech in South Africa, Arafat analogized Oslo to the treaty that Mohammed signed with the Quraysh...
...Israel cannot go on like this...
...Or failing that, to kill enough of his followers to deter or slow down their operations...
...When he wants to shut down the violence, he does...
...Military reserve service has been extended...
...Oslo assumed that Arafat would prepare his people for peace...
...To western observers whose notion of human achievement ends with a good latte, a round of golf, and high-speed Internet access, this war seems insane...
...By the end of the eight years, the Palestinians were no longer speaking in code or by analogy...
...Every element of Arafat's police state infrastructure will have to be destroyed: headquarters and commanders of his personal security services, police stations, weapons depots, training camps, communications and propaganda facilities, including radio, TV, and government-controlled newspapers...
...For eight years, the Clinton administration urged Israel to take "risks for peace" with solemn assurance that the United States would stand behind it...
...From the very beginning, Palestinian officials flaunted their nonacceptance of Israel and their disdain for the "peace" they had signed...
...Yet there are still observers in the West who remain puzzled by Arafat's war...
...And now, after a year of his own guerrilla war within Palestine, the balance of forces with Israel has shifted dramatically in his favor...
...Egypt and Jordan have withdrawn their ambassadors...
...How would international peacekeepers stop Palestinian suicide bombers from infiltrating, when Israelis, who live there and know every nook and cranny of the place, cannot...
...It would reward Palestinian violence and vindicate the Hezbollah model of making guerrilla war to force Israel into unilateral territorial retreat...
...Instead, he has trained them for "popular war," down to the children who are indoctrinated with the glories of "martyrdom" and bloodlust from their very earliest days...
...That leadership, having seen the devastation and destruction wrought by Israel in response to Arafat's unyielding belligerence, might be inclined to eschew belligerence...
...Tourism, a mainstay of the economy, is dead...
...It would do nothing to end the current guerrilla war...
...The vilification of Israel, temporarily moderated during the Oslo interlude, has resumed full force at the United Nations, the Arab League, and in Europe...
...Arafat is not a peace partner...
...Maybe not today, but tomorrow for sure...
...For today, Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon has been temporizing, casting about for a strategy...
...Under cover of war, Israel will need to abandon and evacuate its more far-flung settlements...
...People are so afraid to go to Israel that British Air, Swissair, KLM, and Lufthansa forbid their pilots who fly there to stay overnight...
...Think of how a single Columbine massacre traumatized a country of 280 million...
...And until he and the Palestinian Authority are removed, there is no hope for anything other than endless "war until victory," as Arafat assures his people almost daily...
...After all, the entire campaign of terrorism, suicide bombings, drive-by shootings, mortar attacks, gun battles, and ambushes is carried out under the umbrella and protection, often the direction, of Arafat and the Palestinian Authority...
...Arafat never had any intention of creating this New Middle East of civilized societies living side by side...
...He then sent secretary of state Colin Powell to bolster the fictional cease-fire even as it collapsed around him...
...All within, probably, three to four days, at which time the world will have forced Israel to stop...
...It bombed his tent...
...In 1993 in the Oslo accords, Arafat was offered recognition, self-government, and an end to occupation...
...Arafat initiates violence, openly provoking an Israeli military reaction...
...But such is the anti-Israel feeling in Europe and the Arab world that the idea has gained much currency—so much, in fact, that the Bush administration has had to fend it off, single-handed, in the Security Council...
...At a conference earlier this year in Lebanon, that much-celebrated Palestinian "moderate" Faisal Husseini (who died of a heart attack shortly thereafter) explained why the Palestinians had accepted only a relatively small amount of land with Oslo...
...And then in 1993, the miracle: Israel itself, in a fit of reckless high-mindedness unparalleled in the annals of diplomacy, brought him back to Palestine, gave him control of 98 percent of the Palestinian population, armed his 40,000 "police" (i.e...
...In 1978, they were offered negotiations and autonomy after the Camp David peace treaty between Israel and Egypt...
...But Israel has been reluctant to invade to seize and destroy...
...The other notion about "doing something," emanating mostly from the Europeans, is to send some kind of international force, including Americans, to observe and peace-keep...
...The pressure on the United States will be enormous...
...No country of 6 million people can sustain one Columbine massacre after another...
...Three Israeli soldiers are kidnapped by Lebanese terrorists in a raid that brazenly crosses the U.N.-drawn frontier between Lebanon and Israel...
...To go after the terrorist ringleaders is certainly justified and might be marginally effective...
...The only approach is to go to the source...
...Pressure from the United States, such as putting the PLO on the terrorist list, might force some tactical retreats or occasional cease-fires...
...Irrational...
...One can lob mortars over it, but sending suicide bombers through it is very difficult...
...We went there to rescue Arafat and protect Palestinians...
...To do so today would be disastrous...
...The Bush administration, to its credit, has fallen into the "doing something" trap only once, when President Bush sent CIA director George Tenet in June to broker a cease-fire that never took...
...Will the current Israeli government attempt this...
...Who will then rule the Palestinians...
...in a similar suicide bombing...
...It would only fortify the Palestinians, giving them a wall of international protection behind which to take shelter as they prepare yet more terrorist attacks within Israel...
...Against such an enemy, there are only two choices...
...The irony is that there is nothing new here...
...He has just seen Israel, facing guerrilla war in Lebanon, abjectly surrender and withdraw unilaterally...
...Every day is a victory...
...What does that mean...
...One final element...
...Every Palestinian death creates a martyr and a rallying cry...
...That is unclear...
...Chaos will yield new leadership...
...Eventually, and inevitably, Israel will have to launch and fight its war...
...Israel is not just suffering, it is isolated...
...But Arafat has not wavered from the unbroken Palestinian tradition of rejecting compromise...
Vol. 6 • September 2001 • No. 47
