Forget the "Arab Street"

...On the streets of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, people are more honest and straightforward...

...In this light, the administration's rapid decision to offer a meeting between Arafat and Cheney if Arafat can make his flock behave for just a short period suggests that the "Arab street" truly spooked the vice president...

...The Bush administration will have repeated the cardinal error of the British when they believed that by regionalizing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict before and after World War II—by allowing, if not encouraging, other Arabs to give "counsel and guidance"—they could perhaps find a settlement...

...His rule over the Palestinian Authority, like his rule over the PLO, has been dynamic: It depends on an illusion of progress to counter the all too apparent fact that the enterprise is hopelessly dysfunctional...

...Arafat's gamble was eminently reasonable...

...There have just been too many acts of obvious encouragement and complicity between Arafat's Palestinian Authority, his Fatah organization, and the young men doing the sniping, machine-gunning, and suicide-bombing...

...The "peace process" is over, and some form of an Israeli occupation of these lands is inevitable, yet few foreign-policy professionals are prepared to admit that American and Israeli policy for years has been founded on an illusion...

...Geography, DNA, and Western angst also help...

...Cumulatively, the writers of al-Ahram drive home a message that harks back to the time before the peace...

...This may not be at all the way the administration sees the offer, but the context in which the offer was made—Cheney surrounded by intense criticism—makes America seem panicked...

...Its columnists and contributors wage a steady campaign against normalization...

...Read the joint memoir of President George H.W...

...Brutal, corrupt, and predatory, Arafat and his minions have to keep pressure on the Israelis or risk serious internal dissent, possibly violent internal strife...

...He is certainly the most successful terrorist of modern Middle Eastern history...

...Its newfound enthusiasm for engagement in the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation will have produced the exact opposite of what it intended...

...Cheney's visit to the Middle East and General Zinni's diplomatic athletics make it appear that the United States must travel around the Middle East seeking "guidance" from Arab rulers because Palestinian shuhada' have now forced us to pay homage...

...In the early 1990s, it was possible—just barely—to imagine Arafat in the process of a miraculous transformation, from consummate terrorist to authoritarian statesman...

...Ever sensitive to his country's poverty and fallen cultural prestige, President Mubarak has for years allowed a torrent of anti-Israeli invective in the state-controlled press...

...Just the opposite happened...

...One Arab leader after another publicly censured the United States for its failure to engage more forcefully in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which of course means to put more pressure on Israel...

...In near perfect harmony, the Arab world's rulers blamed Israel for the Palestinian suicide bombers, who are universally referred to in the Arab press as shuhada', martyrs who die in battle against infidels...

...We should expect to see Palestinian attacks—particularly suicide bombings—continue, if not significantly increase...

...As Fouad Ajami wrote in The Dream Palace of the Arabs (1998), No one who reads the Egyptian daily al-Ahram [the official paper of record] would think that Israel and Egypt were at peace...

...Always entrepreneurial, he has repeatedly bounced back from oblivion by deftly merging headline-grabbing terrorism with the Arab world's unhappy and unrequited national and religious aspirations...

...The Israeli-Palestinian confrontation dominated the Arab press reports on Cheney's travels...

...For a statesman to have seriously doubted Arafat's intentions and still allowed him to build well-armed paramilitary forces next door to Israel would demonstrate criminal incompetence...

...Even a blind Palestinian who can't watch Al Jazeera satellite television's inspiring "holy-war" coverage can tell that the more Palestinian suicide attacks against Israeli civilians there are, the more the Bush administration wants to see Arafat freed from his captivity to attend the Arab League summit in Beirut where he, so the administration's theory apparently goes, will help Saudi Prince Abdullah bring peace to the region...

...The chairman, of course, initially denied all knowledge of the vessel, suggesting that the Israelis were the damnable party for casting doubt on the Palestinian commitment to President Bush's war on terrorism...

...In any case, Yasser Arafat, if he is allowed to go to the summit, will come back recharged and triumphant...

...In a newspaper with strict limits on all other political and cultural discussions, writings on Israel are a free-for-all...

...The positions of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria—the primary frontline states, which have certainly not gone out of their way to encourage or pressure Arafat and the Palestinians to make compromises with Israel—are similar, though less intense...

...diplomats, pillaged and terrorized a good slice of the Shiite population of Lebanon, and ruthlessly and pettily assassinated anti-Arafat Palestinian dissidents, yet the PLO chairman retains among many the image of a freedom fighter, the estimable "Old Man" of the Palestinian national movement...

...It is impossible to imagine a productive contribution of the Arab League to the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation...

...If this happens in the next few months, it will be a very good idea for Bush and company to march to Baghdad as quickly as possible...

...Preeminently, Arafat wanted a Palestinian "right of return" to Israel, which for Barak, or any other Israeli prime minister, and for President Clinton, was a demand that implied the elimination of the Jewish state...

...What the Bush administration is likely to get from the Arab League, which remains preponderantly a creature of Egypt (though the Saudis occasionally give the Egyptians a run for their money), is a nasty slap in the face...

...At Camp David, Yasser Arafat could not obtain from Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak what he wanted, which is, of course, what happens when two sides hold mutually exclusive positions...

...America is now decidedly on the defensive...

...Alternatively, the administration could accept, in part or whole, the league's recommendations, which will pick up where Ehud Barak and President Clinton said "no...

...No discernible lines are drawn for them—Islamists, Arab nationalists, and military pundits alike...

...Bush and his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, or the autobiography of Secretary of State James Baker and you get the distinct impression that Washington believed Arafat and the Palestinians were ready for peace, or at least more ready than the Israelis...

...The Bush administration will not irretrievably damn Arafat in public for his terrorist sins because Washington can't see an alternative to him or to the conflict-resolution approach followed by the Clinton administration...

...They'll need to do something stunning to reverse America's fortunes and keep the suicide bombers from our gates...

...The capture of the Palestinian Authority's Karine A freighter, filled with weaponry supplied by Iran, including C-4 plastiques, the suicide bomber's weapon of choice, left President Bush obviously, and probably permanently, contemptuous of Arafat...

...Foreign service officers in the State Department's Near East Bureau usually echoed Friedman through the Clinton years...

...Without this mystique, there is no guarantee of peace and security for us and our friends in the region...

...Such hopes and visions are, of course, no longer sustainable...

...Yet terrorism continues to work for Arafat, even with the first American administration that has largely defined itself by a war against Middle Eastern terrorism...

...Abdullah, of course, supported Arafat's uncompromising position at Camp David in July 2000 and has given no indication whatsoever publicly—nor has any senior member of the ruling Saudi elite—that Arafat erred in his obstinacy in Maryland...

...Iraq became a sideshow, the second point in the Arab leaders' public reproach of American foreign policy in the region...

...Even in the State Department, where one has always found a high concentration of apologists for Arafat and critics of any "conservative" Likud party prime minister in Israel, the Karine A and the constant suicide bombings have made Foggy Bottom more guarded in its public and private comments about the chairman...

...If Arafat had looked and spoken like Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the terror-prone Kurdistan Workers party (the PKK), if the Palestinians had more resembled the Kurds (a humiliated, stateless people who have only Muslim enemies), and if America's and Europe's left-wing intellectual elite had not imbued "guerrilla" violence with so much moral aura and celebrity, Yasser Arafat would never have won a Nobel Peace Prize...

...Even hard-nosed Johns Hopkins professor Fouad Ajami, always perspicacious on the Arab world, thought there was a tiny chance that Arafat could escape from the "dream palace of the Arabs," where Israel's eventual destruction was an idée fixe...

...Whether the Bush administration really believes in the power of the mythical "Arab street" isn't important...

...As the New York Times quite accurately put it, "after more than 17 months of conflict, the Palestinians feel they are winning...

...It is easy, however, to imagine a scenario where America gets bushwhacked, where it must publicly reprimand the league's members for an assault on the geographic and ethnic integrity of Israel or acquiesce to the league's position that Israel can have peace so long as she agrees to terms far beyond the Camp David talks scuttled by Arafat in July 2000...

...And now the administration that has done so much to reverse the image of American weakness in the Muslim Middle East—weakness that is the jet fuel behind the appeal of bin Ladenism in the Arab world—may well deal, quite unintentionally, a severe blow to America's hayba, the majesty and magnetism that inhere in unchallengeable power...

...If the Arab League doesn't devolve into a fratricidal spitting contest, which regularly happens among the league's 22 members, and manages to put forth a "peace initiative" based on Prince Abdullah's suggestion, Washington could confront a real diplomatic mess...

...They conjure up the specter of Israel as an enforcer of Pax Americana, a power bent on diminishing the role and place of Egypt, severing Egypt from its natural hinterland in the Fertile Crescent and the Persian Gulf...

...I am convinced Reuel Marc Gerecht is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...Instead of forcefully turning the tables against America's critics, and asserting publicly in Arab lands the strong support for Israel that he expressed in Jerusalem, the vice president expressed concern about the conflict...

...This well-intended sympathy translated into Arabic, however, confirms what Yasser Arafat has known since the 1970s: Persistent and well-targeted terrorism can make even a great nation flinch...

...The Arab press certainly didn't suggest that the vice president had even privately conveyed America's implacable determination to destroy Saddam Hussein...

...And this image of panic and confusion will probably grow much worse if Prince Abdullah goes to Texas to see President Bush and Arafat goes to Beirut to receive the adulation and support of the Arab League...

...All have pitilessly exploited the Palestinian issue as an escape valve for the emotions generated by their own oppressive societies...

...Though Arab coalitions are vastly overrated—either for or against you—the Bush administration, which seems to care about these things, will finally have helped build a broad-based Muslim coalition, against it...

...It beggars the imagination to believe that Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, or the "temporary" Israeli-Palestinian conflict negotiator General Anthony Zinni has any illusions about Yasser Arafat's mendacity or his inability to let go of terrorism as a negotiating tool...

...So, confronted with superior force, the Palestinian Authority quite naturally chose to unleash unconventional warfare against Israel to test its will...

...Like Jerusalem, Washington shrinks from girding its loins for the ugly military offensive required to stamp out terrorism in the West Bank and Gaza...

...Any administration pressure on Israel would, of course, further undermine America's position in the Middle East, since the members of the Arab League would correctly conclude that they—and the Palestinian suicide bombers behind them—had strong-armed America to do for the Palestinians what bilateral negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians had not...

...What has meaning, at least on the Palestinian side, is the obvious...

...that one day Yasser Arafat is going to stand up and sing 'Hatikva,' the Israeli national anthem, in perfect Hebrew," wrote the New York Times's Thomas Friedman in 1989 in his captivating tour de force, From Beirut to Jerusalem...

...His Palestine Liberation Organization has hijacked Western airliners and machine-gunned airports, slaughtered Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games, orchestrated the kidnapping and murder of U.S...

...Oslo," "Mitchell," and "Tenet"—the terms for "peace-process" desiderata that make the Palestinian terror war against Israel sound like battling spouses hunting for some new marriage-counseling technique—have absolutely no meaning...

...Hosni Mubarak's Egypt, in particular, has determined that a real peace process would diminish Egypt's position in the Arab world...