End of the Road Map . . .
ROSE, TOM
End of the Road Map . . . And the beginning of a new Israeli strategy. BY TOM ROSE Jerusalem THE SUICIDE BOMBING that killed 22 people including 6 small children in Jerusalem on August 19 ended...
...Arafat's supporters at the U.N...
...Since Israel brought Arafat back to the West Bank in 1994 as part of the Oslo Accords, Palestinian GDP has declined 70 percent...
...A Palestinian state at peace with Israel is a greater threat to Arafat than it is to israel...
...Now, 800 dead Israelis later—15 last week alone—Israelis have concluded that it is more dangerous to host Arafat than to eliminate him...
...and in the E.U...
...It also killed any pretense of faith in the "road map...
...That is the objective fact...
...Neither the road map's collapse nor Israel's looming "removal" of Arafat prompted Morocco or Jordan to alter or condition its decision to reestablish relations with Israel, broken off at the start of Arafat's terror war...
...The signals from Washington were mixed...
...administration increasingly disgusted with Arafat, and Europeans demonstrating growing impatience with the whole affair, the international climate for Arafat's expulsion, while not risk-free, is more amenable than it has been...
...Israel warned Saudi Arabia it was fully prepared to defend itself against any aggressor...
...Think of it: two-thirds of the collective national Palestinian wealth destroyed...
...Opponents used to argue that Arafat only needs a cell phone to stay in control of "his people...
...Nor did it prevent Prime Minister Sharon from celebrating the tenth anniversary of an extraordinarily significant relationship that Bombay and Jerusalem were calling the "Indo-Israeli Alliance" during his high-profile state visit to India...
...understanding that makes it easy to see why, given the choice between the road map and Hamas, Arafat chose Hamas...
...They were left with no choice but to rid themselves and the region of the menace of Yasser Arafat once and for all...
...It's Arafat, whose goal is not a Palestine next to Israel, but rather Israel itself...
...Compounding the news of the forward deployments, U.S...
...With Saddam gone, a U.S...
...It wasn't the world stage that made Arafat globally relevant, it was Israel...
...investigators claim to have confirmed Israeli intelligence about an advanced al Qaeda plot to use those very bases to stage 9/11-style terror attacks against up to five Tel Aviv skyscrapers...
...Advocates of expulsion say that depriving Arafat of physical centrality deprives him of the ability to lead, which in turn will force the creation of a new Palestinian leadership...
...The one man preventing the creation of a consolidated security service capable of fighting terror was Arafat...
...Ironically, those who thought supporting Arafat was synonymous with supporting a Palestinian state are the very ones who have helped prevent it...
...Arguments that exile would only give Arafat a bigger stage were drowned out by reminders that Arafat's last exile, between 1982 and 1993, saw the emergence of an alternative Palestinian leadership...
...As if waking from a national coma, Israelis suddenly realized that one man was protecting the Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorist organizations from dismantlement, and he was Arafat...
...Controlling only 3 of Yasser Arafat's 12 "security" organizations, Abbas could not hope to meet Israeli and American demands for a crackdown on terrorists after the bus bombing, even had he wanted to...
...Arafat was working to kill the road map so that its goal of establishing a Palestinian state at peace with Israel could never be realized...
...One way or another...
...They share the same goal: the destruction of Israel...
...In contrast to the ceremonial installation of Abbas as the first Palestinian prime minister, Arafat's naming of his crony Ahmed Qurei to succeed Abbas was dismissed in Jerusalem...
...sole purpose was to find a way to preempt his boss's expulsion...
...The Israeli security cabinet's statement of September 11 that it had decided in principle to "remove" Arafat was the final acknowledgment that it was no longer possible to ignore the elephant in the living room...
...When Arafat loyalists used Arafat-controlled Palestinian television and radio to publicly threaten Abbas with death if he tried to crack down, Abbas got the message and resigned...
...When we were dealing with Arafat, we weren't making progress...
...But Arafat has not yet been completely abandoned...
...Road don't lead nowhere...
...Been there, done that...
...The growth increment alone in this year's trade between Israel and India will be greater than the entire GDP of the Palestinian Authority...
...Amid all the variables that have attended this murderous conflict, Arafat is the one outstanding constant...
...During that same period, despite the hightech bust and the terror war waged against it, Israel's GDP doubled...
...Qurei quickly announced the formation of a "security government" whose purpose will be to "confront security threats and enforce the rule of law in Palestinian Authority areas...
...The oversold peace plan collapsed upon and crushed its own creation, the young government of Palestinian prime minister Mahmoud Abbas...
...BY TOM ROSE Jerusalem THE SUICIDE BOMBING that killed 22 people including 6 small children in Jerusalem on August 19 ended the so-called "hudna" (cease-fire) between competing Palestinian terror groups and Israel...
...By wedding themselves to Arafat, his international allies allowed the Palestinian dictator to loot and plunder his people...
...The Israeli mood was best expressed by a middle-aged woman interviewed in a supermarket who said matter-of-factly that Israel was like the alcoholic no longer able to deny his disease...
...He still has the Saudis...
...Last week Israeli intelligence revealed that Saudi Arabia has forward-deployed its two most sophisticated battle-ready squadrons of F-15s to the secret Tabuq airfield in the northwest corner of the kingdom, just 90 miles from Israel...
...In the wake of his departure and the resumption of terror in the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, Israelis too seemed to acknowledge that they had reached the end of their road...
...Not even the Europeans seemed ready to lend assistance...
...An option dismissed in August as the fanciful concoction of an unstable fringe became state policy in September...
...The Mitchell Plan, the Tenet Plan, the Seven Quiet Days, the Zin-ni Missions, Bethlehem First, the Wolf's Lair, and finally the road map: all failures...
...State Department spokesman Richard Boucher, though he called the potential expulsion of Arafat "not helpful," also noted: "We were making progress without dealing with Arafat...
...Israeli defense minister Shaul Mofaz, Sharon's most influential and popular minister, called Qurei a lackey whose Tom Rose is publisher of the Jerusalem Post...
...But unlike previous moves designed to generate enough international pressure to preempt Israeli action, Qurei's story had no takers...
...Even the most dovish Israelis no longer seem interested in denying the obvious: It isn't Israel that is preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state...
...We had a failed leadership that wasn't leading us anywhere...
...Whether this new leadership will be better or worse than the malignant one that is about to be removed is a question Israelis and Palestinians will soon see answered...
...That's been tried...
...Nothing worked...
...did not remove obstacles to peace between Israelis and Palestinians, they reinforced them...
...For three years, Israelis tried everything short of facing the Arafat question head on...
...There are but two choices left: either to conquer the disease or to let it conquer you...
Vol. 9 • September 2003 • No. 2
