Arafat’s War Card

By: Charles Krauthammer
The Washington Post, October 3, 1996

The PLO commits itself to . . . a
peaceful resolution of the conflict. . .
. Accordingly, the PLO renounces . . .
acts of violence and will assume
responsibility over all PLO elements and
personnel in order to ensure their
compliance, prevent violations and
discipline violators.
Yasser Arafat, letter to Yitzhak
Rabin, Sept. 9, 1993

A Rubicon was crossed in the Middle
East last week, and most American
observers — mesmerized by an
archaeological tunnel — missed it: For
the first time in history, a Palestinian
army, invited by Israel into its midst as
part of the Oslo peace accords, turned
its guns on Israel.

That army was brought in for two
purposes. First, as a tangible symbol of
Palestinian self-government. And second,
to ensure stability and civil order
within the Palestinian-ruled territories.

The last thing Yitzhak Rabin and
Shimon Peres, who negotiated the 1993
Oslo accords, expected was for Yasser
Arafat to turn that army on Israelis.
They didn’t expect it because in return
for all they gave Arafat — recognition,
territory, elections, that army — the
one thing he offered in return was a
solemn, public, written renunciation of
violence. (See above.)

At the time, the Likud opposition
warned that no nation could safely invite
30,000 (now perhaps 45,000, another clear
breach of the Oslo accords) armed men of
its sworn enemy into its midst on a mere
promise. Likud was right.

Ever since Israel changed governments
by electing Binjamin Netanyahu prime
minister, PLO leaders have been openly
threatening a new intifada (yet another
violation of Oslo) if this or that demand
on Israel was not met. So when Israel
opened an archaeological pedestrian
tunnel in Jerusalem — which Western news
media are finally beginning to
acknowledge neither undermines nor
threatens nor even touches the Islamic
holy sites on the Temple Mount — Arafat
seized the occasion to order his people
into the streets and let his army turn
its guns on Israel.

That, not the tunnel, is why we had
this week’s hasty White House summit.
That also is why the summit could not
possibly have succeeded.
“Success,” as defined by the
diplomats, would have meant extracting
some major concession from Israel to
allay Palestinian demands and thus avert
new Palestinian violence. But, of course,
such concessions would have legitimized
and indeed rewarded the turning of the
Palestinian army on Israel.

And that would have been the ultimate
failure. No peace process can survive in
which one side can resort to war whenever
it declares itself “frustrated”
or otherwise unhappy with the pace of
negotiations.

Which is precisely what Arafat did
last week. For all his current “Who
me?” arms-length treatment of the
violence, its unleashing was a deliberate
political decision taken by Arafat and
his cabinet. With his usual Beirut-style
brinksmanship, Arafat used the tunnel as
the pretext to display his trump card:
his new army.

He was saying to Netanyahu: “If
you refuse to proceed in the peace
process at the pace I had come to expect
from your accommodating Labor
predecessors, I don’t just have to sit
here and take it. I can start a war. And
this time, thanks to Oslo, I can start a
war that is not just sticks and stones
but bullets.”

That is why the White House summit
was doomed: Arafat needed to come home
with something to show for his war card.
And Netanyahu needed to show that playing
that card earns no reward.

One would think that banishing the
war card would be a supreme objective of
the United States as well. Yet President
Clinton’s statement at the concluding
press conference issued no condemnation
whatever of the violence, no pledge by
the parties to renounce violence as a
negotiating tool.

On the contrary. The president,
explicitly addressing the Palestinians,
pleadingly asked them to watch the
upcoming Israeli-Palestinian negotiations
and just “give us a few more
days.” A few more days — until
what? A few more days to check your
passions, after which, if you’re not
satisfied by the results of these
negotiations, you go out in the streets
and start burning Israeli checkpoints? A
few more days until, if your
“frustrations” are not
alleviated, we’ll understand if the
Palestinian army turns on the Israelis
again?

The United States cannot, by default,
abjectly accept the PLO premise of the
legitimacy of its resort to mob violence
and, finally, civil war. (We had a taste
of this earlier in the week with the
administration’s spineless abstention on
a U.N. Security Council resolution that
indirectly criticized Israel and said not
a word about the PLO’s breach of its
pledge to forswear violence.) If that is
the administration’s premise, then the
peace process is in far deeper trouble
than even the president imagines.

Whatever one thinks of the wisdom of
Israel’s opening the tunnel, one has to
recognize that today let’s say the issue
is a tunnel, tomorrow it will be
something else. There always will be
issues that divide, there always will be
disputes that upset the other side. But a
peace process that is at the same time a
war process is a contradiction in terms
— and a prescription for continued
diplomatic failure.