Don’t Do It, Mr. President: Palestinian State Under Present Circumstances Will Only Make Matters Worse

(Washington, D.C.): If press accounts are to be believed, President Bush is determined to
commit his administration to the recognition of a “provisional” Palestinian state as soon as there
is a moment when its unveiling — not to say its logic — is not shattered by yet another murderous
terrorist attack against Israeli civilians.

On their face, these reports seem implausible. After all, in the months since
September 11^th
in particular, President Bush has conveyed too clearly his appreciation of several principles
that completely conflict with such an initiative:

1) Israel is a valued ally in the front lines on the war on terrorism. Unlike
Yasser Arafat and
any Palestinian state with which he is associated — to say nothing of Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic
Jihad, PFLP, etc., Israel is squarely “with us” in that global struggle. Weakening Israel (e.g., by
compelling it to surrender territory and sovereignty to yet another radical, irredentist Arab
despotic state) will not help us win the war on terror; to the contrary, it will create new,
undesirable and wholly unnecessary vulnerabilities.

2) Terrorism must be defeated, not be rewarded. There is no getting
around it: As Charles
Krauthammer makes clear in a powerful column published in today’s Washington
Post,
granting the Palestinians a state under present circumstances — after nearly two years of war and
without any credible basis for believing it will be ended — is the most transparent incentive to
further violence since, well, Israel abandoned its defensive security zone in Lebanon.

3) The United States believes Israel has a legitimate right to self-defense and
supports the
Jewish State in its exercise of that right. It is implausible, to say the least, that the
United
States would be able to support for very long Israeli efforts to root out the terrorist infrastructure
that will assuredly prosper in a provisional Palestinian state insofar as doing so would entail the
violation of internationally recognized borders.

Divisions that will inevitably arise between not only the United Nations and Israel but the
U.S.
and the Jewish State are all the more dangerous because they may provide not only a legal
casus
belli, but an Arab perception that a favorable correlation of forces has finally been
achieved that
will result in precisely the sort of regional war President Bush so clearly wants to avoid. This
will be all the more likely if, as Mr. Krauthammer warns is predictable, the Palestinian state
asserts its right to import firepower and forge alliances that will maximize both the
inflammability and the destructiveness of such a conflict.

It can only be hoped that President Bush will heed his own instincts and eschew the
sophistry of those whose idee fixe delusions about “peace processes” and “land for peace”
have brought Israel to the present, perilous pass. If so, he will confine his “plans” for
Mideast peace to a reaffirmation of America’s desire to achieve that goal and a recognition that it
cannot impose one through such seductive but ultimately disastrously futile ideas as a
provisional Palestinian state or the even more benighted idea of inserting U.S.
monitors/peacekeepers into the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

“A Guarantee of More Violence”

By Charles Krauthammer

Washington Post, 20 June 2002

Whenever a massacre occurs in Israel, Palestinian spokesmen rush out to say: “Yes, this is
terrible, but this is what happens when you have a people with no hope for an end to the
occupation.” Apologists in the West invariably echo this exculpation/explanation.

Of all the mendacity that pollutes Middle Eastern discourse, this is the worst. It assumes that
the
listener is not only stupid but also amnestic. Two years ago at the Camp David summit, in the
presence of the president of the United States, the Palestinians were offered an end to the
occupation — a total end, a final end — by the prime minister of Israel. They said no. They said
no because in return, they were asked to make peace.

Remember? The mantra thrown at the Israelis for decades was “land for peace.” It turns out
Arafat wanted the land, but at Camp David, as always, he refused to make peace. The reason
innocents are dying every day is not because of the occupation but because the Palestinians
believe they can get (as Hezbollah got in Lebanon) land without peace.

And why should they not believe it? The State Department wants to give them exactly that.
The
way out of the Middle East morass, Colin Powell has urged the president, is to give the
Palestinians a “light at the end of the tunnel” by giving them their own “interim” or “provisional”
Palestinian state — even as the massacres continue, like the blowing to bits of 26 Jerusalemites in
two consecutive suicide bombings this week .

This rewarding of terrorism is not just a moral scandal. It is disastrous diplomacy. What does
this
provisional state say to the Palestinians? You can reject the state you were offered two years ago,
start a war, murder daily and then be re-offered a state — this time without even having to be
asked to make peace.

For an American foreign policy whose major objective is stability and nonviolence (if for no
other reason than to give us freedom of action elsewhere in the region to fight terrorism), one
could not devise a worse policy. If two years of blood-letting gives the Palestinians an interim
state — without even a simple cease-fire, let alone a real peace — what possible disincentive do
they have to continue the violence?

Statehood before peace is guaranteed to increase the violence. After all, what does
“provisional
statehood” mean? There has never been a “provisional state.” Powell will have to make the
concept up as he goes along. But if statehood means anything, it means three things:

(1) Territorial inviolability. Today terrorism is reduced (Israel stops 90 percent of planned
attacks) because the Israeli army goes into Palestinian territories to seize and stop terrorists.
After statehood, this becomes an invasion of another country. The terrorists will have sanctuary.
Every time Israel pursues them, the Security Council will be called into emergency session, and
America will be censured unless it condemns this Israeli “invasion.” The net effect will be more
terrorism and increased resentment of American diplomacy.

(2) Arms. The basic premise of American policy for 25 years has been that the only way to
ensure peace is to have a demilitarized Palestinian entity. Sure, in offering “provisional
statehood” the United States will insist on limits to Palestine’s buildup of weapons. These limits
will be broken as surely as were the limits on the Palestinian “police” that were in the Oslo
accords. But it will be worse. Once you have statehood, the Palestinians will say that every
self-respecting state has the right to arm itself as it wishes. Why not Palestine? The West Bank
will bristle not just with the weapons of guerrilla war (machine guns and car bombs), but the
weapons of regional war: Katyusha rockets and antiaircraft missiles. What do you think happens
when civilian planes trying to land at Ben Gurion Airport come under fire from such an armed
Palestinian state?

(3) Alliances. A basic attribute of statehood is the right to contract alliances. Even before
statehood, Arafat secretly allied himself with Iran and Hezbollah. With statehood, he will be able
to do so openly. And what do we do when he declares alliance with Syria or Iraq and invites
their tank armies into the West Bank to protect Palestine from Israeli “aggression”?

Provisional statehood is folly. For the United States to offer it constitutes a moral and
strategic
collapse. It is a way to give the Palestinians their goals without even the pretense of asking them
to put down the gun.

Statehood for the Palestinians is a foregone conclusion. The only question today is whether
they
get it while they continue to massacre Jews or only after they have abjured massacres. Land for
peace. Remember?