Exploding the peace process

by CAL THOMAS
The Washington Times, 3 MARCH 1996

Last Sunday’s two bomb blasts in
Israel, which killed 25 people and
wounded 77, produced the usual shock and
outrage among those in Israel and the
West who still have faith that terrorists
and fanatics don’t mean what they say and
say what they mean.

For those keeping score, the latest
terrorist attacks bring to 80 the number
killed in suicide bombings by the
extremist Hamas and Islamic Jihad since
the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin
“made peace” with the Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO) in
September 1993. The total dead from all
terrorist attacks since that agreement is
at least 150.

This isn’t a peace process. It is
processed peace that, like processed
cheese, can look like the real thing but
is full of ingredients that may not
contribute to the health of those who
swallow it.

PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat has devised
a brilliant strategy for achieving in
negotiations what he and Arab leaders
have been unable to achieve on the
battlefield–the wholesale destruction of
Israel. Mr. Arafat repeatedly states his
intentions to friendly audiences and in
private gatherings of sympathetic
diplomats and liberal peace groups. While
his remarks are reported in Middle East
press outlets, most Western publications
ignore them and most Western diplomats
make apologies for him.

On Jan. 30, Mr. Arafat is reported to
have told a closed meeting of Arab
ambassadors in Stockholm that he expects
to see the collapse of Israel and that
the establishment of a Palestinian state
is inminent. Mr. Arafat’s remarks were
first reported by a Norwegian newspaper
and later confirmed by Israel’s most
respected military correspondent, Ze’ev
Schiff, in the Ha’aretz newspaper.

According to notes taken by one of the
attendees, Mr. Arafat said, “The PLO
will now concentrate on splitting Israel
psychologically into two camps. Within
five years we will have 6 million to 7
million Arabs living on the West Bank and
in Jerusalem.”

Mr. Arafat plans his own “right
of return” strategy in which Muslims
will be brought from outside the
Palestinian state to overwhelm the Jewish
population. Mr. Arafat reportedly said:
“We plan to eliminate the state of
Israel and establish a Palestinian state.
We will make life unbearable for Jews by
psychological warfare and population
explosion. Jews will not want to live
among Arabs. I have no use for
Jews.”

This is not the first time Mr. Arafat
has revealed his true intentions, but who
in the West believes him? The Clinton
administration and Israel’s Labor
government are pulling the wool over
their own eyes. They are being played for
suckers by Mr. Arafat, Hamas and Islamic
Jihad who see Israel’s repeated
“land-for-peace” concessions as
evidence of weakness.

A Feb. 23 editorial in the Jerusalem
Post asserts Israeli government officials
“on the highest level have
agreed to the establishment of a
Palestinian state in Gaza and
Judea-Samaria [the West Bank], with a
connecting extraterritorial corridor, and
have acknowledged the right of this state
to ‘brine us as many Arab refugees’ from
neighboring countries as it wishes.”

According to the newspaper, the plan
also calls for dividing Jerusalem into
Arab and Israeli sectors–with Arab
suburbs and neighboring villages
incorporated into the Arab area.

The new boldness of Mr. Arafat and his
terrorist friends follows an agreement
between the PLO and Hamas in which Hamas
will continue to fight Israel, attacking
everywhere except in the
Palestinian-controlled area known as Zone
A to avoid embarrassing the Palestinian
authority. Not only has Israel conceded
land and plans to relinquish even more
with no evidence that peace is any
closer, it also releases known terrorists
pledged to destroy the Jewish state who
are committed to the unrepealed
Palestinian Covenant that calls for
Israel’s total eradication.

“We Palestinians will take over
everything, including all of
Jerusalem,” Mr. Aratat is said to
have told the Arab diplomats in
Stockholm. After the terrorist incidents
last weekend, the commentator Moshe Zak
wrote in the Jerusalem Post that it is
“a commonly entertained delusion
that conducting talks with Arafat and his
cronies can somehow cause Palestinian
terrorism to go away…. Palestinian
terror cannot be uprooted by any gesture,
act or plan of reconciliation.”

In light of the deeds that followed
Mr. Arafat’s words in Stockholm, there is
every reason to believe that in this case
he is telling the truth.