Proof of the Palestinians’ Pudding

(Washington, D.C.): The Palestinian leadership’s latest gambit is an appeal to Western moral equivalence involving the insertion of “international observers” in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Israel’s objections to this idea were not widely understood, let alone viewed sympathetically, by other nations even before Secretary of State Colin Powell announced (and then recanted) America’s support for such an initiative during his recent trip to the region. Fortunately, the Jerusalem Post’s Saul Singer provides a short course on the subject in an op.ed. published in today’s Wall Street Journal Europe, noting that international monitors will do nothing to protect the cease-fire. They will, instead, likely provide Yasser Arafat with the cover he needs to violate the agreement.

Interestingly, the fact that Arafat can be counted upon only to be faithless is made in another column published in the Journal’s U.S. edition today. This essay, by Robert Pollack, documents the sordid history of broken commitments and despoiled nations left in Arafat’s wake over more than three decades of terrorism and thuggery. There is no prospect that he will behave better now that he has an army of some 40,000 “police,” untold terrorists and safe havens from which they can operate more or less with impunity.

Finally, lest there be any lingering doubt as to Arafat’s true intentions, consider a quote uttered shortly before his death by a man who was, until recently, one of the PLO Chairman’s chief lieutenants — Faisal Husseini. It was translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) and described by A.M. Rosenthal in a syndicated column published in Sunday’s Washington Times:

In his last interview, with a nationalist Egyptian newspaper, Husseini said frankly that the Arabs’ political goals were set for a temporary time frame, not long-range peace. That meant Arabs “ambushing the Israelis and cheating them.” He added that if Palestinians were looking for the “higher” Pan-Arab strategy, the immediate answer he’d give them would be: “From the [Jordan] river to the sea.” So much for gentlemanly diplomacy.

JERUSALEM — On Friday, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell dropped what to Israeli ears sounded like a bombshell. Standing next to Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat in Ramallah, Mr. Powell said, “I think as we get into the confidence-building phase there will be a need for monitors and observers to … make an independent observation of what has happened.”

Within hours, Mr. Powell shot down his own trial balloon by ruling out any monitoring mechanism opposed by Israel. And with yesterday’s terrorist bombings in the Israeli city of Yehud, the matter of “confidence-building” may already be moot. Still, pressure for an observer force is bound to increase. The international community will wonder why Israel should so adamantly refuse what seems like a sensible measure for its own security — unless, of course, Israel has something to hide. This, in turn, serves the propaganda purposes of the Palestinian Authority. As Mr. Arafat asked last weekend at a Lisbon meeting of the Socialist International, “Why does the government of Israel reject the dispatching of international observers to consolidate and protect the cease-fire?”

Actually, a cursory glance at history shows that the reason for Israel’s objection is the same as for Mr. Arafat’s enthusiasm: International observers will not protect the cease-fire, but Mr. Arafat’s ability to violate it. The long record of international observers in the Arab-Israeli conflict is unblemished by a single sustained example, when tested, of basic fairness toward Israel, let alone protection from Arab aggression.
Discouraging Record

The discouraging record begins even before the founding of the state. In his autobiography, David Ben-Gurion recalls when the British, then governing Palestine, took the term “observer” to extremes. On April 13, 1948, a convoy of ambulances and armored buses headed for Hadassah hospital on Mount Scopus. Two hundred meters from the British military post that was supposed to secure the route, the convoy came under Arab attack from both sides of the road. “The soldiers [at the post],” Ben Gurion reports, “watched the attack but did nothing.” British military cars passed three times during the seven hours the convoy was under attack, one including Jerusalem’s ranking British general, but did not stop to intervene or assist. Seventy-seven Jewish academics, nurses, and students were massacred that day, after top British officials had “personally guaranteed” that medical and civilian transports would be protected by the British army and police.

Under the 1949 Armistice Agreement, United Nations Military Observers were deployed along the cease-fire lines with Syria, Jordan, and Egypt. In the 18 years before the Six Day War changed these lines dramatically, there were hundreds, if not thousands, of attacks against Israel — in the 1950s from Egyptian-held Gaza and in the 1960s by Fatah, from behind Syrian and Jordanian lines. None of these attacks produced a single condemnation by the United Nations, the body that was ostensibly policing the cease-fire lines. The U.N. observers could be relied upon to complain, however, whenever Israel retaliated in response to Arab attacks.

In more recent times, U.N.IFIL, the U.N. observer force deployed in southern Lebanon while Israel fought with Hezbollah there, showed that the powers of observation of such forces had become no less selective. Former Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Dore Gold recalls the standard pattern: “Hezbollah would launch artillery attacks 50 meters away from a U.N.IFIL outpost, Israel would shoot back, and U.N.IFIL would protest against the Israeli response.”

The picture of international observers as neutral pairs of eyes and ears has not been borne out in practice. Observers ostensibly have a mandate to be impartial, but they do not check the interests of the nations they represent at the door. It should not be a surprise that the same nations that vote against Israel en masse in international bodies have trouble acting fairly when serving in an observer force.

Even the United States has bitter experience with the inability of international observers to stick to their mandate when it conflicts with the policies of the nations that send them. Saddam Hussein was able to whittle away the effectiveness of U.N.SCOM, the U.N. monitoring effort in Iraq, through constant pressure on the relevant capitals to hold him to lower standard. U.N.SCOM’s fall was a classic case of how even the most dedicated international observers ultimately reflect the will and biases of the bodies that stand behind them, not some objective standard of fairness, or even the mandate they are sent to uphold.

In addition to whatever biases national representatives bring to the table, Israel also suffers from a structural asymmetry: the lack of plausible deniability. These days, Israel is not being attacked by armies of sovereign nations or even by the Palestinian Authority per se, but by proxies that allow national leaders to shirk responsibility. Israel, by contrast, must defend itself with its army, and stand behind its actions. Israel will always be a more convenient address for international protest than murky bodies such as Hezbollah or the latest offshoot of Mr. Arafat’s myriad security forces.

Purported Counterexamples

In response to this dismal record, a number of purported counterexamples are constantly trotted out: the U.N. Disengagement and Observer Force on the Israeli-Syrian border, the Multinational Force and Observers in the Egyptian Sinai, and Temporary International Presence in Hebron. Yet these examples illustrate a point made recently by Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, “Observers can observe once you have peace. They cannot observe a lack of peace.” The distinction between peace-making and peace-keeping is a vital one. U.N.DOF “works” despite the lack of a Syrian-Israeli peace because Syria does not want to attack Israel over its own border, preferring instead the deniability of supporting Hezbollah’s attacks from Lebanon. Egypt has no interest in violating its demilitarization commitments in the Sinai, so Israel does not have a problem with the MFO there.

The TIPH is the closest thing to an example of a potentially volatile situation that may have been calmed somewhat by an international presence. But the TIPH, it is important to note, does not report to the United Nations but to Israel, the Palestinians, and the governments of its members. It did not stop the Palestinian sniper who murdered 10-month-old Shalhevet Paz in her stroller in March.

In short, Israel’s experience with international observer forces ranges from benign to harmful. There is no reason for Israel to risk the placement of a one-way mirror between it and the Palestinians, with a special glaze that lets through Palestinian attacks, while reflecting back Israeli responses straight into the court of world opinion.

Mr Singer is the editorials editor of, and a columnist for, the Jerusalem Post.

The crackdown was swift and brutal. Though the government was deeply divided between hardliners and those favoring more negotiation with the Palestinians, the hardliners won. Towns and refugee camps that had raised the flag of the Republic of Palestine were shelled, while Yasser Arafat proclaimed a “genocide” and urged his people to resist. There were numerous casualties on both sides.

The Arab League called for a ceasefire, and then for a meeting of its heads of state. But Mr. Arafat rejected their proposals. At a meeting with the government shortly thereafter, he accused his opponents of being imperialists in league with the U.S.

Black September

If this sounds familiar, it should — except that the start of this conflict was September 1970, not September 2000; it happened in Jordan, not Israel and the West Bank; and Mr. Arafat’s nemesis was King Hussein, not Ehud Barak or Ariel Sharon.

In 1970, Palestinians, both citizens and refugees, were almost as numerous in Jordan as King Hussein’s own Bedouins. Mr. Arafat used the estimated 20,000 Palestine Liberation Organization fighters in Jordan to exercise control over much of the Palestinian population. In many parts of the country, he was the de facto government. The king had grown increasingly worried that Mr. Arafat posed a threat to his regime, and cross-border attacks into Israel and other acts of PLO terror had put intolerable strains on his relations with the West.

The last straw came on Sept. 6, when the PLO hijacked four civilian airliners, flying three to Dawson’s Field in PLO-controlled northern Jordan and one to Cairo. After European governments secured the release of the hostages by agreeing to release PLO terrorists from their prisons, the PLO blew up the planes.

The Jordanian response, from which one of the PLO’s most notorious brigades was to take its name, became known as Black September. An estimated 2,000 PLO fighters and several thousand more Palestinian civilians were killed. Mr. Arafat fled to Cairo, where an angry meeting with King Hussein nonetheless led to a ceasefire. But Mr. Arafat soon returned to join the rump of his forces, which had retreated to northern Jordan, close to their Syrian sponsors. Within 10 months they were driven out of the country.

As the world waits to see whether the current, fragile ceasefire will put an end to nine months of low-level warfare between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the past may prove instructive. For, in essence, we’ve been here before. And regardless of what one thinks of Mr. Arafat from a moral standpoint — is he simply a terrorist, or does he come, as he famously told the United Nations in 1974, “bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun”? — his history, wherever he has gained a territorial foothold, has not been that of a reliable or even rational partner, even with potential Arab allies. His history is one of pushing too far.

Is the Jordan example not convincing? Well, a replay wasn’t too long in coming. Within months of their expulsion from Jordan, Mr. Arafat and the PLO were setting up shop in Lebanon and tearing at the fabric of that country too. Lebanese Christians, particularly, resented suffering the Israeli retaliations that the PLO’s cross-border raids provoked. In April 1974, for example, the PLO killed 18 at Kiryat Shimona and 20, mostly schoolgirls, at Maalot, both in northern Israel.

The early ’70s were also boom years for PLO terrorism on the international stage. The year 1972 alone saw PLO groups blow up a West German electricity plant, a Dutch gas plant and an oil refinery in Trieste, Italy; kill, in conjunction with the Japanese Red Army, 24 at Israel’s Lod airport; and massacre 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. In early 1973, Black September took the American ambassador and his deputy (along with one Belgian diplomat) hostage in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, and, after President Nixon refused to negotiate, murdered them.

Flush with money from his Arab and Soviet sponsors, as well as an income tax levied by the Gulf states on Palestinian workers, Mr. Arafat quickly built up a state — called the Fakhani Republic after the Beirut neighborhood in which he operated — in much of Lebanon. By 1975, he had some 15,000 troops under his command, with many more associated paramilitaries, and was acquiring tanks and anti-aircraft guns.

PLO-affiliated conglomerates, including one controlled by Ahmed Qurei, who would later negotiate the Oslo Accords, monopolized everything from shoes to baby food. Billions of dollars flowed through the PLO, the only thorough record of which seemed to be a small notebook Mr. Arafat carried on his person. His underlings levied arbitrary taxes on the Lebanese, and practiced other forms of extortion, car theft and racketeering.

That year — 1975 — Christian rage boiled over, and Lebanon’s long civil war began. By early 1976, the PLO and its allies controlled most of the country. But that summer Palestinian assassins murdered the U.S. ambassador to Lebanon, and the U.S., Israel and the Arab states tacitly supported a Syrian-led invasion of the country, which reversed many PLO gains. An October ceasefire stabilized the situation. But 40,000 had been killed. And in subsequent years, PLO attacks into Israel continued, provoking more Israeli retaliation.

The endgame began in June 1982, when renewed PLO attacks on Israel coincided with an assassination attempt on the Israeli ambassador in London. Prime Minister Menachem Begin ordered Defense Minister Ariel Sharon to send Israel’s armed forces into Lebanon to drive out the PLO. Mr. Arafat’s appeals to the Arab League and the U.N. went unheeded, while ordinary Lebanese took to crying “Enough!” whenever they spotted him. In August President Reagan convinced Israel to stop the fighting, but Mr. Arafat, whose forces had been routed, had already told the Lebanese government he would leave the country. On Aug. 30, he left for Tunis, while his forces dispersed to other Arab countries. The Lebanese would suffer eight more years of the civil war he provoked.

The extent of Mr. Arafat’s personal involvement in the numerous terrorist acts that have left an indelible stain on the Palestinian cause has long been a matter of debate among knowledgeable observers. But there is no question that, if not outright front groups for Mr. Arafat’s Fatah faction, the groups that claimed responsibility were most often fully paid up members of the PLO, and that Chairman Arafat did nothing to stop them.

Persistent rumors that the U.S. and Israel possess tapes of Mr. Arafat directing the 1973 Khartoum murders (confirmed to me by Ariel Sharon late last year) have gained further credence with the recent allegations of James J. Welsh, a former Navy and National Security Agency intelligence analyst. He says the NSA sent out a warning of a possible PLO attack, based on shortwave intercepts, that was inexplicably downgraded by the State Department. After the murders, it was covered up. His story deserves congressional attention. After all, there is no statute of limitations on murder.

Where Blame Lies

But the more pressing question is what the future holds for the little war now going on in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. Mr. Arafat’s history in Jordan and Lebanon suggests this is headed for no good end. From internal corruption and abuse of power, to the repeated breach of agreements, to the apparent use of territory as a base for terrorism, the situation of today’s Palestinian Authority is strikingly similar to those two prior episodes.

Perhaps such observations played a part in convincing former U.S. envoy Dennis Ross, who spent a decade trying to convince the word otherwise, to conclude this year that Mr. Arafat “is not capable of negotiating an end to the conflict.” And if Prime Minister Sharon soon feels compelled to act decisively against Mr. Arafat, as he did in 1982, and as King Hussein did in 1970, it would behoove the world to think carefully about where blame for the continuing Palestinian tragedy really lies.

Mr. Pollock is an assistant editorial features editor at the Journal.