Required Reading: Journal’s Pollack and Post’s Kelly Lay Bare the Bankruptcy of U.S. Moral Equivalence in the Mideast

(Washington, D.C.): Arabists in the State Department are clearly hoping to do a make-over on a President who came to office properly eschewing the moral equivalence, if not patently anti-Israeli policies, that characterized his predecessor’s Mideast diplomacy. In doing so, they have sought to: minimize or otherwise excuse Palestinian misdeeds; demand Israeli “restraint” in the face of murderous acts of terror; and seek further concessions from Israel as a lubricant to a resumption of a manifestly failed “peace process.”

President Bush appears to have better instincts than that. While Mr. Bush has himself, regrettably, mouthed some of these hackneyed formulations in recent days, he has rightly distanced himself from the Clintonian embrace of Yasser Arafat and not repeated the shrill criticisms of Israel emanating from Foggy Bottom.

What the President could clearly use, however, are some alternatives to the “talking points” served up by the usual suspects (not a few of whom are Clinton holdovers) staffing him on Middle East policy. Toward that end, he would be well advised to draw upon the insights and language offered by two profoundly knowledgeable and marvelously articulate journalists, the Wall Street Journal‘s [Deputy Editorial Page Editor], Robert Pollack, and Michael Kelly, who is, among other things, a syndicated columnist with the Washington Post. It can only be hoped that Mr. Bush will not only adopt the views expressed by these distinguished authors but that he will ensure that his Administration speaks henceforth with one voice on Arafat’s political illegitimacy and the strategic legitimacy of Israel’s efforts to defend its people and territory against the murderous war Arafat has unleashed.

As Israelis debated how to respond to continued suicide bombings, the Palestinian Authority dealt swiftly over the weekend with two perceived enemies. On Saturday, 43-year-old merchant Munzer Hafnawi was sentenced to death in a Nablus courtroom, and on Sunday, in Gaza, Khalid Akka was likewise condemned. Their alleged offense: providing Israel with information used to track and kill Palestinian militants.

That such trials usually occur within a day or so of arrest, are measured in hours or even minutes, and are often conducted without any legal counsel for defendant (lawyers are afraid to represent them), doesn’t seem to faze many of those complaining about Israel’s policy of “assassinations.” But then maybe the six “collaborators” the PA has sentenced to death in recent weeks could be considered lucky to get any kind of trial at all. An indeterminate number of others, including an Israeli Arab shot last week in the West Bank, have also been killed by vigilantes.

In fact, the history of such killings is so long, their number so great, and the definition of collaboration so elastic (often just moderation toward the Jews) that it may not be too much of a stretch to say that the current population of Gaza and the West Bank has been as much radicalized by Arab violence as by Israeli. When Westerners puzzle over why it’s so hard for Israel to find moderate interlocutors among the Palestinians — historically among the best educated, most entrepreneurial, and liberal of Arab societies — a sad but simple part of the answer is that a great number of the Palestinian elites who might have filled that role were either killed or persuaded to leave long ago. Those now living prosperously in Europe, America or the Gulf states have little interest in returning to fight both Israel and Yasser Arafat for this little patch of dry land.

The creation of such a situation was exactly the intent of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem and foremost Arab political and religious leader in Palestine under the British mandate. During the late 1930s, his forces killed hundreds of Jews. But even more important to him was getting rid of any Arabs who might tolerate a Jewish presence. Many were killed, often in mass executions. Others fled.

Not surprisingly, those remaining a decade later were in no mood to accept a 1947 U.N. partition plan envisaging a small, 45% Arab, state of Israel, and a Palestinian Arab state in what is now the West Bank. The mufti — who had returned to the Middle East from a war-time exile during which he’d advised Hitler on a final solution for Palestine’s Jews — led them into battle. Some of the Arab refugees who fled Palestine during the war reported fearing not only the Jewish forces, but also being branded collaborators by the mufti if they stayed.

It is telling that the next great Palestinian strongman, Yasser Arafat, should include among several well-documented falsehoods of autobiography a claim of relation to Husseini.

When the Fatah leader entered the West Bank in 1967, shortly after it had passed from Jordanian to Israeli control, he found the locals reluctant to join him. “To them their new Israeli masters were no worse than the pre-war Jordanian administration — in fact the Israeli police treated them better,” writes Said K. Aburish, a Palestinian biographer of Mr. Arafat. So Mr. Arafat turned to violence, threatening some “collaborators” and killing about 30, before cooling to the strategy.

The tactic returned with a vengeance during the intifada that began in 1987, in which hundreds of collaborators — many just Palestinians who had prospered during the Israeli occupation — were killed. And Mr. Arafat quickly set about criminalizing “collaboration” in the post-Oslo entity he has governed since 1993 — most notoriously in the form of a law making the sale of land to Jews punishable by death.

The cumulative effect of decades of such killings should not be underestimated. While the bulk of the three million or more Palestinian exiles in the world are — or are descended from — simple war refugees, a significant number, especially of the 400,000 or so living in Europe and America, may be political and economic refugees as well. And it is partly their absence from Palestine today, composed largely of the vulnerable poor and Mr. Arafat’s privileged elite, that so clouds prospects for peace. Though the term may seem somehow inappropriate in this context, the Palestinian civitas has suffered grievously from brain drain.

During what has now been nearly a year of violence since the failure of the talks at Camp David, a great many observers and policy makers (including former U.S. envoy Dennis Ross) have publicly abandoned hope that Mr. Arafat can ever be a party to a settlement of this conflict. At the same time, few have dared to envisage a peace process without him. There is, it seems, no palatable alternative.

But of course, the appearance of no alternative has too often been the excuse for propping up dictators. It is also the very reason dictators themselves deal so harshly with potential rivals, and fight the emergence of a middle class and other liberalizing institutions of civil society. Many would undoubtedly regard decisive Israeli action against the Arafat regime, should it come, as a recipe for perpetual chaos. But as someone who believes a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza is the only long-term solution to this conflict, I suspect the fall of Mr. Arafat may now be the only hope for creating the kind of free Palestinian society that will allow that to happen.

The events of the past 11 months in Israel have been remarkably clarifying. When the Palestinians, on the pretext of a visit by Ariel Sharon to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, began the second intifada last fall, it was still possible for the aggressively delusional to pretend that the Israelis and the Palestinians equally desired a workable peace. That belief shattered under repeated, murderous attacks on Israelis that clearly occurred with at least the tacit blessing of the Palestinian leadership.

Now the other great founding myth of the peace process is also dead. This is the great falsehood of relative morality. For decades, the European left has maintained that the Palestinians held a morally superior position to the Israelis: They were an illegally subjugated people who were striking back in what may have been violent but were also appropriate ways. The claim of Palestinian moral superiority ended when the world saw Palestinians cheer in the street a young man holding up hands red with the blood of an Israeli soldier beaten to death, or perhaps it was when Palestinians stomped two boys, one a U.S. citizen, to death in a cave, or perhaps it was some other moment of gross and gleeful murder.

What remained — the left’s final feeble resort — was a claim of moral equivalency: The Palestinians might be engaged in terrible acts but so too were the Israelis. Both sides were killing; indeed, the Israelis, with their better arms and soldiers, had killed far more than had the Palestinians.

Now this too has gasped its last breath. It is not possible to pretend any more that there is anything like a moral equivalency at work in this conflict. The facts are indisputable.

One: The Palestinians are the aggressor; they started the conflict, and they purposely drive it forward with fresh killing on almost a daily basis. Two: The Palestinians regard this second intifada not as a sporadically violent protest movement but as a war, with the clear strategic aim of forcing a scared and emotionally exhausted Israel to surrender on terms that would threaten Israel’s viability. Three: As a tactic in this strategy, the Palestinians will not fight Israeli forces directly but instead have concentrated their efforts on murdering Israeli civilians. The greater the number, the more pathetically vulnerable the victims — disco-goers, women and children in a pizza restaurant — the better. Four: Israel has acted defensively in this conflict; and while Israeli forces accidentally killed Palestinian civilians, their planned lethal attacks have all been aimed only at Palestinian military and terror-group leaders.

Since the Oslo accords were signed in 1993, Palestinian terrorists have killed more than 400 Israelis. In June a bomber killed 21 teenagers at a Tel Aviv disco; last week, a bomber killed 15 and maimed as many as a hundred in a Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem; three days later, another suicide-bomber wounded 20 persons at another restaurant.

After the Sbarro bombing, Secretary of State Colin Powell, astonishingly, lectured the Israelis in the language of the literally exploded idea of moral equivalency. “I hope that both sides will act with restraint,” Powell said. “They both have to do everything they can to restrain the violence, restrain the provocation and the counter-response to the provocation.”

This official U.S. policy statement is beyond stupid. It is immoral, hypocritical, obscene. It is indefensible. Israel is at war with an enemy that declines, in its shrewdness and its cowardice, to fight Israel’s soldiers but is instead murdering its civilians, its women and children.

This enemy promises, credibly, more murders. In the face of this, in the aftermath of an attack expressly and successfully designed to blow children to bits, how dare a smug, safe-in-his-bed American secretary of state urge “restraint” by “both sides?” How does the secretary imagine his own country would respond to such a “provocation” as the Sbarro mass murder? (His own country bombed Serbia to its knees for killing ethnic Albanians in distant Kosovo, let alone Americans on American soil.)

And when you get down to it, why, exactly, should Israel continue to exercise restraint? Why shouldn’t it go right ahead and escalate the violence? The only point to waging war is to win. Israel is at war, and losing. It can win only by fighting the war on its terms, unleashing an overwhelming force (gosh, just what is called for in the Powell Doctrine) to destroy, kill, capture and expel the armed Palestinian forces that have declared war on Israel.

So far, Israel has indeed chosen to practice restraint. But, at this point, it has every moral right to abandon that policy and to engage in the war on terms more advantageous to military victory. This is a matter for Israel, at war, to decide one way or the other. Whether Secretary Powell purses his lips or not.