The Road To A Palestinian State

(Washington, D.C.): Samuel
Johnson once declared that “Hell is
paved with good intentions.” The
people of Israel seem increasingly likely
to discover that Hell-on-earth — a
heavily armed, radical Palestinian Arab
state west of the Jordan River and bent
on the destruction of the Jewish State —
will be paved with false assurances of
Yasser Arafat’s good intentions.

The latest example of this phenomenon
was unveiled at the time of last week’s
agreement between Arafat and Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The
immediate practical effect of this accord
was to complete the promised withdrawal
of Israeli forces from 80% of Hebron.
That withdrawal would have been a
political non-starter for Bibi Netanyahu
and his government, however, in the
absence of some evidence that the PLO’s
Arafat would now be compelled to honor
his previous commitments to
peace with and security for Israel.

Enter the United States

Such evidence was supposed to be
conveyed in a separate document supplied
at the time the Hebron deal was
finalized.⁽¹⁾
That document, called in diplomatic
parlance a “Note for the
Record,” was prepared by U.S.
Special Middle East Coordinator Dennis
Ross. It affirms the Israeli and
Palestinian leaders’ “commitment to
implement the Interim Agreement [signed
at the White House in September 1993] on
the basis of reciprocity.” Of
paramount importance for Israel, however,
is the Note’s enumeration of
“Palestinian responsibilities.”

These include reaffirmation of the
Palestinian side’s commitments to: “complete
the process of revising the Palestinian
National Charter” which
calls in 30 of its 33 provisions
for the destruction of the State of
Israel and/or violence against Israelis; “fighting
terror and preventing violence”
via, among other things,
“preventing incitement and hostile
propaganda,” “apprehension,
prosecution and punishment of
terrorists,” and “confiscation
of illegal firearms;” and limiting
“the size of the Palestinian
Police.” The reason these
commitments needed to be reaffirmed, of
course, is because they have been repeatedly
breached by Arafat and his Palestinian
Authority.

A case in point is the issue of
revising the vitriolically anti-Israel
Palestinian Charter. Arafat & company
have employed numerous excuses,
bureaucratic dodges and temporizing
measures to leave the Charter intact.
Particularly noteworthy was the ruse of
announcing in April 1996 that the
question of how to modify the Charter’s
language had been remanded to a legal
committee for action.⁽²⁾
The U.S. and Israeli governments (led at
the time by Mr. Netanyahu’s predecessor
and rival, Shimon Peres) promptly tried
to portray the Charter as already
changed. Mr. Clinton actually declared:
“When we met at Sharm el-Sheikh,
[Arafat] said that there would be a
revision in the Palestinian Covenant by
the first of May. Under difficult
circumstances, he kept that
commitment.” The
U.S.-generated “Note for the
Record” is the Clinton
Administration’s first formal
acknowledgment that the Palestinians have
yet to fulfill this key undertaking.

Samo, Samo

No sooner was the ink dry on this Note
and the accompanying Hebron agreement,
though, than Arafat demonstrated afresh
that he has no intention of honoring his
commitments. His triumphal return to
Hebron was marked by provocative talk of
“liberating” the city which he
described as but a step toward the
creation of a Palestinian state with
Jerusalem as its capital. Although the
Western press chose to emphasize
conciliatory phrases in Arafat’s speech, none
of the Arabs in his audience missed the
code words for the liberation of all of
“Palestine” — also known as
the land of Israel.

Worse yet, according to reports in
today’s Washington Post, “there
seemed to be far more police on hand than
the 400 permitted by the new
Israeli-Palestinian agreement, not even
counting the many more assumed to be
present in plain-clothes. Many were seen
carrying weapons not allotted in the
agreement’s careful inventory of 200
pistols and 100 rifles.” It
would be icing on the cake — and
entirely consistent with Arafat’s
practice — if among that impermissibly
large and excessively armed Palestinian
police force were some of those wanted by
Israel for terrorism against the Jewish
State.

The Scales Begin to Fall

Even aside from such fresh and
flagrant evidence of Arafat’s bad faith,
there should be few lingering illusions
about his circumstances, motivations and
intentions. Indeed, on the same day that
the Hebron deal was signed, the Washington
Times reported in a front-page
article by its highly regarded diplomatic
correspondent, Martin Sieff, that Israel’s
intelligence services are now expressing
alarm that the assumptions that
underpinned the “peace process”
are faulty — and the implications of the
error could prove disastrous for the
Jewish State.

The following are key excerpts of
Sieff’s article, which was headlined
“Israeli Security Realizes it
Underestimated Arafat”:

• “Israeli
  intelligence, which once thought
  it had Yasser Arafat bottled up,
  now finds he has wrecked its
  apparatus in the territories, has
  gained control of Hamas and is
  ready for a military
  confrontation if need be.
  ‘They thought they had Arafat
  fenced in. Now he’s off the
  reservation,’ a Middle East
  source said.
• “Israel’s intelligence
  chiefs are going through a
  revolutionary reassessment of the
  Palestinian Authority president,
  concluding that they and Israel’s
  political leaders have
  dangerously underestimated him.
  Columnist Ehud Ya’ari, known for
  having excellent sources among
  Israel’s military and
  intelligence chiefs, first wrote
  about the reassessment in the
  January 9th issue of the Jerusalem
  Report.
• “‘Some of the best brains in
  Israeli intelligence believe that
  Arafat is heading for a huge
  confrontation down the road,’
  wrote Mr. Ya’ari, the chief
  Middle East correspondent for
  Israel Television and an
  associate of the Washington
  Institute for Near East Policy.
  Mr. Ya’ari’s assessment has not
  been widely reported in the
  Israeli press. But
  political and intelligence
  sources in Israel confirmed all
  the major elements of it.
• “They said intelligence
  assessments delivered to the
  Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and
  Defense Committee have abandoned
  the assumptions that have
  dominated Israel’s peace policies
  through three governments the
  past four years:

• “That Mr. Arafat has
  no options except to seek
  cooperation with Israel.
• “That he faces a
  serious challenge from
  the Islamic
  fundamentalist group
  Hamas, especially in the
  Gaza Strip.
• “That he is
  dependent on maintaining
  Israeli good will to win
  concessions in the peace
  process.
• “The security chiefs now
  believe — and have told the
  Cabinet and the Knesset, the
  parliament — that Mr.
  Arafat is willing if necessary to
  have a violent confrontation with
  Israel that could escalate into
  war and is preparing for that
  eventuality, Israeli
  sources said. The intelligence
  chiefs also believe that Mr.
  Arafat can ‘turn on and off,’ as
  an Israeli source put it,
  Palestinian popular protests in
  the areas under his control and
  that his ruthlessly effective
  security police prevent Hamas and
  other Islamic fundamentalists
  from posing any serious threat to
  him. Israeli intelligence ‘had
  warned of the danger of Arafat
  losing control of the Palestinian
  street: in reality, he has
  demonstrated exemplary control,’
  Mr. Ya’ari wrote….

• “Mr. Arafat’s intelligence
  services are also said to have
  surprised Israeli intelligence
  with the skill and speed with
  which they have turned around
  Palestinians who worked for
  Israeli intelligence and
  security. ‘His security
  services are turning former
  Palestinian collaborators…into
  their guides to the Israeli modus
  operandi,’ Mr. Ya’ari
  wrote.” (Emphasis added
  throughout.)

Whither the Principle of
Reciprocity?

Prime
Minister Netanyahu has adopted an
approach that predictably wins him
international kudos but entails real
risks to his nation’s security. He
appears to believe that these risks are
made more manageable by the U.S.
“Note for the Record,” which is
seen as a de facto American commitment to
ensure that Arafat honors his
obligations. Unfortunately, the
United States has a sorry record of
insisting upon compliance, even when its
own security is directly at stake —
witness the myriad Soviet and Russian
violations of bilateral and multilateral
agreements that Washington has studiously
ignored. America has done no better by
allies, in particular Israel, who have in
the past relied upon it rigorously to
monitor and faithfully to enforce
U.S.-sponsored agreements.⁽³⁾

In light of this sorry history and
Arafat’s continuing contempt for his
commitments, Bibi Netanyahu would
be wise to test the Clinton
Administration’s intentions early on with
respect to reciprocity — before
Israel is rendered any more vulnerable to
the conflagration Yasser Arafat evidently
has in mind. As it happens, one
such test is looming, whether Mr.
Netanyahu seeks it or not.

As the Zionist Organization of America
noted in a press release issued on 17
January 1997, “the
Specter-Shelby-Lowey amendment to foreign
aid legislation adopted in 1995 requires
that the PLO ‘amend its National Covenant
to eliminate all references in [that]
Covenant to the PLO calling for the
destruction of Israel’ in order to
qualify for U.S. aid. This stipulation
was later reaffirmed in the Middle East
Peace Facilitation Act of 1995, Sec.
604(c)(1).”

With the U.S. acknowledgment in its
“Note for the Record” that the
PLO Covenant has yet to be changed, the
Clinton Administration is statutorily
obliged to insist that further American
taxpayer funding for the Palestinian
Authority be suspended pending formal
excision of the offensive language. If,
as seems likely, Ambassador Ross and his
colleagues — presumably with the vocal
support of some in Israel — argue that
such a cut-off would be counterproductive
and jeopardize the peace process, it will
be a chilling indication that the
principle of reciprocity will continue to
be ignored by the United States and that
only the Israelis will be
pressured to comply with all of
their obligations.

The Bottom Line

It is incumbent upon the Clinton
Administration to honor the law,
demonstrate tangible support for
Netanyahu’s demand for reciprocal
compliance and signal to Arafat the
unacceptability of continuing to belie
his stated good intentions with
malevolent actions. A place to start
would be by suspending U.S. taxpayer
assistance to the PLO unless and until
the odious Charter is, at long last,
changed so as to reflect a willingness on
the part of the Palestinian Arabs to live
in peace and security with Israel.

– 30 –

1. See the
Center’s recent Decision Brief entitled
A Pig in a Poke? New U.S.
Promises Are No Substitute for Arafat
Fulfilling Commitments He Has Already
Made (No.
97-D 08, 14 January 1997).

2. For more on
this flim-flam, see the Center’s 3 May
1996 Decision Brief entitled
Besmirching the Oval Office:
Clinton-Arafat Meeting Propounds the ‘Big
Lie’ ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=96-D_43″>No. 96-D 43,
3 May 1996).

3. See Irving
Moskowitz’s excellent study of the
history of U.S. failures to honor its
security guarantees and other commitments
with respect to assuring the compliance
of other nations with their solemn
international obligations, entitled Should
America Guarantee Israel’s Security?,
published by Americans For a Safe Israel,
1993.