The War on Terror Should Bring Down Sponsoring Regimes, Not Create Them in Palestine’

(Washington, D.C.): One of the few good things to be said about the war against the United States that entered a new and — it is to be hoped — decisive phase on 11 September, is that American policies that have heretofore inadvertently contributed to terrorism can be revisited and abandoned. With his clarion call to fight global terrorism and those who sponsor, harbor or otherwise abet it, President Bush has established the ideal baseline for such course-corrections.

A Regime that Sponsors, Harbors and Abets Terrorism: Arafat’s PA

There would be no better place to begin than with the wooly-headed thinking about the so-called “peace process” between Israel and Yasser Arafat’s literally named Palestine Liberation Organization. The Clinton Administration chose studiously to ignore the reality that, under Arafat and his PLO, the Palestinian Authority (PA) spawned by this “process” remains bent on the “liberation” not just of all the West Bank and Gaza Strip but pre-1967 Israel, as well.

Not surprisingly, therefore, the PA used every concession Israel afforded it — from control over most of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, to tens of thousands of heavily armed “police” (read, paramilitary) forces, to diplomatic immunity exploited to smuggle weapons in Arafat’s and other official vehicles, etc. — to harbor and support terror against the Jewish State. As a result, few, even among the once-formidable Israeli Left, any longer cling to the illusion that the creation now of a full-fledged, “viable” and internationally recognized Palestinian state will measurably reduce, let alone end, terrorism waged on a daily basis against Israel.

In fact, Arafat and his lieutenants have made abundantly clear — via their rhetoric (at least in Arabic), through the symbolic use of maps of “Palestine” showing no Israel and in expressions of sympathy and approval to the families of suicide bombers — that as long as the Jewish State exists on territory considered to be occupied by the Arabs, the jihad will continue.

Arafat has himself described the peace process — which is, let’s be clear, explicitly predicated upon the notion that he has “accepted Israel’s right to exist” in peace and security — as a bait-and-switch scheme akin to a temporary truce the Prophet Mohammed used to buy time until his army was strong enough to violate it and destroy their enemies.

The Vision Thing’

President Bush is entirely correct to say that “The idea of a Palestinian state has always been part of a vision, so long as the right [for] Israel to exist is respected.” That vision was itself, part of a larger vision of what Shimon Peres has dubbed a “new Middle East.” According to this conception, Israel would be fully integrated into economic and political relations with its former enemies, an engine for not only her own prosperity but theirs. There would, of course, no longer be any question of Israel’s legitimacy; her right to exist would be the cornerstone of transformed regional security realities.

While it is true that this vision has been unalterably embraced by people like Shimon Peres, it has not been explicitly and formally adopted by the U.S. government — at least not under George W. Bush. And that is, presumably, because the current Bush Administration has heretofore appreciated that there is one major problem with such a vision: It has no relationship to reality, either today’s or any that is in prospect.

Mitchell, Shmitchell

Consequently, no matter how often senior Bush Administration officials reiterate mantra-like statements smacking of moral equivalence about the need for “the parties to return to the negotiating table,” to “end the cycle of violence,” and “start the Mitchell process,” that way lies only more terror directed against Israel — and, for that matter, against her friend, the United States.

The policy the President has enunciated for fighting terror must be applied, as he has promised, on a global basis. Naturally, that must include the terror that afflicts Israel, as well.

This is not simply a question of necessary solidarity with the United States’ most reliable friend in a dangerous region. It is strategically untenable — and morally repugnant — to think that any victory worthy of the name can be won against international terrorism as long as America is seen to be enabling its continued violence in one part of the world (known under the British Mandate as “Palestine” west of the Jordan River), while it fights terror elsewhere.

The Bottom Line

The American people now confront a grim prospect that has long confronted their friends in Israel: An open-ended war against an enemy implacably determined to inflict as much damage as possible on a free people until the latter either all surrender or die. Just as President Bush has rightly said there can be no negotiation between the United States and Osama bin Laden or his state- sponsors, there can be no useful negotiation between Israel and Yasser Arafat.

For these reasons, President Bush must take advantage of the opportunity, albeit a costly one, presented by the 9/11 attacks. He now must demonstrate that his vision extends beyond the banal absurdities still uttered by the last of the die-hard “peace processors.” Most especially, he must reject their sirens’ song by declaring that the United States will neither cut — nor ask Israel to accept — Faustian deals that would make possible, and legitimate, the creation of a new terrorist-sponsoring regime, all in the vain hope that doing so will somehow help us fight international terrorism.