The price of intransigence
Hearts leapt that bright morning 10 years ago when the prime minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin, and the Palestine Liberation Organization leader, Yasser Arafat, shook hands on the White House lawn and President Clinton declared "the peace of the brave is within our reach." Never has faith been so brutally betrayed, hope so utterly supplanted by despair. Who could have imagined that Israel would now face the worst terrorism in its history, with about 900 people killed in just three years--the equivalent of 50,000 murders a year in the United States?
Today there are headlines once again about formulas for a settlement, but it is clear that the Palestinians are far less prepared for peace than they were a decade ago. Suffused with messages of hate, indoctrinated early in the schools, and subjected to poisonous broadcasts in the media and the mosque, they nurture a culture that longs not for the creation of a Palestinian state but for the destruction of the state of their Israeli neighbors. In a recent poll, 59 percent of Palestinians wanted to see terrorism against Israel continue, even after the creation of a Palestinian state, and in all of the territories, including East Jerusalem. Only 26 percent wanted to give up the armed struggle.
Is it any wonder the Israelis have concluded that the reason the Palestinians reject peace is not because Jews live in the West Bank city of Hebron but because they live in Tel Aviv and Haifa?
Thugocracy. The Palestinian leaders have made no bones about it. Their own magazine stated long ago their aim clearly: "Not to impose our will on the enemy but to destroy him in order to take his place." Palestinians have few qualms in admitting that the original accord negotiated in Oslo was worse than a sham. The bloody bookends are a statement--within days of the signing by Arafat--that Oslo was part of the "plan of stages" to destroy Israel and the June 24, 2001, affirmation by the relatively moderate Faisal Husseini that the Oslo agreement constituted a "Trojan horse," whose pure essence was deception.
But why reiterate the deception? Why ignore the naked declaration of bad faith? Because the presumption, widely shared, is that the Middle East is very much as it was before Camp David. But that's just not so. There has been a huge shift in Israeli sentiment since then. The peace camp has virtually collapsed. And most Israelis no longer expect anything but more Palestinian terrorism--72 percent of Israelis today believe that they or a family member will be killed or injured in a terrorist attack.
The intensity of the world's desire for a peaceful outcome in the Middle East is understandable. The trouble is that this desire has resulted in a flight from reality that will have just the opposite effect, encouraging Arafat and his henchmen in their cynical incitement to violence. In such circumstances, what hope can there be for any moderate elements? For the West and Israeli peacemakers to turn a blind eye to this behavior will foster only contempt for rational compromise.
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