Life After Gaza
In these circumstances, Israelis will be wholly justified if they refuse to make any more concessions until the Palestinians change their behavior over an extended period of time. And they will deserve the strongest international support for that. Western sympathy and aid for the Palestinians should now be conditioned on the Palestinians' unequivocal answers to six questions:
1. Will there be a decline in incitement to hatred or a change in the rhetoric of Palestinian officials when speaking in Arabic to their people?
2. Will the Palestinians continue to be directed toward the destruction of Israel, or will they seek to build up their own nation-state?
3. Will there be a stable government with real control of the territory that will stop terrorism and disarm radical groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad, as well as the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, a terrorist paramilitary group ruled by Fatah?
4. Will Palestinians continue to claim Israeli withdrawal as a victory through terrorism, thereby justifying more terrorism?
5. Will the billions of dollars of new aid disappear into the private bank accounts of their leadership groups, as it has for years, or instead be put into programs for the welfare of their people?
6. Will they dismantle the refugee camps that, despite all the foreign aid, have been a permanent condition of Gaza life and resettle their people in decent housing?
Without the right answers to these questions, it will be impossible for Israel to make further concessions and withdrawals, especially when the message from the international community is always that they are never enough--no matter what the Palestinians do.
Fortunately, President Bush has long insisted that meaningful negotiations with the Palestinians cannot be held as long as Palestinian terrorism persists and the terrorist organizations are not dismantled and disarmed. His instincts will be to hold to that, but the instincts of a second term in any administration are similar to those of the last Clinton administration--namely, to accomplish some great diplomatic coup in this part of the world before the president's final term ends. The Bush administration would be wise to look not just at the failures of the Clinton administration to hold the Palestinians accountable but also at the Carter administration's participation in the ouster of the shah of Iran in 1979 because of Iran's poor human-rights record. The ensuing revolution brought the ayatollahs to power--a strategic catastrophe for America, for the region, and for Israel, since now the world must contend with a nuclear-ambitious and terrorist-sponsoring regime. Similarly, the danger is that Gaza will become a worldwide terrorist training base, much as Afghanistan was for the Taliban and al Qaeda.
The assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, David Welch, said last week that it is critical that the Palestinian Authority disarm Hamas and other terrorist organizations. "In the road map," Welch said, referring to the U.S.-backed plan for peace in the region, "there is a requirement to take steps toward the dismantlement of the terror organizations. Hamas is, for us, a terror organization. I would expect that the PA would do those things. . . . Security is the beginning, the middle, and the end."
Until now, Abbas has shown neither the willpower nor the firepower to stop the extremist terrorist groups from resuming terrorism. The next few years will determine whether President Bush continues with his policy of moral, strategic, and diplomatic clarity or abandons it in the pursuit of an illusory solution, pressuring Israel for more concessions, before knowing whether Abu Mazen presides over a Palestinian state or a terrorist state.
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