A Fulcrum Moment
The best, slim hope for an Israeli-Palestinian peace is the continuance in power of Ariel Sharon. This prospect, however, is now at risk. In Europe it was fashionable for quite a while to portray Sharon as the iron-fisted zealot, contrasted with the oppressed Palestinians who wanted only peace. The opposite, of course, was true. The peace process, throttled by Yasser Arafat, was given new life with Sharon's plan for unilateral disengagement from Gaza. But it came at huge political cost. Sharon lost his majority in the cabinet and in the parliament and the support of many in his own Likud Party. It was a highly risky gambit, and he and his new party will see how it fares when they face Israeli voters in March.
Sharon is ahead in the polls right now, but perhaps more than anyone, he knows the bleak history of the role of terrorism in Israeli politics. The terrorism of the intifada in 2000 forced Ehud Barak out as prime minister, leaving the office to Sharon. Suicide bombings in February and March 1996 knocked Shimon Peres out of the prime minister's job. Prior to that, terrorism caused Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to lose an earlier election. And in an election in 1988, Peres lost following the firebombing of a mother and her three children near Jericho. Terrorists, interested not in peace but only in conquest, have been trying to obstruct the re-election of any Israeli prime minister who seems moderate and willing to compromise. The renewal of suicide bombing in Israel is simply a part of this malevolence.
Why is Sharon so vulnerable? Precisely because if the withdrawal from Gaza and the opening of the Rafah border crossing from Gaza to Egypt exposes Israel to more murder, he will have to show that the moves made sense. He can advance his program for peace only with the broadest possible public support, from the right and the left. But here the news is not good. The Rafah crossing was supposed to be reopened for trade while preventing the passage of weapons and explosives. The security arrangements, effectively forced upon the Israelis by Washington, were so porous that every single Israeli military, security, intelligence, and police service opposed the agreement, recognizing how easily the Palestinians could smuggle terrorists and weapons into Gaza.
Eight minutes. To date, the worst of fears have been realized. The Israelis believed they were to receive information regarding every person crossing in and out of Gaza so as to put a hold on their entry if necessary. Instead, information comes in at least eight minutes late, long enough for the person to cross through the terminal and enter Gaza. As the head of the political-military section of the Israeli Ministry of Defense put it, "The agreement is worthless." Another security expert put it well, "It is like seeing a movie with no sound and no subtitles."
Dire results, unsurprisingly, have ensued. Senior Hamas operatives, whom Israel had previously expelled from the territories, returned to Gaza via the Rafah crossing with no hindrance from the international supervisors or from Israel. The highest-ranking one was the brother of Hamas's top leader in Gaza, Fadel al-Zahar, who had been kept out of Gaza for 15 years. The feckless Palestinian security forces admitted that 10 to 15 high-ranking wanted militants had returned to Gaza through the Rafah crossing in just seven days since it came under Palestinian control--mostly from Izzadin al-Qassam, the armed terrorist wing of the radical Islamic Hamas movement. Included was Sheik Ahmed el-Malah, one of the founders of Hamas; Rafik al-Hasanat, a senior member of Hamas wanted by Israel for over a decade; and Nihro Masoud, one of the founders of Hamas's al-Kassam Brigade.
More routes are soon to be opened between Gaza and the West Bank. Subject to the same lamentable inspections, Hamas and other terrorist groups will transfer operatives and experts in sabotage into the West Bank and then threaten major Israeli population centers. That smuggling has already been attempted. In October, three notorious terrorists who had come from Sinai were captured on their way from Gaza to the West Bank. They admitted to an effort to expand the operational structure of terrorism in the West Bank, including the manufacture of curved trajectory weapons to overfly the Israeli security fence and to abduct an Israeli as a hostage in exchange for the release of Palestinian prisoners. They conceded that their recruiter was Salem Thabet, a high-level terrorist behind many attacks, including the double suicide bombing at the Ashdod port in March of 2004, which killed 11 Israeli civilians.
Nor has the withdrawal from Gaza ended the violence. Explosives were planted along the Gaza fence, 20 of which have already been discovered, the smallest weighing 88 pounds. Light-weapons fire and rocket and mortar rounds continue unabated. As the commander of the Israeli-Gaza division said, "This is not the border we hoped for. The number of incidents since we left Gaza is enormous."
Why is this happening? Surprise--Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority leader, has failed to lift a finger to control such groups. Barely a day has passed since his election in January without attempts to launch one form of terrorist attack or another from the PA-controlled territory. There have been almost 1,800 different incidents to date since the February Sharm al-Shaikh summit. The anarchy predicted for Gaza has become a reality. It is now ruled by warlords, armed gangs, and terrorists, with no independent judiciary or anything like the rule of law.
Even more troubling is the role of Washington. We have not really insisted on dismantling the terrorist organizations. Instead, we have forced Israel to accede to Hamas as a partner in the political process, undermining the essential argument that Hamas must be dissolved as a terrorist organization, despite explicit statements from Hamas that it has no intention of giving up its weapons or of compromising its objective of destroying Israel. If Hamas does as well as most predict, winning some 30 to 40 percent of the seats in the Legislative Council, it can exploit the legitimacy it has achieved to escalate attacks on Israel and block any peace proposals from the Palestinians.
President Bush's assertion that the United States "will not distinguish between terrorists and those who harbor them" is no longer operative with Palestinians. Indeed, the State Department has made it clear that it will not ostracize Abbas as it did Arafat. Condoleezza Rice and her staff at the State Department seem satisfied if Abbas simply continues to mouth his empty promises of putting an end to violence and say nothing when he criticizes Israeli attempts to foil terrorist attacks.
Yet another disturbing sign of Abbas's failure is the resignation of one of the few honest men in the PA, Salam Fayad, the former finance minister. He left because the PA refused to honor its commitment not to raise the payrolls of high officials--never mind that Abbas insisted that the PA hire an additional 2,500 gunmen as a continuation of the political bribery so typical of Arafat's regime. Indeed, Abbas will now be paying the salaries of Fatah's al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a terrorist group that was the first to publicly endorse Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's call for Israel to be "wiped off the map."
Nor has Abbas dealt with the roots of extremism. Palestinian religious, academic, and political elites continue their incendiary ideology of virulent hatred of Jews. In a country where two thirds believe in the implementation of Islamic law, or sharia, and only 16 percent believe in the law of the legislature, the killing of Jews is presented as a religious obligation--labeling them the enemies of Allah, all to be annihilated.
Here are some examples. A senior PA cleric, Ibrahim Mudayris, who preaches more than half the officially sponsored PA TV sermons on Friday nights, stated: "The cause of our nation's problems and the world's problems is the Jews. . . . You will find the Jews behind every conflict on Earth. . . . Don't ask Germany what it did to the Jews, since the Jews are the ones who provoked the Nazis so the world would go to war against it." Another imam, Muhammad Ibrahim Maadi, preached on television that the Jews "will not be deterred unless we blow ourselves up willingly and as our duty, in their midst."
Teaching martyrdom. This notion of the shahid martyr has become so ingrained in the Palestinian culture that it is a major theme of formal education, family values, religious practices, television broadcasting, posters, pre-suicide eulogies, trading cards, family celebrations, movies, music, games, and summer camp. A study by a Palestinian psychiatrist, Shafik Massalah, found that over half of the Palestinian population ages 5 to 11 dreams of becoming a suicide bomber. The same Maadi said on PA-controlled television, "Shame upon he who does not educate his children in the education of jihad. Blessings upon he who dons a vest of explosives on himself or on his children and goes upon the midst of the Jews." Yet the international media and many governments say almost nothing about these vicious trends.
Abbas was Arafat's deputy for 40 years. Think of how we Americans would feel if Saddam Hussein's deputy for 40 years took over Iraq. When Abbas took over, he said he was going to "follow in the footsteps of Arafat." So, under the cover of pacific words and professing a wish to dismantle the terrorist operations, he is all the time really whispering that he cannot do so--and getting away with this brazen hypocrisy. He is well received everywhere in the world and showered with financial aid while Hamas and the terrorists are allowed to accumulate more and more lethal weapons and continue their violence.
The Bush administration has reverted to the pattern of the Clinton administration, which also failed to hold the Palestinians accountable. It searches for diplomatic painkillers rather than real solutions. It gives the Palestinians the impression that Israeli security concerns can be dismissed in the interest of helping Abbas politically, or the Palestinians economically.
Washington must wake up to the grim realities on the ground. The outcome of the Israeli election will determine the range of flexibility that the likely winner, Sharon, can bring to the battered peace process. Force-feeding a clearly flawed agreement down his throat will accomplish nothing. If the wave of terrorism re-emerges and is connected to the dishonored agreement around Gaza, it will be blamed on Sharon and greatly damage the lingering hopes so lamentably betrayed by Abbas.
This story appears in the December 19, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.