Arafat Redux
On September 13, 1993, Yasser Arafat signed the Declaration of Principles
on the White House lawn and engaged in the famous handshake with Yitzhak
Rabin and Bill Clinton. That very day, appearing on Jordanian television,
he assured the Palestinians in Arabic that the DOP was just the first
stage of the “Phased Plan”:
Do not forget that our Palestine National Council accepted the decision
in 1974. It called for the establishment of a national authority on any
part of Palestinian land that is liberated or from which the Israelis
withdrew. This is the fruit of your struggle, your sacrifices, and your
jihad…This is the moment of return, the moment of gaining a foothold on
the first liberated Palestinian land…Long live Palestine, liberated and
Arab.
Nobody cared. In those days, if you called attention to statements by
Arafat that clashed with his professions of
peace, you yourself were
called an “enemy of peace.” That at least was preferable to being a
“victim of peace,” Rabin’s coinage for the Israelis who very soon started
dying in massacres sponsored by Arafat’s Palestinian Authority. The first
Oslo-era suicide bombing occurred on April 6, 1994, in the Israeli town
of Afula, killing eight bus passengers and wounding forty-four.
Many followed, and Arafat kept stoking the flames. In a
speech in 1995 he
proclaimed: “Be blessed, O Gaza, and celebrate, for your sons are
returning after a long celebration. O Lod, O Haifa, O Jerusalem, you are
returning, you are returning” (quoted in Maariv, September 7, 1995). In
another speech that year he declared: “The struggle will continue until
all of Palestine is liberated” (Voice of Palestine, November 11, 1995).
Still, nobody cared. Arafat was able to keep waging his genocidal assault
on Israeli civilians, killing a thousand and injuring and traumatizing
many more thousands, up to his death in November 2004. His sole
“punishment” was being confined to his Ramallah compound for the last two
years of his life, Ariel Sharon apparently having managed to persuade
George Bush that Arafat was not a constructive force. Even then Arafat
remained an internationally protected person, not subject even to arrest
and trial.
On January 11, 2007, in a speech at a Ramallah rally marking the 42nd
anniversary of the founding of the Fatah party, after placing a wreath on
Arafat’s tomb, Mahmoud Abbas said: “Shooting at your brother is
forbidden. Raising rifles against the occupation is our legitimate right,
but raising
guns against each other is forbidden. We should put our
internal fighting aside and raise our rifles only against the Israeli
occupation.”
He also said: “The issue of the
refugees is non-negotiable. We will not
give up one inch of land in Jerusalem and we consider the settlements
illegal. We also reject any attempt to resettle the refugees in other
countries.”
He also said: “The sons of Israel are mentioned
as those
who are corrupting humanity on earth.”
The story was carried by the right-of-center Jerusalem Post and the
right-wing WorldNetDaily. com (which also gave detailed information on the
recent, Israeli-facilitated , U.S. transfer of funds and weapons to
Abbas’s forces). But for everyone else it was yawns and business as
usual. The Associated Press version of the story, which was featured at
leading venues like WashingtonPost. com and CBSNews.com, quoted Abbas’s
words “Shooting at your brother is forbidden” but left out the rest of
that paragraph.
On Saturday, at a joint press conference in Jerusalem, visiting Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice and Foreign Ministry Tsippi Livni reaffirmed
their commitment to the road map. Livni made another of her prissily
evenhanded, “I’m one of the good Israelis” formulations: “Our
responsibility is to give the Palestinians a political horizon as well as
to provide safety to Israelis in Sderot.”
On Sunday, Rice went on to a meeting with Abbas in Ramallah, after which
she posed with him for the cameras and pledged“deeper American
engagement.” Considering that Abbas is now setting up coalition talks
with Hamas, the United States seemed verging on handing an outright
kosher certificate to the Axis of Evil.
Meanwhile on Friday, the Jerusalem Post ran an op-ed called “America, Be
a Peacemaker” by Seymour Reich of the Israel Policy Forum, who had
earlier taken credit for encouraging Rice to push through the
Gaza-crossings agreement that helped deprive the Sderot residents of
their safety. Reich’s Friday op-ed was probably written before the news
about Abbas’s Ramallah speech—but what difference would it have made?
Apparently the last acolyte of the Baker-Hamilton opus, Reich says in the
article: “The administration and Congress must heed the Iraq Study
Group’s recommendation: ‘There must be a renewed and sustained commitment
by the United States to a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace.’” He also
chides Israel for “an announcement that would revive a settlement in
the West Bank’s Jordan Valley,” saying this “undermines Israel’s attempt
to strengthen Abbas.”
A recommended exercise is to run a Google search on “strengthen Abbas.”
The phrase keeps turning up for dozens and dozens of Google pages. In
comparison, “strengthen Siniora” or “strengthen Saniora” peters out after
just a few pages.
I call on all of you—American peace processors, Israeli doves, American
Jewish peace professionals— to address publicly these words by Abbas:
"We should put our internal fighting aside and raise our rifles only
against the Israeli occupation.
The issue of the refugees is non-negotiable… We also reject any attempt to
resettle the refugees in other countries.
The sons of Israel are mentioned as those who are corrupting humanity on
earth."
****
And now is the time for the leaders of Western nations to stop acting like delusionals and cowards.
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