A rchive Date
[ 13-02-2001 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Israel ]
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[Israel will never get peace from Arafat
By GEORGE JONAS -- Toronto Sun
February 8, 2001
As predicted by the polls, Israel's new prime minister is now Ariel Sharon. A Likud politician and a former defence minister, Sharon has been routinely described as a right-winger or a "hawk" in the media.
I've always doubted (along with a current majority of Israelis) that the Oslo peace process and its "dovish" representatives in Israeli politics - Labour's Shimon Peres, the assassinated former leader Yitzhak Rabin, and most recently Ehud Barak - could bring peace to the Middle East. I predicted several times since 1993 that Oslo's doves will only succeed in making peace more elusive than ever.
Will the "hawkish" Sharon do any better?
Unfortunately, I doubt that too. At present, Israeli politicians can only reduce the chances of peace; they can do nothing to increase it. Sharon will do all right if he can prevent the situation in the Middle East from becoming worse.
Peace eludes the region because the Arab (and Muslim) world cannot come to terms with Israel's existence. Whether or not Arabs are justified in their rejection of the Jewish state may be disputed, but the fact of their rejection is beyond dispute. The PLO's Yasser Arafat is no different from any other Middle Eastern leader in this regard.
The liberal fantasy describing Arafat as "a partner for peace" with Israel has always been farcical. Arafat himself has only occasionally bothered to hide his ultimate aims. Usually - as in a 1972 conversation with the Italian journalist, Oriana Fallaci, for instance - he made his views perfectly plain:
"The end of Israel is the goal of our struggle, and it allows for neither compromise nor mediation," Arafat said to Fallaci at the time. "We don't want peace. We want war, victory. Peace for us means the destruction of Israel and nothing else."
Arafat may have changed his tactics in the intervening 29 years, but there's no reason to think he has changed his strategy. Barak's failed attempts to make more concessions than Peres and! Rabin put together illustrate this plainly. It's futile to make concessions to someone who isn't interested in the deal itself. The devil for such a person isn't in the details, but in the whole. It isn't a Jewish Jerusalem that is anathema to Arafat, but a Jewish Tel Aviv.
Trying to trade land for peace with Arafat may have been futile for another reason: peace has never been Arafat's to give. At most, Arafat controls the PLO. He doesn't control Hamas or Hezbollah, to say nothing of Syria or Iran.
Benjamin Netanyahu didn't win the election of 1996 because a majority of Israelis weren't interested in peace; he won because people saw no signs of peace. When an Israeli is blown up he doesn't care whether the device that blows him up is planted by Arafat or by some chap Arafat kisses and calls his "cousin." If giving land to Arafat had stopped his kissing cousins from blowing up people, most Israelis would have gone for the deal. They elected Netanyahu because it didn't.
If no buses had been blown up in Tel Aviv after Oslo, if no rockets had been fired on Israeli settlements, Peres would have won in 1996. It was the Arab terrorists who campaigned most effectively for Netanyahu, just as the Israeli lunatic who assassinated Rabin campaigned most effectively for Peres. In the end, the Arab terrorists waged the better campaign.
Much the same thing happened this time: Arafat, in effect, campaigned for Sharon. Possibly he did so in the belief that since Israel lost much of the world's support - and the idea of a Jewish state lost the support of some Israelis - the old revolutionary strategy of "the worse, the better" might be the winning play.
Is such a calculation wrong? Not necessarily. If the spirit of post-Zionism has indeed taken over Israel, a hawkish Israeli government could become an anomaly. Such a government would only bolster Arab and Muslim militancy and alienate Israel's allies, while doing little to stiffen Israeli resolve.
But while this is a possibility, the uselessness of trying to make a deal with any of Israel's opponents at this juncture is a certainty. For peace in the Middle East, the Arab world would have to accept Israel's existence. This isn't currently in the cards. It isn't, whether Sharon can be fairly compared to Churchill, as he was in a Wall Street Journal headline this week, or to Milosevic, as he was in the Los Angeles Times.
 World Fact Book (CIA))]
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