BBC: Israeli Troops Fire on Reporters/Peace Demonstrators

History Isn't on the Palestinians' Side
Arafat's strategy is suicidal in more ways than one.

BY VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

For all the efforts of our contemporary theorists to harness and sometimes refashion history, the facts of the past belong to no one--and won't go away. Those who conjure it up often discover to their dismay that they themselves are subject to its brutal laws of truth. The Palestinians are fast learning of history's ironies and unintended reminders, as they seek to invoke the past to convince Americans of the righteousness of their present plight.

Take the idea of the occupation of Arab lands since 1967, which the Palestinians now cite as a singular historical grievance that needs immediate rectification through intervention of the U.S. But sadly occupation and partition are the b*stard children of war; and history, rightly or wrongly, is not kind to states that repeatedly attack their neighbors--and lose.

Ask the millions of poor Germans who had their ancestral lands confiscated by Poland and France--and their country subsequently partitioned for a half century. Why do the Russians still occupy portions of the old Japanese homeland decades after the surrender? How is it that the British won't give up Gibraltar long after their successful battles against the Spanish fleet? And why must the world give far more attention to Palestine than it does to Tibetans, Irish and Chechens?

The situation on the West Bank is not only commonplace in history's harsh calculus, but prevalent even throughout the Arab world today. Right next door in Lebanon, Syria controls far more Arab land than does Israel. And if Palestinians suffer second-class citizenship under Israeli occupation, they are worse off in occupied Lebanon where, as helots, they are denied basic rights to employment, health care and government services.

Kuwait ethnically cleansed all Palestinians--perhaps a third of a million--just a decade ago. Well after the 1967 Six Day War, the Jordanians themselves slaughtered thousands. Before the intifada more Palestinians sought work in a hated Israel than in a beloved Egypt. History suggests that there is more going on in Palestine than the morality of occupation.

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The Palestinians have turned to suicide bombers--terrorists boasting of a new and frightening tactic that cannot be stopped. But they should recall the kamikazes off Okinawa that brought death, terror and damage to the American fleet--before prompting horrific responses that put an end to them for good and a lot more besides. In general, the record of terrorist bombers--whether Irish, Basque or Palestinian--who seek to reclaim "occupied" lands is not impressive in winning either material concessions or the hearts and minds of the world.
Palestinian spokesmen decry asymmetrical casualty figures, as if history has ever accorded moral capital to any belligerents that suffered the greater losses in war. Again, ask imperial Japan or Nazi Germany whether the ghosts of millions of their dead today carry moral weight when their governments once sought war against their neighbors.

Deliberately trying to blow apart civilians will never be seen as the moral equivalent of noncombatants dying as a result of the street fighting in the West Bank. Afghans accidentally killed by errant bombing in Kandahar are different from those deliberately incinerated on Sept. 11. Somalis killed in Mogadishu by American peacekeepers--far more civilians dying there in two days than in two years on the West Bank--are not the same as those murdered by thugs in jeeps trying to steal food from the starving.

Americans learned in Vietnam and Mogadishu that it is hard to distinguish civilians from soldiers when gunmen do not always wear uniforms and take potshots from the windows of homes: They are real killers when alive, but somehow count as "civilians" when dead. The problem is not that the Palestinians are losing more than the Israelis due to their greater victimhood or morality, but rather that they find themselves losing very badly to a military far more adept at fighting.

Nor do the Palestinians' cries for justice exist in an historical vacuum. True, the current Arab-Israeli war--at least the fourth since 1948--is fought over the West Bank; but that is only because the theater of operations has changed somewhat since the Arab world lost the first three wars to destroy Israel proper. Less than two years ago, Yasser Arafat was offered almost all of the West Bank and would now be the unquestioned strongman of his own tribal fiefdom had he taken such a generous Israeli offer. His own scheming and the intifada--not Israeli extremism--brought back to him his old nemesis, Ariel Sharon.

Again, the problem for the Palestinians is not that Americans are ignorant of the historical complexities of the Middle East, but that we know them only too well.

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Palestinian spokesmen give us moralistic lectures about remaining disinterested as "honest brokers"--even as they appeal to Arab anti-Semitism and racial solidarity on grounds of national, religious and ethnic empathy. That double standard puzzles America, because by any such measure we also find affinity in shared values, and so have almost none with the Palestinians, who, like the entire Arab world, do not embrace real democracy, free speech, open media and religious diversity.
Nor is it good public relations for illegitimate dictatorships of the Arab League to shake fingers at democracies in America and Israel on issues of equality and fairness. The problem is not that the Palestinians object to the idea of displaying preferences per se, but that their own biases and prejudices have so little appeal to Americans.

We are told that the Palestinians have a long memory of, and reverence for, the past--especially the injustice of 50 years of lost homelands. But Americans are not ahistorical. We remember Sept. 11, and the Palestinians who cheered our dead before being admonished by a terrified Arafat.

For the past three decades Palestinian terrorists and their sponsoring brotherhoods have murdered Americans abroad. Palestinians embraced Saddam Hussein's cause and clapped as Scuds plunged into Tel Aviv and blew apart American soldiers in Saudi Arabia. An entrapped Arafat now calls for American succor, but a few months ago scoffed that the U.S. was irrelevant as far as he was concerned. The problem, again, is not that Americans have forgotten Palestinian acts, but that we remember them all too well.

The Arab world warns of its martial prowess and deadly anger--as American flags burn, threats to kill us are issued, and "the street" shakes its collective fist. But we Americans remember 1967, when we gave almost no weapons to the Israelis--but the Russians supplied lots of sophisticated arms to the Arabs. In the Six Day War, the state radio networks of Syria, Egypt and Jordan boasted to the world that their triumphant militaries were nearing Tel Aviv even as their frightened elites pondered abandoning Damascus, Cairo and Amman. And we recall the vaunted Egyptian air force in 1967, the invincible Syrian jets over Lebanon, the Mother of All Battles--and the Republican Guard that proved about as fearsome as Xerxes' Immortals at Thermopylae.

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A beleaguered Arafat now wildly works his Rolodex for support for his autocracy. But history answers cruelly that strongmen in their bunkers are as impotent as they are loquacious--and as likely to receive disdain as pity. Moammar Gadhafi was a different man after the American air strike proved his military worthless and his person no longer sacrosanct. The rhetoric of the Taliban in September promised death; in October they and their minions went silent. In wars against bombers and terrorists, the past teaches us that peace comes first through their defeat--not out of negotiations among supposedly well-meaning equals.
We all would prefer, and should strive for, peaceful relations with the Egyptians, the Jordanians, the Syrians--and all the other 20-something dictatorships, theocracies, and monarchies of the Middle East--as well as a state for the Palestinians. But the day is growing late; our patience is now exhausted; and sadly an hour of reckoning is nearing for all us all. The problem is, you see, that we know their history far better than they do.

Mr. Hanson, a military historian, is author most recently of "Carnage and Culture" (Doubleday, 2002).

The Wall Street Journal, Tuesday, April 2, 2002

 

Arafat Always Goes Too Far
A retrospective: 30 years of terror.

BY ROBERT L. POLLOCK
Tuesday, April 2, 2002 12:01 a.m. EST

(Editor's note: This article originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal, July 9, 2001.)

The crackdown was swift and brutal. Though the government was deeply divided between hard-liners and those favoring more negotiation with the Palestinians, the hard-liners won. Towns and refugee camps that had raised the flag of the Republic of Palestine were shelled, while Yasser Arafat proclaimed a "genocide" and urged his people to resist. There were numerous casualties on both sides.

The Arab League called for a cease-fire, and then for a meeting of its heads of state. But Mr. Arafat rejected their proposals. At a meeting with the government shortly thereafter, he accused his opponents of being imperialists in league with the U.S.

If this sounds familiar, it should--except that the start of this conflict was September 1970, not September 2000; it happened in Jordan, not Israel and the West Bank; and Mr. Arafat's nemesis was King Hussein, not Ehud Barak or Ariel Sharon.

In 1970, Palestinians, both citizens and refugees, were almost as numerous in Jordan as King Hussein's own Bedouins. Mr. Arafat used the estimated 20,000 Palestine Liberation Organization fighters in Jordan to exercise control over much of the Palestinian population. In many parts of the country, he was the de facto government. The king had grown increasingly worried that Mr. Arafat posed a threat to his regime, and cross-border attacks into Israel and other acts of PLO terror had put intolerable strains on his relations with the West.

The last straw came on Sept. 6, when the PLO hijacked four civilian airliners, flying three to Dawson's Field in PLO-controlled northern Jordan and one to Cairo. After European governments secured the release of the hostages by agreeing to release PLO terrorists from their prisons, the PLO blew up the planes.

The Jordanian response, from which one of the PLO's most notorious brigades was to take its name, became known as Black September. An estimated 2,000 PLO fighters and several thousand more Palestinian civilians were killed. Mr. Arafat fled to Cairo, where an angry meeting with King Hussein nonetheless led to a cease-fire. But Mr. Arafat soon returned to join the rump of his forces, which had retreated to northern Jordan, close to their Syrian sponsors. Within 10 months they were driven out of the country.

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As the world waits to see whether the current, fragile cease-fire will put an end to nine months of low-level warfare between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the past may prove instructive. For, in essence, we've been here before. And regardless of what one thinks of Mr. Arafat from a moral standpoint--is he simply a terrorist, or does he come, as he famously told the United Nations in 1974, "bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter's gun"?--his history, wherever he has gained a territorial foothold, has not been that of a reliable or even rational partner, even with potential Arab allies. His history is one of pushing too far.
Is the Jordan example not convincing? Well, a replay wasn't too long in coming. Within months of their expulsion from Jordan, Mr. Arafat and the PLO were setting up shop in Lebanon and tearing at the fabric of that country too. Lebanese Christians, particularly, resented suffering the Israeli retaliations that the PLO's cross-border raids provoked. In April 1974, for example, the PLO killed 18 at Kiryat Shimona and 20, mostly schoolgirls, at Maalot, both in northern Israel.

The early '70s were also boom years for PLO terrorism on the international stage. The year 1972 alone saw PLO groups blow up a West German electricity plant, a Dutch gas plant and an oil refinery in Trieste, Italy; kill, in conjunction with the Japanese Red Army, 24 at Israel's Lod airport; and massacre 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. In early 1973, Black September took the American ambassador and his deputy (along with one Belgian diplomat) hostage in Sudan's capital, Khartoum, and, after President Nixon refused to negotiate, murdered them.

Flush with money from his Arab and Soviet sponsors, as well as an income tax levied by the Gulf states on Palestinian workers, Mr. Arafat quickly built up a state--called the Fakhani Republic after the Beirut neighborhood in which he operated--in much of Lebanon. By 1975, he had some 15,000 troops under his command, with many more associated paramilitaries, and was acquiring tanks and anti-aircraft guns.

PLO-affiliated conglomerates, including one controlled by Ahmed Qurei, who would later negotiate the Oslo Accords, monopolized everything from shoes to baby food. Billions of dollars flowed through the PLO, the only thorough record of which seemed to be a small notebook Mr. Arafat carried on his person. His underlings levied arbitrary taxes on the Lebanese, and practiced other forms of extortion, car theft and racketeering.

That year--1975--Christian rage boiled over, and Lebanon's long civil war began. By early 1976, the PLO and its allies controlled most of the country. But that summer Palestinian assassins murdered the U.S. ambassador to Lebanon, and the U.S., Israel and the Arab states tacitly supported a Syrian-led invasion of the country, which reversed many PLO gains. An October cease-fire stabilized the situation. But 40,000 had been killed. And in subsequent years, PLO attacks into Israel continued, provoking more Israeli retaliation.

The endgame began in June 1982, when renewed PLO attacks on Israel coincided with an assassination attempt on the Israeli ambassador in London. Prime Minister Menachem Begin ordered Defense Minister Ariel Sharon to send Israel's armed forces into Lebanon to drive out the PLO. Mr. Arafat's appeals to the Arab League and the U.N. went unheeded, while ordinary Lebanese took to crying "Enough!" whenever they spotted him. In August President Reagan convinced Israel to stop the fighting, but Mr. Arafat, whose forces had been routed, had already told the Lebanese government he would leave the country. On Aug. 30, he left for Tunis, while his forces dispersed to other Arab countries. The Lebanese would suffer eight more years of the civil war he provoked.

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The extent of Mr. Arafat's personal involvement in the numerous terrorist acts that have left an indelible stain on the Palestinian cause has long been a matter of debate among knowledgeable observers. But there is no question that, if not outright front groups for Mr. Arafat's Fatah faction, the groups that claimed responsibility were most often fully paid up members of the PLO, and that Chairman Arafat did nothing to stop them.
Persistent rumors that the U.S. and Israel possess tapes of Mr. Arafat directing the 1973 Khartoum murders (confirmed to me by Ariel Sharon late last year) have gained further credence with the recent allegations of James J. Welsh, a former Navy and National Security Agency intelligence analyst. He says the NSA sent out a warning of a possible PLO attack, based on shortwave intercepts, that was inexplicably downgraded by the State Department. After the murders, it was covered up. His story deserves congressional attention. After all, there is no statute of limitations on murder.

But the more pressing question is what the future holds for the little war now going on in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. Mr. Arafat's history in Jordan and Lebanon suggests this is headed for no good end. From internal corruption and abuse of power, to the repeated breach of agreements, to the apparent use of territory as a base for terrorism, the situation of today's Palestinian Authority is strikingly similar to those two prior episodes.

Perhaps such observations played a part in convincing former U.S. envoy Dennis Ross, who spent a decade trying to convince the word otherwise, to conclude this year that Mr. Arafat "is not capable of negotiating an end to the conflict." And if Prime Minister Sharon soon feels compelled to act decisively against Mr. Arafat, as he did in 1982, and as King Hussein did in 1970, it would behoove the world to think carefully about where blame for the continuing Palestinian tragedy really lies.

Mr. Pollock is an editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal.

 

Vatican Criticizes Israel for Imposing 'Unjust' Conditions

VATICAN CITY, April 3 — The Vatican today raised its profile on the
escalating crisis in the Middle East by sharply criticizing Israel for imposing "unjust and humiliating conditions" on the Palestine people and by condemning all acts of terrorism. With Bethlehem under Israel military occupation, the Vatican also called on the two sides to respect holy places. here

 

Geez, hasn't anyone ever watched the Highlander movies?

 

So basically Saddam says: Let the children starve while we pay suicide bombers to kill other children....http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tm..._re_mi_ea/palestinians_bomber_money_4&cid=514