A Durable Peace (39 page)

Can there be no deviation from this line? Are there no dissidents? There were, but they didn’t last long. They met the fate
of PLO dissidents like Issam Sartawi, who was cut down in cold blood in 1983 for calling for negotiations with Israel, or
of the Moslem religious leader Imam Khossander, who was murdered in Gaza in 1979 during a spree of PLO killings of Arabs who
had supported Sadat’s arrival in Israel.
¹¹³
Farouq Kaddoumi, Arafat’s “foreign minister,” explained the rationale behind such executions in chilling terms:

The PLO and the Palestinian people in the occupied territories and outside them know very well how to use such methods to
prevent certain personalities from deviating from the revolutionary path. Our people in the interior recognize their responsibilities
and are capable of taking the necessary disciplinary measure against those who try to leave the right path.
¹¹⁴

Hundreds of other, lesser-known Palestinians who tried to deviate “from the revolutionary path” by advocating a genuine peace
with Israel received “the necessary disciplinary measure” and were summarily cut down—a practice that the intifada death squads
enthusiastically took up in murdering over seven hundred Palestinian Arabs, including nurses, teachers, and students accused
of “collaborating” with Israel.
¹¹⁵

I have spoken with quite a few prominent Palestinian Arabs, mostly in discreet meetings. Invariably, they said that they would
seek a genuine compromise and coexistence with Israel but were afraid to say so openly for fear of PLO or Hamas terror. These
people were not pro-Israel by any stretch of the imagination. But they had given up on the PLO’s wild fantasies of drowning
Israel with returning refugees or of conquering Haifa and Jaffa. Most of all, they would like a negotiated solution that would
enable them to throw off the ideological yoke, initially imposed from the PLO
base in Tunis a thousand miles away, and to take charge of their own destiny.

This is why it is so ironic to hear some people speaking in such lavish terms about the “new local spokesmen” who emerged
as “Palestinian leaders” during the intifada and while accompanying the Palestinian negotiators at the Madrid Peace Conference.
Seeing Western-educated West Bankers on television sporting the latest in verbal accessories has given many in the West the
impression that these are Palestinian Arab leaders who have built their own independent base of power and are rising to challenge
the unpolished Arafat and his coterie. Precisely the opposite is true. The intifada was a highly efficient instrument of intimidation
for the PLO, and left in its wake there were virtually no Arabs in Judea and Samaria who were willing to deviate from Arafat’s
bidding (unless, that is, they were even more intimidated by the fundamentalist Hamas, or “protected” by it Mafia-style).
As was first demonstrated at Madrid when these new spokesmen left the conference in midcourse to fly to Tunis and confer with
Arafat, they were spokesmen for no one but the PLO.

That the West found this so hard to accept is a symptom of the much deeper problem underneath: No matter what the evidence,
the West is entirely confounded by fanaticism if it wears a suit and tie. Equally, it cannot seem to comprehend the fact that
the PLO genuinely
likes
and
admires
totalitarianism—despite its own extraordinary openness on this point. While the nations of the free world condemned China
when Chinese government tanks massacred thousands of defenseless nonviolent, pro-democracy demonstrators in 1989, Arafat sent
a public message of congratulations to Beijing:

I take this opportunity to express extreme gratification that you were able to restore normal order after the recent incidents
in the People’s Republic of China.
¹¹⁶

While Saddam Hussein devoured his Arab neighbor Kuwait, Arafat cheered him on:

I say welcome, welcome, welcome to war…. Iraq and Palestine represent a common will. We will be side by side after the great
battle, God willing, we will pray together in Jerusalem…. The Iraqi fighters and the Palestinian stone-throwers have an appointment
with victory.
¹¹⁷

And as the neo-Stalinist coup seemed to end democracy in the Soviet Union in August 1991 and plunge the world back into the
Cold War, the PLO praised the putsch:

The PLO has always viewed this experiment in perestroika with great skepticism, and with trepidation mingled with sadness.
¹¹⁸

In midcoup, the official PLO organ, Radio Palestine, added further clarification: “What happened in the USSR proves that the
[struggle against the West] is natural and inevitable, and that perestroika was the anomaly.”
¹¹⁹
In the West, those few commentators who even noticed that the PLO was evincing such a sweet tooth for oppression insisted
on lamenting that it “always seems to back losers”—just another bad roll of the dice.

But it is not luck that is responsible for the PLO’s choice of friends. It is its chronic affinity for the goals and methods
of tyranny, which has consistently allied it with the likes of the Nazis and the Soviets, terror organizations of almost every
description, and Arab despots from Nasser to Saddam. The PLO pedigree of tyrannophilia goes all the way back to June 1940,
on the occasion of the Nazi dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and France, when the Mufti sent
his
personal congratulations to Hitler:

[I wish] to convey to his Excellency the Great Chief and Leader my sincerest felicitations on the occasion of the great political
and military triumphs which he has just achieved…. The Arab
nation everywhere feels the greatest joy and deepest gratification on the occasion of these great successes…. The Arab people…
will be linked to your country by a treaty of friendship and collaboration.
¹²⁰

It is impossible to escape the perverse but utterly consistent logic that has compelled the PLO and its progenitors to follow
the path from the Mufti’s pact with Hitler to “destroy the Jewish National Home,” to Shukeiri’s pact with Nasser to “drive
Israel into the sea,” right down to Arafat’s pact with Saddam to “burn half of the Jewish state.” They may all have failed,
but their legacy of hatred persists, following a straight, unbroken line.

Someday, it will be one of those famous historians’ riddles how terrorists and totalitarians who murdered Westerners for decades
were able to manipulate the Western democracies into besieging the solitary democracy in the Middle East on their behalf.
But we can solve the riddle with a myth—the myth of the Trojan horse. For the PLO is a Pan-Arab Trojan horse, a gift that
the Arabs have been trying to coax the West into accepting for over twenty years, so that the West in turn can force Israel
to let it in the gates. The Arabs paint their gift up prettily with legitimacy, with the pathos of its plight, with expressions
of love for the cherished ideas of freedom, justice, and peace. Yet no matter how it is dressed up to conceal the fact, the
ultimate aim of this gift remains: to be allowed within Israel’s defensive wall, to be parked on the hills overlooking Tel
Aviv, whence it can perform its grisly task. Every inch of Western acceptance—the cover stories, the banquets, the observer
status, the embassies, and any territory the PLO has ever been able to get its hands on—it uses to push it ever closer to
its goal. And while it is difficult for uninitiated Westerners to imagine the Arabs destroying Israel as the Greeks laid waste
to Troy, it is all too easy for anyone familiar with Israel’s terrain to imagine, precisely as Arafat has promised, that a
PLO state implanted ten miles from the beaches of Tel Aviv would be a mortal danger to the Jewish state.

That the West has succumbed to such a ploy is a remarkable failing, of memory and of a sense of justice. For how long ago
was it that Yasser Arafat had Americans and Europeans murdered? That Israel, which knows the PLO, has not averted the increasing
acceptance of this Trojan horse is also a remarkable failing: of communication, of concern for the importance of ideas, and
of common sense in seeing that it must take the truth straight to the people who count—the citizens of the democratic nations.
Israel has no choice but to begin, even at this late date, to explain what the Trojan peace proposed by the PLO means to Israel,
and what it means for the world. And Israel must explain what kind of a peace it demands instead.

The above chapter was written (with very few amendments) one year before the Oslo Accords, in which Israel signed a preliminary
peace agreement with the PLO. The basis of the Oslo agreement was that Israel first would hand over the areas populated by
Palestinians in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza to the control of the Palestinian Authority headed by Arafat. The Palestinian Authority
in turn would suppress in these areas anti-Israel terrorism, annul the PLO Charter, and fulfill other commitments, such as
ceasing anti-Israel propaganda, thus heralding a new era of peace between the two peoples. While Israel kept its part of the
bargain, the Palestinian Authority did not. While the PLO itself eventually refrained from terrorist attacks, the Palestinian
Authority enabled the enormous expansion of the terrorist organizations of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and others in the areas under
its jurisdiction. Contrary to the specific promises given to Israel in the Oslo Accords (and yet again in the Hebron Accords
of 1997, which I concluded with Arafat, with the United States underwriting the agreement), the Palestinian Authority did
not dismantle the terrorist organizations, did not collect their illegal weapons, did not extradite terrorists to Israel,
did not stop incendiary incitement to violence in the Palestinian-controlled media, and did not cooperate consistently and
systematically with the Israeli security agencies to fight terrorism. In fact,
on many occasions, Palestinian Authority leaders, including Arafat himself, engaged in vitriolic calls for violence, gave
the green light for terrorism to the Hamas terrorists, and lionized the suicide bombers who murdered scores of Israeli civilians,
calling these killers “heroes of the Palestinian nation” and naming public squares after them.

The result was an unprecedented explosion of terrorism in Israel’s cities, coming on the heels of the agreement to end all
terrorism. In the two and a half years after the Labor government signed the Oslo Accords to end all terror, two hundred and
fifty Israelis died in these savage attacks, equivalent to ten thousand American dead. The people of Israel reached one conclusion:
This is not peace. While many agreed to continue with the Oslo agreement, with all its flaws (Yitzhak Rabin described it as
“being perforated with more holes than Swiss cheese” because its central framework had not been cleared in advance with Israeli’s
military and security chiefs), they nevertheless demanded two things: that Arafat keep his commitments under Oslo and that
Israel maintain the necessary security defenses.

This is precisely the platform on which I was elected as Prime Minister in 1996 and which my government proceeded to implement
thereafter. We have insisted that the Palestinians carry out their part in the agreement, most notably to fight terrorism
and to annul the PLO Charter. At our demand, the Palestinian Authority annuled the passages in the PLO Charter calling for
Israel’s destruction. This was done in the presence of President Clinton to make backtracking difficult. Our insistence of
this symbolic act was the first step on the long road of Palestinian acceptance of Israel, but many steps remain. Equally,
we have been prepared to withdraw from additional territories, but not at the expense of Israel’s security. These demands
are consistent not only with the agreements we signed but also with common sense. They are the minimal safeguards to assure
us that the PLO has abandoned the strategy of the Trojan horse, and they provide Israel with secure and defensible boundaries
in case it hasn’t.

6

B
y now, readers must be asking themselves if the attainment of peace is at all possible in this Middle Eastern morass of depravity
and duplicity. If Arab politics is so predisposed to violence and strife, if non-Arabs and non-Moslems are hardly tolerated,
if much of Arab society manifests an incorrigible anti-Westernism that finds its focus in anti-Zionism, is it even possible
to conceive of, let alone achieve, a durable peace between Arab and Arab, and between Arab and Jew?