October 9, 1996
Recent violence between armed Palestinian police and Israeli soldiers in Rammallah points up serious questions about the Oslo Accords, the so-called peace process between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization.
This time, the violence was precipitated by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's decision to open a tunnel near holy places of both Jews and Muslims. The actual agreement to open the tunnel was reached earlier this year between Arafat and then Prime Minister Shimon Peres and Israel's Labor Party. Since Netanyahu and the Likud Party came to power, Arafat has been losing face with his followers. To bolster his tough-guy image, he has to now protest the tunnel's opening.
World leaders criticized Israel for provoking the crisis. French president Jacques Chirac counseled Israel to avoid provocations and telephoned Arafat to express his “solidarity and support” with the Palestinians. This response demonstrates western double standards. During the 1987 to 1993 Palestinian uprisings (intifada), Israel came under Western criticism for its harsh response to stone-throwing and fire-setting Palestinians. When Israel responds in kind to Arab terrorism, it also encounters criticism. But the West is relatively silent in its criticisms of the Palestinians who started the recent violence.
I am not an expert in Middle East affairs. But the way I see it is the only way there can be peace, using Arafat's 1980 words, “Peace for us means the destruction of Israel.”
“Williams,” you say, “Arafat has changed; he's repudiated the Palestinian Covenant calling for the destruction of Israel!” Not so. In January, speaking to Arab diplomats in Stockholm's Grand Hotel, Arafat said, “We plan to eliminate Israel and establish a Palestinian state…. We will make life unbearable for Jews by psychological warfare and population explosion.” Arafat wants to work on “splitting Israel psychologically into two camps.” A few months ago, Marwan Barguti, a top official in the Palestinian Authority in Gaza, said, “Our forces will fight the Israelis. Orders have already been given. We already have in Gaza 20,000 armed security personnel.”
Like Hitler's strategy, the “peace process” is simply part of an overall Palestinian design for the ultimate destruction of Israel. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, just one year before World War II began, spoke of the “desire of the German people for peace,” despite evidence to the contrary and Winston Churchill's earlier 1932 warning of the “inexhaustible gullibility” of Western pacifists.
During the late 1920s and early 1930s, Hitler knew outright war was a hopeless cause. France alone could have defeated him mightily. Through talk of peace, he managed to extract concession after concession and rearm. The rest of the story is written with the blood of millions.
Similarly, the Arab states know war with Israel is their worst nightmare. Therefore, they are using the “peace process” to get Israel to give up land for nothing more than promises of peace. Again, they might heed Winston Churchill's warning to his fellow countrymen: “Every concession that has been made was followed immediately by fresh demands.”
Should there be a Palestinian state, it would, like any sovereign state, have the right to have a military. Regardless of any written agreement, a Palestinian state would establish a military force that would be used, with assistance from its Arab neighbors, against Israel.
Israelis should recognize a fundamental fact of world history: Peace agreements aren't worth the paper they're written on and one concession leads to demands for another. Considerable evidence demonstrates that what holds adversaries at bay is their knowledge of a completely unacceptable cost should they attack.