That's a good point. I think getting once Arafat is gone, peace will happen. At least expel him.
EXPEL ARAFAT
George Will
December 4, 2001 -- COMING from the territory for which Yasser
Arafat is responsible, terrorists last weekend killed 26
Israelis, a portion of Israel's population that is equal to
1,240 Americans. America is projecting power halfway around the
world to collapse the Taliban regime because it harbors
terrorists.
It would be disgusting for America to call for Israeli
"restraint" and to disapprove if Israel cleanses its back yard
of Arafat's Palestinian Authority regime that welcomes
terrorists except when, to distract America, it yet again
promises to pass a few through the revolving doors of PA jails.
It is time for a novel approach to the war between Israel and
Arafat's Palestinian Authority. The approach should begin with
wisdom from a Donald Westlake novel mordantly titled "What's
The Worst That Could Happen?"
Westlake's amiable crooks want to rob a Las Vegas casino, but
don't know how. One of them says he has a lot of ideas, but
Westlake writes: "A whole lot of ideas isn't a plan. . . .
Ideas without a plan is usually just enough boulders to get you
into the deep part of the stream, and no way to get back."
The latest U.S. idea is to send retired Marine Gen. Anthony
Zinni to pick up the shards of the last idea, which was to send
CIA Director George Tenet to implement former Sen. George
Mitchell's idea for a cease-fire followed by a cooling off
period followed by "confidence-building" measures.
The idea of the Mitchell plan is that neither side is to blame
- neither Israel, which wants to exist, nor the Palestinians
who do not want it to; neither the Palestinians who want to
plant nail bombs on buses, nor Israel, which would prefer the
Palestinians not do that. Rather, a mutual lack of "confidence"
is to blame.
There is this much truth in that idea: The Palestinian
Authority lacks confidence in Israel's willingness to commit
suicide, and Israel lacks confidence that the PA will stop
insisting on suicide as part of a "peace" agreement.
The idea behind dispatching Mitchell was to pick up where
Dennis Ross left off. Ross' task, which he undertook with the
energy and wisdom of a beaver, was to oversee the Oslo "peace
process," which turned on Arafat's renunciation of violence.
That process has required lots of overseeing, considering that
terrorists have killed more Israelis in the eight years since
Oslo began in 1993 than in the 45 years of Israel's existence
before that.
The idea behind Oslo was for Israel to "take a risk for peace"
- as though getting on a bus, visiting a pizzeria or disco and
walking down a street are not risky enough for Israelis. Israel
would take a risk by yielding something tangible, control of
land, for something intangible, Arafat's promises of peace.
Israel did that. The current war refutes the Oslo idea.
The idea behind Oslo was to capitalize on the "spirit of
Madrid," an Israeli-Palestinian conference convened in 1991, in
the aftermath of the Gulf War. The idea behind Madrid was. . .
. Does anyone remember?
You must remember this. On Aug. 31, Arafat, world's senior
terrorist, did a star turn - at one point strolling with
America's senior friend of terrorists, Jesse Jackson - in
Durban, South Africa, at a U.N. orgy of hate directed against
Israel and the United States and bearing an Orwellian title:
World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination,
Xenophobia and Related Intolerance.
It was the kind of sewer of ideas that prepares the climate for
the sort of things that happened in America 11 days after the
conference opened, and what happened last weekend in Israel.
Now Israel should be as bold in its self-defense as America is
being in its. In 1982, Israel drove Arafat and his thugs from
Lebanon to Tunisia. He and his thugocracy have earned another
expulsion from the eastern end of the Mediterranean.
If he cannot control his territory, it is in anarchy and Israel
must subdue it. If he can control it but won't, he has earned
expulsion under the principle America cites in expelling the
Taliban from power.
If expulsion strikes the U.S. State Department as, well,
immoderate, here is a moderate version of the idea: When next
the peripatetic Arafat flies off to visit world capitals,
Israel should not let him come back: He cannot land in PA
territory if Israel does not let him.
That is more than an idea. It is a plan.
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