Here’s a question: Why is there still a Palestinian Authority?
David Frum - National Review
The Authority was created by the 1993 Israeli-Palestinian peace deal: The deal provided that the Palestinians would abjure violence and in return the Israelis would withdraw in stages from the West Bank and Gaza.
The Palestinians never honored their end of the deal. Arafat experimented with violence repeatedly through the 1990s; then, in September 2000, he abrogated his commitments altogether and launched the current terror war.
Why did Arafat choose war three years ago? We may never know the real answer to that question: some combination of miscalculation, ego, inter-Palestinian politics, and his own implacable hatred of Israel.
Whatever the motive, the war fully and finally voided the 1993 agreement. The Palestinians surrendered the benefits of peace and gambled everything on a war of atrocities. They lost and lost again – and yet at every turn, the world community and even the United States has pressed Israel to restore to them everything they possessed in September 2000 and more besides.
And so, as the Palestinians keep attacking Israeli civilians and schoolchildren, the world community keeps pretending that this Palestinian war of aggression does not exist. What is occurring in the Mideast, we are urged to believe, is not a war but a “peace process” interrupted by bomb attacks carried out by fringe groups. Arafat and the Palestinian Authority (or so we are again urged to believe) are merely bystanders.
Nobody believes this interpretation of events; and yet many, including even the US State Department, feel obliged to continue repeating them. And so they disguise from themselves – and constrain Israel too to ignore – the only possible answer to the Palestinian terror campaign: Arafat and the Palestinians have chosen war. They must therefore have war until they are sick of it, war until they decide that even a disappointing (from their point of view) peace with Israel is better than one more day of fighting. Three years of advice to Israel to show restraint, to use less than its full power against its murderous enemy, has not restored the laughably misnamed “peace process.” Restraint has prolonged and exacerbated the war, at terrible cost to both sides.
Has it occurred to anyone that the reason that the Middle East is so unstable – the reason that the Arabs keeping warring and warring and warring again on Israel – is that we have taught them to think of war as a one-way option? If they win, they keep their winnings – if they lose, the West will restore their losses?
It’s a cliché that war settles nothing. In fact, generally it is only war that ever settles international disputes. The Palestinians gambled everything on this war. They lost their gamble. Now it is time for them to be cashed out. Israel should invade the West Bank and Gaza, extinguish all Palestinian political authority, round up and detain as many Palestinian leaders as it can catch, put them on trial for war crimes, and reassert its pre-1993 status as the occupying power in all of the West Bank and Gaza. Independence for a Palestinian state should come as a concession from the conquerer. The “peace of the brave” that Arafat spoke of in 1993 is available only to the brave, not to the murderers of schoolchildren and bus passengers. Now is the time for the peace of the just, which begins with the defeat and punishment of the unjust, from Arafat on down.
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