In the light of the foiled double human bomb attack planned for Jerusalem today, Israel’s release of almost 400 Palestinian prisoners might appear to be the even more potent suicidal enterprise. As Ha’aretz reports:

‘The Islamic Jihad network from the Tul Karm and Jenin areas is said to be behind the planned attack. The same network was responsible for the February suicide bombing at the Stage nightclub in Tel Aviv that left five Israelis dead. In the wake of the Tel Aviv attack, Israel delayed the second round of prisoner releases. In the past, Israel has refused to release prisoners who have not served two-thirds of their terms, but 93 of the detainees had only completed a fraction of their sentences. Some of the prisoners released were charged for attempted shootings, preparing explosives and assisting attempted murder. More than a quarter of the prisoners are Hamas members, Army Radio reported. A total of 380 of the men are from the West Bank, the remaining 18 from the Gaza Strip.’

The release of the 400 completes Israel’s promise to release a total of 900 prisoners as a goodwill gesture. There cannot be many nations in the world who, when the enemy is still attacking them, would set a total of 900 enemy combatants free to continue to attack them as a goodwill gesture. Predictably, the Palestinians said this gesture was not enough.

The key point is this. Israel made an obligation and is standing by it. The Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, by contrast, has done virtually nothing to meet his obligation — which is supposed to stand prior to anything Israel is required to do — to dismantle the Palestinian infrastructure of terror; and yet he is not being held to account.

Because he is not Arafat, because he wears a suit and speaks softly and talks about an end to the culture of violence, the west is happy to take him at face value. Big mistake.

On Sunday, he declared that the human bomb phenomenon was over. Not only did he get that wrong, as today’s news has demonstrated, but he backed it up, in characteristic terrorist fashion, by the threat that it would not be over if he didn’t get what he wanted. As the Jerusalem Post reported:

‘ "We have started to deal with the culture of violence," he said. "We stopped the culture of violence and the Palestinian people have started looking at it as something that should be condemned and it should stop." Asked on ABC whether the suicide bombing era had ended, he said: "I believe it is over." But he warned that if progress toward a peace agreement was not achieved in meetings with Sharon next month, "despair and loss of hope will come back and a return to the old ideas" of armed resistance.’

Ah, ‘despair and loss of hope’ – the excuse of the apologists for terror throughout the world. It is not despair that causes terror, but the fanatical religious hatred and incitement to murder which are still pouring out of Abbas’s Palestinian Authority. It is not loss of hope that causes terror but, on the contrary, the ever-present hope of victory which is kept alive by the infrastructure of terror that Abbas refuses to dismantle. As Frank Gaffney observes:

‘To the contrary, terrorist organizations are not being dismantled by Abbas. Instead, groups like Hamas with the avowed mission of destroying Israel are ascendant. They are winning local elections and taking full advantage of the "hudna" (temporary suspension of hostilities) to rebuild their offensive capabilities against Israel. Hamas and other terrorists are being integrated into Palestinian security forces, receiving valuable training and even arms from American and European personnel. In addition, burgeoning quantities of ever-more powerful weapons are being smuggled into Gaza from Egypt. Meanwhile, Palestinians are being encouraged by official imams whose sermons are broadcast on Abbas-controlled media to kill Jews and destroy America. For example, less than two weeks before Mr. Bush welcomed Abu Mazen to the White House, Sheik Ibrahim Mudeiris claimed on Palestinian Authority TV that history showed the torture, exile and murder of Jews to be legitimate and the Muslim conquest of the United States inevitable.’

Yet here’s the really alarming thing. Far from treating Abbas for what he is, a more sophisticated form of terrorist, President Bush actually lionised him.

‘In the White House Rose Garden, Mr. Bush described Abbas as a "man of courage," explaining that he takes "great faith in not only [Abbas'] personal character, but the fact that he campaigned on a platform of peace — he said, 'Vote for me, I am for peace.' And the Palestinians voted overwhelmingly to support him."’

Can this be the same Bush who refuses to talk to terrorists, the same Bush who insists on holding people accountable for their actions, the same Bush who gave his name to the doctrine that there can be no deals or even negotiations unless houses are put in order and terrorist infrastructures dismantled and moves towards the rule of law, democracy and a free society are in evidence? ‘Campaigning for peace’ is patently a cop-out since every tyrant and two-bit dictator says he is ‘for peace’. The acid test is the dismantling of the factories of terror and hatred and the construction of the institutions of a free society. That is the rationale for regime change in the region; that is why the painful construction of a free society in Iraq is absolutely central; that is why the entire edifice of the defence of the west rests upon the relentless pressure on rogue states to become answerable to their people. Only if they stop terrorising their own populations will they stop terrorising the rest of the world.

Yet in the very heartland of terrorism, none of this has been done. Abbas may have been elected, but Palestinian society is still no more democratic or free than it was, and the Palestinian terror factories are still very much in business. To repeat: only a democracy brings peace. Police states+fanatical ideology=terror. The roots of terrorism will not be destroyed unless tyrannies turn into free societies. This is the very pivot of Bush’s foreign policy. And yet he appears to be making an exception for the Palestinians, whose conspicuous absence of democracy and equally conspicuous refusal to halt terror production is being indulged or brushed aside. It is not enough for unnamed administration sources to murmur that the President said hard things about Abbas’s failure behind the scenes. It’s the show that’s put on at the front of house that’s doing the damage.

And that damage was even greater than the display of egregious fawning in the White House Rose Garden. For as Robert Satloff of the Washington Institute has pointed out, not only did Bush fail to correct Abbas when he made demonstrably false claims about the provisions of road map, but Bush himself also said some extremely alarming things.Most worrying was his declaration to Abbas:

‘Changes to the 1949 Armistice lines must be mutually agreed’

which directly contradicted his commitment to Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in April 2004:

‘It is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final-status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949.’

This was a staggering reversal and a huge advance for the Palestinians. While Bush’s commitment to Sharon was vague and conditional, his statement to Mazen introduced an explosive new policy aim. As Satloff writes:

‘For years, Palestinians have wanted the United States publicly to accept the 1967 lines as the reference point for negotiations. In the arcane lexicon of Middle East diplomacy, by positing the1949 lines as the reference point, Bush granted the Palestinians more than they had asked for and effectively made the Palestinians a successor to the signatories of the armistice. In so doing, Bush inadvertently eroded the special status of UN Security Council Resolution 242, the central pillar of peace diplomacy since it was passed in 1967, which makes no reference to the armistice lines. Though this was surely not the administration's intent, it should come as no surprise if Palestinians now believe that Washington has legitimized opening what is commonly called "the 1949 file" and if they therefore start to make unprecedented demands -- or demands for compensation and concession -- based on the status quo of 1949.’

In the circumstances, Bush appears to have rewarded Abbas for continuing Palestinian terrorism and failing to move towards a free society. This was no doubt quite unintentional, but it has happened because, unlike his dealings elsewhere in the defence of the west, Bush’s whole approach to the Arab war on Israel has from the road map onwards been based on entirely the wrong premise. This is that the conflict is between Israel and the Palestinians, and it is a conflict based on a quarrel over sharing the same piece of land. Wrong. It is a conflict between Israel and the Arab world -- which for no more than the past three decades has chosen to hide its never-changing exterminatory intentions behind the fiction of Palestinian national identity -- and it is based not on an argument about sharing the land but rather on that Arab world’s refusal to share the land at all with a Jewish state and its desire to ethnically cleanse the Jews from the land altogether: an ambition which it has kept alive in large measure to distract the populations it tyrannises from rising up against the regimes that oppress them – which is why the development of free societies (pace Sharansky) is a precondition of peace in the Middle East.

Because of the falsity of Bush’s premise, however, it followed that Palestinian terrorism was no more than a kind of extraneous problem which had latched onto the original impasse, that Hamas was in a different universe from the PA, and that once Arafat was out of the way and replaced by someone who talked the language of non-violence the problem was on the way to being solved. Thus Abbas has to be not only given a chance to set the Palestinian house in order, but – just like in the Northern Ireland ‘peace process’ – the evidence that he is failing to do so and that the Palestinians are negotiating with a gun pointed to Israel’s head cannot be acknowledged at all.

For different reasons – principally because human nature cannot survive unless it has hope -- the Israelis subscribe to similar delusions. Thus Sharon has done everything he can to boost Abbas, to strengthen his hand and give him a chance. But Mazen should not be boosted unless and until he commits the PA to democracy and puts an end to the incitement against Israel, which he could do more or less overnight.

In an interview with Ha’aretz, the controversial former Chief of the Israeli Defence Staff Moshe Ya'alon said that recent statements by Abbas showed that he

‘"…has not given up the right of return. And this is not a symbolic right of return, but the right of return as a claim to be realized. To return to the houses, to return to the villages. The implication of this is that there will not be a Jewish state here."

’Therefore, he said, the establishment of a Palestinian state will lead to war "at some stage," and such a war could be dangerous for Israel. The idea that a Palestinian state can be established by 2008, and will then produce stability, is "divorced from reality" and "dangerous," as any such state "will be a state that will try to undermine Israel." Asked about the current situation in the PA, Ya'alon responded: "For the Palestinians it is still convenient to maintain a gang-based reality rather than a state foundation. "When [the PA] permits Hamas to take part in the elections without abandoning its firearms, is that democracy? It's gangs. Armed gangs playing at pretend democracy," he said. "If Fatah continues to behave as it does now, Hamas will eventually take over the Gaza Strip," he added.

’Asked for his views on the general concept of two states for two peoples, he said: "In the present reality, I see difficulty in producing a stable situation of end-of-conflict within that paradigm." A two-state solution, he continued, is simply "not relevant. It is a story that the Western world tells with Western eyes. And that story does not comprehend the scale of the gap and the scale of the problem. We, too, are sweeping it under the carpet."

Personally, I support the disengagement from Gaza — and would wish Israel to leave much of the West Bank too. This is because I think it is wrong for one people to rule over another if it wants to rule itself. It is wrong for the Jews — and bad for them too — to rule over the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza. If the Arabs wish to create a state of their own there, that’s fine by me — as long as they do not wish to create it in order to launch a more effective war of extermination against Israel. At present, however, there is no concrete sign that this is not what such a state would be used for; indeed, all the signs are that the aim of exterminating Israel is still very much alive, even though the tactics may have shifted. And I am under no illusions that disengagement is not hideously dangerous for Israel and the threat of increased terrorism as a result is very great, as is the risk of the creation of ‘Hamastan’ in Gaza. When people say that leaving Gaza with nothing to show for it is a dangerous sign of weakness, they are right. But waiting until there is something to show for it may mean waiting for ever. As ever, Israel is damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t. But however great the threat of terrorism is, there is a worse threat for Israel:

'Asked whether he fears for Israel's existence, Ya'alon responded: "A combination of terrorism and demography, with question marks among us about the rightness of our way, are a recipe for a situation in which there will not be a Jewish state here in the end."'

Terrorism is not the worst of it. Loss of belief in ‘the rightness of our way’ is what would ultimately prove lethal to Israel’s continued existence. I fear that Ya’alon is correct, and that whatever happens the Arabs will continue to wage war upon Israel -- until that happy time when the peoples of the Arab world gain their own freedom from the tyrants who oppress them and use hatred of the Jews as their alibi. Until then, Israel needs to defend itself and will only be able to do so if it believes in ‘the rightness of our way’ — which includes, for the vast majority of Israelis, a state for the Palestinian Arabs. Yet such a state may be intended as a Trojan horse for Israel’s destruction. This is the dilemma in which Israel is trapped, and its enduring tragedy.

Posted by melanie at June 2, 2005