Will Israel Sever its umbilical cord to Arafat?

Israel only has itself to blame for bringing Arafat on to the scene. The question remains as to when and whether Israel will sever its umbilical cord to the PLO leader.

The Israeli government in 1993 imported the Egyptian born Yassir Arafat, the head of the PLO, then in Tunis, to rule the Palestinian Arab population.

The late Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, proud of his decision to impose Arafat on the Palestinian Arab people, declared at the time that “Arafat will crush terror without civil liberties organizations and without any supreme court getting in his way”.

And when Arafat was elected under internationally supervised elections in 1996, the contest was conducted under Arafat’s rules: nobody was allowed to run in those elections without the express written consent of Yassir Arafat.

And when a serious candidate did indeed emerge to run against Arafat, the challenger’s house was blown up. Arafat’s campaign managers had devised persuasive ways of convincing Arafat’s rivals to reconsider a race against him.

When Jimmy Carter, the head of the US observer team to the elections, was asked to comment on Arafat’s “election rules”, Carter quipped that “we have problems like that in Chicago too”.

The Civil Liberties Issue

By November, 2001, Human Rights Watch declared that Arafat had set up an autocratic regime that had engaged in a policy of systematic torture, arbitrary executions and wholesale denial of human rights and civil liberties,

After years of riots and an Arab nationalist revolution that posed a threat to all of Israel, the Israeli government decided to hand Arafat an opportunity to rule over the Palestinian Arab population, in the hope that Arafat would forge a nation state that would live in peace and coexist as a neighbor to the state of Israel, and meet the greatest challenge of all: to absorb millions of Palestinian Arab refugees into humanitarian conditions. There are now 3.6 million Palestinian Arabs who live in or continuous to the squalor of “temporary” UN-run Palestinian Arab refugee camps that were set up for the half a million Arab refugees who left in 1948.

Insured of declaring a program to help refugees, Arafat made it a policy that all Arab refugees must continue to suffer in their “temporary” refugee camps, under premise and promise of “the right of return” to the 531 Arab villages that were destroyed during the 1948 war, despite that fact that they no longer exist and that they have been replaced by Israeli cities, collective farms and roads.

Instead of inculcating recognition and reconciliation of and with the state of Israel, Arafat’s PA conveyed the consistent message in the Arabic language that the new Palestinian Arab state must replace the state of Israel, and not coexist with it

Instead of appointing religious leaders to preach a messages of peace in the local mosques, Arafat instead appointed Hamas preachers who rant every Friday with sermons that endorse war on the Jews.

Instead of creating new media outlets to promote peace, Arafat has used the official Arabic language media of the PA to convey a consistent message of war and not of peace.

Instead of using the PA School System to promote a two state solution and recognition of the state of Israel, Arafat has used his school system to introduce a curriculum that calls for a Palestinian Arab state that will replace the state of Israel. George Washington University professor, Nathan Brown, a Fulbright scholar working under a grant from US Foundation for Peace evaluated Arafat’s school books and curriculum and concluded that the concept of peace and recognition are totally lacking in Arafat’s new curriculum

Arafat and Israeli Government Expectations

In 1993, the late Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and the former (and current) Israeli foreign minister, Shimon Peres, stated time and again that the reason why they handed over the Palestinian Arab population to Arafat, was because Arafat would reign in the violence of the nascent Islamic Palestinian Arab movement. And when Peres and Rabin conducted a briefing for the media in Oslo when they received the Nobel Peace Prize together with Arafat in December 1994, I asked them if Arafat had fulfilled his commitment to crush the Hamas. They indicated that he had done so. A few hours later, when I asked Arafat the same question, as to whether the PLO leader would crush the Hamas, Arafat’s response was clear: “Hamas are my brothers. I will handle them in my way”.

And Arafat did handle the Hamas – by bringing them into his new regime, as full coalition partners. In May, 1995, Arafat’ security forces announced that they would provide Hamas with arms. In December, 1995, Arafat invited Hamas to join his provisional regime. In 1996, Arafat appointed Hamas officials to run the religious departments and schools under his authority. By Fall 2001, the IDF confirmed that all Islamic terror groups train and operate in the full view of the Palestinian Authority security services, and that the Islamic terrorists get a clear message that their activity operates with the full blessing of Arafat’s regime.

Israel now acknowledges that Arafat’s Palestinian Authority, which Israel helped to create to control the Islamic terror, had instead become the sponsor of Islamic terror.

Arafat’s war with Israel is most like the 1948 War of Independence.

It is waged everywhere, on the home front, at road junctions, on the way to schools, in buses, in cafes, and in pizzerias, while even some Israeli Arabs and their leaders are not ashamed to join in.

Almost half of the murders of Israelis that have taken place have been carried out by members of Arafat’s own military units: the Fatah and the Tanzim

In a briefing given by the Israeli army to the media on Monday morning, December 3, 2001, IDF experts declared that Arafat had not arrested a single wanted terrorist from among the list of 108 wanted men that Israel Foreign Minister Shimon Peres had handed over to Arafat following a spate of murders. The 100 men that Arafat did arrest were 100 people on his own payroll, none of whom were wanted by Israel, all of whom were arrested for embarrassing the Palestinian Authority.

In the words of the IDF spokesman, “Arafat did not pay attention to Secretary Powell when the American Sec’y of state declared that Arafat would have to reign in the terrorists who are fighting Israel. Arafat has not learned his lesson”