Next stop on the Road Map: All-out war

The End of “Peace”

Anyone who breathes the air of Israel during summer 2003 can discern plans for war in the Fall.

Israel’s press is replete with Israeli intelligence reports which convey the precise plans of Israel’s adversaries for war in the Fall.

The 167 Arab terror attacks which occurred during the first month of the “Hudna” served as a somber reminder to the prognosis of Arab terror attacks to come.

Official Palestinian Authority media is replete with war preparations:

PA TV and radio carry daily salutes to martyrdom and Jihad in the war to “liberate all of Palestine.”

PA TV and radio show Arab refugees from 1948 and their descendants conducting parades in their UN refugee camps, marching in heavily armed processions, demanding the fulfillment of what they perceive as the UN promise of the “right of return” to their “villages from 1948,” while Arab refugees and their descendants, while they demand that Israel “remove the settlements” as a condition for peace – Four million Arab refugees and their descendants openly define “settlements” on the PA media as Jewish cities like Beersheva, Ramle and Lod, which replaced Arab villages in 1948.

The time has come to cope with reality.

The PLO and Hamas and other Arab terror groups never agreed to any cease-fire.

They did agree to a “Hudna,” viewed in Arab Islamic folklore and defined in Islamic law as a respite between battles in a longer war against non-Arab Islamic infidels who are not a party to any such hudna.

The PLO and Hamas planned their Hudna to last for exactly three months, and they mean it.

All Palestinian Arab organizations conduct military training of their Palestinian Arab population, so that they can conduct a better organized and more cost effective war this time when the time for hostilities are scheduled to resume – at the precise end of the Hudna, on September 29, 2003, which this year marks the third calender day of the Jewish New Year.

The ascension of Abu Mazen to a formal leadership position in the PLO has meant that the colorless PLO for the past generation may organize the finances and the armed forces of the Palestinian Authority in a better and more efficient manner, without lifting a finger to defuse the PLO.

And the ubiquitous Arafat remains in the picture, running everything from his Ramallah Mukatta.

Arafat plans the next stage of battle against Israel with an international character. For the first time in thirty years, Israel can expect that any outbreak of hostilities will be accompanied by active military support from Islamic countries in diverse directions – Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Libya and maybe even Egypt.

PLO and Hamas leaders make it quite clear that if Israel does not agree to the terms of the road map and that if Israel does not agree to the terms of the road map, then the Hudna will terminate on September 29th as planned, and the Islamic regimes in the middle east will not stand idly by.

The Palestinian Authority published thousands of copies of the Road Map for every Palestinian Arab to read.

Yet hardly any Israelis have ever read the road map.

The “road map,” as it is presented, is based on the Saudi Plan from March 2002, which mandates that Israel withdraw to pre-1967 lines and that Israel recognize the “right of return” for all Palestinian Arab refugees to return to their homes from 1948.

Most Israelis do not know that.

Elul, the Jewish month before Rosh HaShanah, the Jewish New Year, is traditionally a time in which Jews take stock and reconsider the way in which they have been organizing their lives and their existence.

This year, the month before Rosh HaShanah will provide Israel and Jewish communities abroad with an opportunity to learn about what the road map portends.

An aside: When the Oslo process was launched:

• Arafat declared time and time again that the diplomatic track would be used only now for a few years.
• Arafat repeated time and again that he would operate according to Islamic custom and make treaties with the Jews which could easily be broken when the Jews would be weak.
• Arafat often spoke of seven years of the diplomatic trek, to be followed by the armed struggle.

Very people took Arafat seriously then… Even when Israeli intelligence held open briefings throughout the calender year 1999-2000 in which the IDF warned that the PLO was taking irreversible steps towards a war in September 2000, very few people took Arafat seriously.

The time has come to take Arafat and his allies with the utmost of seriousness, and to understand that:

• Arafat signed an interim accord at the time of the Jewish New Year in September 1993
• Arafat launched a war at the time of the Jewish New Year in September 2000
• Arafat and his allies promise to continue war at the time of the Jewish New Year in September 2003.

No one in Israel is prepared for a peace based on the Saudi principles.

The PLO and Hamas know that.

The population of Israel is just now waking up to the reality that the terms of the road map are indeed based on a Saudi plan unacceptable to Jews.