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Only, when Rabin and Clinton tried to get Arafat to repeat the renunciation a second time at the signing ceremony at the White House, not only did Arafat refuse, but he insisted on wearing military fatigues to ensure that no Palestinians would be misled into believing that Oslo had anything to do with peace. He even wanted to wear a pistol, but Clinton nixed that. Rabin and Peres decided — characteristically — that clothes do not make the man, and so did not make a scene over Arafat's haberdashery. A few weeks later, Arafat openly returned to his open endorsement of terrorism, genocide, and the destruction of Israel. Then he got his Nobel prize — together with Rabin and Peres. And so the PLO never quite got around to renouncing its "covenant" demanding that Israel be destroyed, even in the midst of the initial demented Oslo euphoria. This past weekend, Colin Powell was patting himself on the back for having "gotten Arafat to condemn terrorism" as a precondition to meeting with him in his Fuhrersbunker. In fact, this is not even the rhetorical hoop Arafat jumped through back in 1993 to get Peres and Rabin to sanctify him, legitimize him, and rescue him from his pariah status in Tunisian exile. What Arafat really did was to endorse terrorism once again — while Powell pretended he had extracted something of diplomatic value. What Arafat actually said was that he opposes all killing of innocent Palestinians and Israelis. But he has repeated thousands of times that when Israeli children are murdered by suicide bombers, this is not terror and not the murder of innocents. It is, rather, freedom fighting and resisting of "occupation." Almost everyone in the Arab world agrees. So what is terrorism, in the view of the Arab world? It's when Israeli troops shoot down a Palestinian loaded with explosives heading towards a school bus or a Passover Seder — or a Palestinian who is organizing massacres of Jews or firing mortars and rockets into Jerusalem neighborhoods. That is what Arafat considers terrorism. That is the "terrorism" he opposes. (The Middle East is an Orwellian paradise, where words generally mean their opposites.) So for all intents and purposes, Arafat's declaration was nothing but an endorsement of terrorism — the fig leaf Powell needed to hold appeasement talks with Arafat. Powell and Bush still think they need the facade of Arab endorsement in order to de-fang Saddam Hussein, and Israel's stubborn way of defending its children and senior citizens keeps getting in the way of their strategy. The Sharon government, of course, has been playing the same sorts of games that Rabin and Peres played, debating which rhetorical hoop would be sufficient to declare that Arafat is now a statesman and partner and has renounced terrorism. And this Peres-ian nonsense, coming now from the Sharon government, is what gave Powell the excuse to grant Arafat legitimacy this past weekend. The White House and State Department are sticking to the tired and discredited idea that they can restore calm by convincing Arafat to issue statements saying terror is bad. Meanwhile the press continues its debate over whether Arafat is even capable of halting the terror — which is rather like a debate in the early days of World War II about whether Hitler would be capable of preventing the invasion of Poland and France. The most Orwellian spin of all is the Palestinian howling about the "massacre" in Jenin. These are the same people who have perpetrated thousands of atrocities and committed hundreds of murders in just this past year. They have committed countless massacres with sincere pride and near-universal public support. Yet when Israel is finally driven to take some mild military action against the killers, it shoots a bunch of terrorists and a handful of civilians who get in the way — and that's considered a massacre. This is the same world that has never gotten around to noticing the 100,000 murdered by Islamist fascists in Algeria, and has long ago forgotten the many massacres of Arabs by Arab regimes. So much for the theory that Arab terror has something to do with Arabs being mistreated. But no one cares about those victims, because they cannot be used as bludgeons against the Jews. — Mr. Plaut is a professor at the University of Haifa. |
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he
Oslo Plague originally began when Israel's Labor party leaders decided,
in the early 1990s, that the only thing that should stand between Arafat
the Terrorist in Tunisia and Arafat the Statesman on the White House lawn
would be a single declaratory statement that he opposes terrorism. For
months, prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and his guru and foreign minister
Shimon Peres tried to get Arafat to jump a rhetorical hoop and issue some
sort of verbal renunciation of terrorism. In the end, Arafat issued a
single duplicitous statement — in English. (Wink wink, fingers crossed,
finger tapping side of nose.) It was good enough for Peres.
