On September 13, 1993, Yasser Arafat signed the Declaration of Principles on the White House lawn and engaged in the famous handshake with Yitzhak Rabin and Bill Clinton. That very day, appearing on Jordanian television, he assured the Palestinians in Arabic that the DOP was just the first stage of the “Phased Plan”:
Do not forget that our Palestine National Council accepted the decision in 1974. It called for the establishment of a national authority on any part of Palestinian land that is liberated or from which the Israelis withdrew. This is the fruit of your struggle, your sacrifices, and your jihad…This is the moment of return, the moment of gaining a foothold on the first liberated Palestinian land…Long live Palestine, liberated and Arab.
Nobody cared. In those days, if you called attention to statements by Arafat that clashed with his professions of peace, you yourself were called an “enemy of peace.” That at least was preferable to being a “victim of peace,” Rabin’s coinage for the Israelis who very soon started dying in massacres sponsored by Arafat’s Palestinian Authority. The first Oslo-era suicide bombing occurred on April 6, 1994, in the Israeli town of Afula, killing eight bus passengers and wounding forty-four.
Many followed, and Arafat kept stoking the flames. In a speech in 1995 he proclaimed: “Be blessed, O Gaza, and celebrate, for your sons are returning after a long celebration. O Lod, O Haifa, O Jerusalem, you are returning, you are returning” (quoted in Maariv, September 7, 1995). In another speech that year he declared: “The struggle will continue until all of Palestine is liberated” (Voice of Palestine, November 11, 1995).
Still, nobody cared. Arafat was able to keep waging his genocidal assault on Israeli civilians, killing a thousand and injuring and traumatizing many more thousands, up to his death in November 2004. His sole “punishment” was being confined to his Ramallah compound for the last two years of his life, Ariel Sharon apparently having managed to persuade George Bush that Arafat was not a constructive force. Even then Arafat remained an internationally protected person, not subject even to arrest and trial.
On January 11, 2007, in a speech at a Ramallah rally marking the 42nd anniversary of the founding of the Fatah party, after placing a wreath on Arafat’s tomb, Mahmoud Abbas said: “Shooting at your brother is forbidden. Raising rifles against the occupation is our legitimate right, but raising guns against each other is forbidden. We should put our internal fighting aside and raise our rifles only against the Israeli occupation.”
He also said: “The issue of the refugees is non-negotiable. We will not give up one inch of land in Jerusalem and we consider the settlements illegal. We also reject any attempt to resettle the refugees in other countries.”
He also said: “The sons of Israel are mentioned [in the Koran] as those who are corrupting humanity on earth.”
The story was carried by the right-of-center Jerusalem Post and the right-wing WorldNetDaily.com (which also gave detailed information on the recent, Israeli-facilitated, U.S. transfer of funds and weapons to Abbas’s forces). But for everyone else it was yawns and business as usual. The Associated Press version of the story, which was featured at leading venues like WashingtonPost.com and CBSNews.com, quoted Abbas’s words “Shooting at your brother is forbidden” but left out the rest of that paragraph.
On Saturday, at a joint press conference in Jerusalem, visiting Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Foreign Ministry Tsippi Livni reaffirmed their commitment to the road map. Livni made another of her prissily evenhanded, “I’m one of the good Israelis” formulations: “Our responsibility is to give the Palestinians a political horizon as well as to provide safety to Israelis in Sderot.”
On Sunday, Rice went on to a meeting with Abbas in Ramallah, after which she posed with him for the cameras and pledged “deeper American engagement.” Considering that Abbas is now setting up coalition talks with Hamas, the United States seemed verging on handing an outright kosher certificate to the Axis of Evil.
Meanwhile on Friday, the Jerusalem Post ran an op-ed called “America, Be a Peacemaker” by Seymour Reich of the Israel Policy Forum, who had earlier taken credit for encouraging Rice to push through the Gaza-crossings agreement that helped deprive the Sderot residents of their safety. Reich’s Friday op-ed was probably written before the news about Abbas’s Ramallah speech—but what difference would it have made?
Apparently the last acolyte of the Baker-Hamilton opus, Reich says in the article: “The administration and Congress must heed the Iraq Study Group’s recommendation: ‘There must be a renewed and sustained commitment by the United States to a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace.’” He also chides Israel for “an announcement that [it] would revive a settlement in the West Bank’s Jordan Valley,” saying this “undermines Israel’s attempt to strengthen Abbas.”
A recommended exercise is to run a Google search on “strengthen Abbas.” The phrase keeps turning up for dozens and dozens of Google pages. In comparison, “strengthen Siniora” or “strengthen Saniora” peters out after just a few pages.
I call on all of you—American peace processors, Israeli doves, American Jewish peace professionals—to address publicly these words by Abbas:
We should put our internal fighting aside and raise our rifles only against the Israeli occupation.
The issue of the refugees is non-negotiable…We also reject any attempt to resettle the refugees in other countries.
The sons of Israel are mentioned as those who are corrupting humanity on earth.
And to stop acting like delusionals and cowards.
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