Oh-oh! The chances for Israeli-Palestinian peace have just decreased dramatically, because the stubborn Israeli government is piling on “new conditions” before it will accept the new Hamas-Palestinian Authority unity agreement.
That’s what the Associated Press is reporting.
Not only did Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterate his “past demands” regarding the PA and Hamas, but he “added some new conditions,” according to the Associated Press. Now Netanyahu suddenly insists “that Abbas’s government continue a crackdown on Hamas militants in the West Bank.” What an obstructionist!
There’s just one tiny problem. Those “new conditions” the Associated Press is complaining about are more than 20 years old. And the Palestinian Authority long ago pledged to fulfill them. The only reason Netanyahu is bringing it up is because the PA never did as it promised.
“Cracking down” on terrorists was the heart and soul of the Oslo accords. Whether the PA would genuinely crack down on them was supposed to resolve the great mystery: Had the PA sincerely forsaken terrorism, or was it still quietly encouraging and assisting the terrorists?
Let’s see what the Oslo accords say, and then what the PA actually did.
The Oslo II accord (signed Sept. 28, 1995), Annex I, Article II, section 1(d) states: “The Palestinian Police will arrest and prosecute individuals who are suspected of perpetrating acts of violence and terror.”
Annex I, Article II, Section 3 (b) adds that the PA police must “actively prevent incitement to violence, including violence against the other side or persons under the authority of the other side.”
And Annex I, Article II, Section 3 requires the PA to “apprehend, investigate and prosecute perpetrators and all other persons directly or indirectly involved in acts of terrorism, violence and incitement.”
The PA never fulfilled any of this. It made only token arrests of terrorists, and then set them free in what Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, called a “revolving doors” justice system (National Press Club, Aug. 6, 1997).
Four years later, nothing had changed. The New York Times reported on December 7, 2001, that President George W. Bush said “Palestinian jails are still built with bars in the front, with revolving doors at the back.”
The following month, the chairman of the Palestinian Authority tried to smuggle fifty tons of weapons into Gaza, on a ship called the Karine A. Anybody remember that?
And on February 2, 2002, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told a conference of defense policy makers in Munich that the PA chairman is “rather deeply implicated in terrorism.”
Given the PA’s track record of not only failing to crack down on terrorists but actually carrying out terrorism, it’s no surprise the prime minister of Israel is now insisting the PA live up to the anti-terrorist commitments it made more than twenty years ago. The only surprise is that the Associated Press is ignoring history, and trying to pretend that Israel is being unreasonable.