The passing of Yasir Arafat is as good an occasion as any to take stock of Israel’s predicament.
To the Western media Arafat portrayed himself as an underdog fighting for a just peace with Israel. But speaking to his own he took a wholly different approach, as in his speech to Arab diplomats in Stockholm on January 30, 1996, in which he declared: “We will make life unbearable for the Jew … we will concentrate our efforts on splitting Israel psychologically into two camps … within five years we will have six to seven million Arabs living in the West Bank and in Jerusalem.”
When Arafat and his terrorists were forcibly relocated to Tunis in the aftermath of Israel’s 1982 incursion into Lebanon, a window of opportunity was opened for Israel to oust the implacably hostile Arabs living under its control. But to pursue this course of action would have required national unity, and Israelis were anything but united.
Lack of national unity was bad enough, but in the early 1990’s Israel’s Labor government went beyond even that sad state of affairs and, disregarding its own campaign platform, rescued Arafat from obscurity, brought him back from Tunis, and set him up in Gaza. The Israeli government even armed Arafat’s terrorist hordes in the hope that they would function as a legitimate “police force.”
Arafat took everything Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres handed him and then turned around and proclaimed jihad – holy war – against Israel. When embarrassed Israeli officials raised relatively mild objections to such rhetoric, Arafat explained that the holy war he had in mind would be waged only in a “political sense.” The Israelis meekly accepted his explanation, much as a coward being spat upon opts to call it rain.
The victims of the bloody massacres of Jews that followed were described by Rabin and Peres as “victims of peace” – the implication being that such deaths were a price worth paying for the Oslo peace process the Israeli government had so wholeheartedly embraced.
Even though the PLO-PA junta by then controlled close to 90 percent of what it claimed to be its territory, Arafat justified his reign of terror by continuing to insist that the Palestinians were “fighting Israel’s occupation of Palestinians’ land.” Laughable, of course, but the Israeli Peace Now movement provided welcome encouragement to the Palestinian Arabs by launching protests against Jews settling any part of Judea, Samaria and Gaza.
The Peace Now leftists choose to conveniently ignore that the Palestinian Arab agenda consists not simply of dislodging the Jews from areas Israel recovered in 1967, but of destroying Israel in its entirety. The Arab-Israeli “conflict” is not, at its center, about territorial accommodation whereby the Arabs are given certain areas of the Jewish homeland as ransom for peace. Rather, it is about Israel’s very survival as a sovereign Jewish state – a proposition to which most Arabs are vehemently opposed.
Those who defend the intransigent Arab stand insist that Israel yield for the sake of propitiating “Arab pride.” But what about Jewish pride? We Jews are the people of the Bible. Our deed to the Land of Israel is the Bible. During the 1937 Peel inquiry, commissioned by the British to deal with the unrest generated by the Arabs living in Palestine, David Ben Gurion, then-head of the Jewish Agency, cited the Bible as the ultimate proof of the Jewish claim to Eretz Yisrael – the Land of Israel – which had been renamed “Palestine” by the Romans.
The Balfour Declaration of 1917 recognized the whole of Palestine as a designated “National Homeland for the Jewish People.” There were no provisions for carving out an area to make room for another state for the Arabs, although the British would depart from the clear language of their declaration by slicing off about 80 percent of the designated Jewish homeland and establish therein a Hashemite Arab kingdom.