Peace Rejected

Mortimer Zuckerman in US News reiterates, once again, why peace is not close in the Middle East.

Hearts leapt that bright morning 10 years ago when the prime minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin, and the Palestine Liberation Organization leader, Yasser Arafat, shook hands on the White House lawn and President Clinton declared "the peace of the brave is within our reach." Never has faith been so brutally betrayed, hope so utterly supplanted by despair. Who could have imagined that Israel would now face the worst terrorism in its history, with about 900 people killed in just three years--the equivalent of 50,000 murders a year in the United States?

Today there are headlines once again about formulas for a settlement, but it is clear that the Palestinians are far less prepared for peace than they were a decade ago. Suffused with messages of hate, indoctrinated early in the schools, and subjected to poisonous broadcasts in the media and the mosque, they nurture a culture that longs not for the creation of a Palestinian state but for the destruction of the state of their Israeli neighbors. In a recent poll, 59 percent of Palestinians wanted to see terrorism against Israel continue, even after the creation of a Palestinian state, and in all of the territories, including East Jerusalem. Only 26 percent wanted to give up the armed struggle.

Is it any wonder the Israelis have concluded that the reason the Palestinians reject peace is not because Jews live in the West Bank city of Hebron but because they live in Tel Aviv and Haifa?

Thugocracy. The Palestinian leaders have made no bones about it. Their own magazine stated long ago their aim clearly: "Not to impose our will on the enemy but to destroy him in order to take his place." Palestinians have few qualms in admitting that the original accord negotiated in Oslo was worse than a sham. The bloody bookends are a statement--within days of the signing by Arafat--that Oslo was part of the "plan of stages" to destroy Israel and the June 24, 2001, affirmation by the relatively moderate Faisal Husseini that the Oslo agreement constituted a "Trojan horse," whose pure essence was deception.