Jewish World Review May 4, 2001 / 11 Iyar, 5761
New life for the peace process?
Up to Yasser
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THE Mideast peace process has more lives than nine cats.
After six months of increasing Palestinian armed
violence, it seemed safe to assume that serious peace
talks between Arabs and Jews were deader than a doornail
in downtown Gaza - at least for awhile.
Now comes a last-ditch effort by Egypt and Jordan to
breathe life into the process. Israeli Foreign Minister
Shimon Peres met over the weekend with Egyptian
President Hosni Mubarak and Jordan's King Abdullah to
discuss the plan. Then Peres flew to the U.S. to confer
with President Bush and United Nations Secretary General
Kofi Annan.
The Egyptian-Jordanian plan envisions a four-week
ceasefire followed by a resumption of formal peace talks
between Israelis and Palestinians. Unfortunately, the
plan puts the bulk of effort onto Israel's shoulders. It
says Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government should
immediately lift its blockade of the Palestinian
territories, withdraw Israeli tanks and troops from
around Palestinian towns and start transferring the tax
revenues Jerusalem has been withholding from the
Palestinians. It also prescribes an immediate freeze on
new Israeli settlements.
What it fails to do is make it clear that none of this
can happen until the Palestinians stop tossing stones,
firing guns, setting off terrorist bombs and lobbing
mortar shells at Israeli villages and civilians. That
means Yasser Arafat has to crush extremist elements and
cancel his calls for a continued intifadeh.
As Sharon told King Abdullah in a phone call over the
weekend, "The situation on the ground is intolerable,
and except for words, Arafat isn't doing anything
serious."
Israel is ready to relieve some of the economic pressure
on the West Bank and Gaza, where unemployment among
Palestinians is at 37%. But even Peres, the eternal
optimist, says clearly, "Israel won't negotiate under
fire."
The problem is that Arafat wants to be everything to
everybody — to tap dance on the peace table and still
boogie in the terrorists' den. Take last week's Iranian-
sponsored terrorist conference, which issued a call for
Israel's destruction. The Palestinian leader canceled at
the last minute. But according to reports, in his place
he sent one of his senior people, the so-called minister
for Jerusalem, Faisal Husseini.
Arafat shouldn't have sent anyone — and he should be
disavowing terrorism and condemning fanatic "martyrs,"
such as the West Bank suicide bomber who killed himself
over the weekend in a fortunately unsuccessful attempt
to blow up a busload of Israeli teenagers.
Above all, Arafat must stop Hamas and other Palestinian
extremists. He might take a lesson from Israel's
founding father, David Ben-Gurion. During the 1948 War
of Independence, the right-wing Irgun group tried to
bring in a boatload of badly needed arms but would not
surrender full control of it to the fledgling Israeli
government. Ben-Gurion, fearing an army within an army,
ordered government forces to fire on the boat and sink
it.
I am in no way comparing the brave men and women of the
Irgun to the madmen of Hamas or Islamic Jihad. But
that's an example of how true statesmanship sometimes
demands tough and unpopular decisions.
Either Arafat makes them and serves his people well, or
he continues to play the two-faced terror game, sets his
people back another 50 years and ends up on history's
garbage
By Richard Z. Chesnoff
JWR contributor and veteran journalist
Richard Z. Chesnoff is a senior correspondent at US News
And World Report and a columnist at the NY Daily News. His latest book, recently updated, is Pack of Thieves: How Hitler & Europe
Plundered the Jews and Committed the Greatest Theft in History.
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