Patrick Buchanan has done it again.
In his latest WorldNetDaily column, he has shown himself to be woefully ignorant of the facts at the core of the Arab-Israeli conflict. With such a poor grasp of the realities of this most important foreign policy issue, one can only be glad that George Bush is sitting in the Oval Office, and not Buchanan.
First of all, there is no such state as Palestine, nor has there ever been a country by that name. It was a purely Roman invention, derived form the ancient Philistines and imposed on the Holy Land in an attempt to erase Jewish claims to the land. This name only emerged after Roman legions physically destroyed Jerusalem and expelled the Jews in the first century of the Christian era. If a state emerges in the coming years called Palestine, it will be an entirely new creation.
Buchanan's errors go downhill from there. He writes of "the terrorism of the suicide bombers of the intifada." The problem with that statement is that the first wave of Palestinian suicide bombers appeared several years before the current intifada violence began in September 2000 (I vividly recall covering the bloody attacks for CBS radio news).
More importantly, indiscriminate Palestinian suicide massacres began a couple years after Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat signed the preliminary Oslo peace accord in 1993. The heart of that accord was a pledge by Israel to withdraw from contested territory (the final amount to be determined later in the process) in exchange for promises of an end to the Palestinian violence of the first uprising. Arafat would immediately receive most of the trappings of statehood, such as a large, armed paramilitary police force, an independent broadcasting system, an international airport, etc. Although Rabin initially denied it to keep domestic peace, the clear implication was that the final Oslo treaty – to be negotiated five years later – would feature a Palestinian state.
Despite a major terror attack on a civilian bus in April 1994, Israel kept its pledge to pull out of around 80 percent of the Gaza Strip and the town of Jericho that summer. Rabin wanted to give Arafat more chances to reign in the Islamic terrorist groups that had expressed total opposition to the Oslo process. Further terror assaults followed, and then Rabin was assassinated. Still Shimon Peres, his successor, continued with the withdrawal program, handing full control of five major Palestinian towns to Arafat in late 1995.
This controversial action was met with a series of deadly suicide blasts on buses and restaurants in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv in early 1996, and the resulting election of the Oslo-skeptic Binyamin Netanyahu. He was greeted by four days of intense Palestinian riots in September, egged on by Arafat after a harmless tourist tunnel was opened up along the Western Wall of the Temple Mount. Urged on by President Clinton to shower the PLO chief with additional grace, the hawkish Likud leader pulled Israeli troops out of most of Hebron in 1997, Judaism's second holiest city on earth.
After a period of relative calm (just a few major terror attacks in '97 and '98!), the Israeli public chose Ehud Barak to move the slow peace process back on the fast track. He quickly withdrew his army from southern Lebanon and renewed frozen peace talks with Syria and the Palestinians. Clinton and Barak were shocked when Syrian dictator Hafez Assad rejected Israel's offer to hand over the entire Golan Heights, demanding the northeast shore of the Sea of Galilee as well (which Syria never legally possessed). Arafat topped this by refusing Barak's offer for a pullout from around 90 percent of Judea and Samaria, the dismantling of most Jewish settlements, the return of around 100,000 Palestinian refugees to Israel proper, and most significantly, an effective Palestinian capital in the eastern half of Jerusalem and sole possession of the sacred Temple Mount.
All of this to say, Buchanan's insinuation that Israel will not consider giving the Palestinians a state – the only solution he sees to the conflict – is ridiculous in the extreme. All polls have consistently showed the opposite. Certainly Israelis will not allow a state to emerge that continues to wage jihad war against them, as Arafat's Palestinian Authority has done. Only a country with a severe suicide wish would do that.
Buchanan's most glaring error is the comparison of atrocious Palestinian suicide terror attacks with tactics employed by various "successful liberation movements" in the past. He fails to note that those groups which achieved their goals – in South Africa, Kenya, Ireland, Rhodesia and Algeria – decidedly did not carry out indiscriminate assaults upon purely civilian targets. Their attacks were mainly directed at military or government targets. Even Menachem Begin's bombing of the south wing of the King David hotel was aimed at British government offices housed there, not at English women and children eating in restaurants, attending religious festivals or riding buses. Besides, that action was condemned by the mainstream Jewish underground movement, which confined its attacks to strategic or military targets as is common in modern warfare.
No successful "liberation movement" has ever deliberately aimed the type of horrendous kamikaze violence against innocent civilians as is occurring every day now in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The stated goal of the Islamic terrorist groups that Arafat has repeatedly failed to curb is to wipe the world's only Jewish State off of the map. By actually joining in their outrageously evil deeds via his own Tanzim and Al Aksa Brigades terrorist groups, Yasser Arafat has eliminated himself as a future partner for peace – an enormous pity for his long suffering people, for tiny Israel, and for the world.
Related offer:
David Dolan's book, "Israel in Crisis," an up-to-date assessment of what the future holds, is available from WorldNetDaily's online store.