Subject: R&B Editorial: "WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE PEACE PROCESS" ??
Date: Thu, 9 Apr 1998 00:34:25 +0000
To: "Hebraic Heritage Newsgroup"<heb_roots_chr@geocities.com>
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Subject: R&B INFORMATION SERVICES: "WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE PEACE
A HISTORICAL ELUCIDATION" by Prof. Louis Rene Beres
R&B INFORMATION SERVICES: "WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE PEACE PROCESS: A
HISTORICAL ELUCIDATION"
by Prof. Louis Rene Beres
WEST LAFAYETTE, INDIANA, March 23, 1998, Root & Branch: Jewish supporters
of the Middle East Peace Process base their argument on an altogether
unwarranted assumption, that is, that the Oslo Accords hold the prospect of
bringing final resolution to the longstanding "territorial" dispute between
Israel and the Arabs. Yet, these Accords are linked to a terrorist
organization whose sole aim of negotiation is to supplant the
State of Israel with a State of Palestine. Moreover, the dispute is not
about territory, as the Jewish supporters still seem to believe, but about
G-d.
As any casual reading of the Arab press will disclose, from 1948 to the
present, the entire Islamic world's opposition to Israel - including
opposition of the P.L.O.- stems from doctrinal hatred of a "cancerous"
Jewish state in its midst. Indeed, if the Palestinian opposition to Israel
is only about the West Bank (Judea/Samaria) and Gaza, why were there so
many Arab terrorist attacks against Jews between 1948 and 1967, when these
disputed territories were in Arab hands?
Some Jewish supporters of the Oslo Accords, disregarding the ever-present
Arab image of their country as a pathology, also base their position on
problematic acceptance of an historic Palestinian claim to the territories
(Judea/Samaria/Gaza). Leaving aside the very questionable nature of the
underlying demographic argument (e.g., the commonly stated assertion that
current Palestinians are descended directly from the ancient Canaanites),
these supporters conveniently ignore the continuous Jewish presence in
these lands. They also ignore that almost one million Palestinians are now
full citizens of Israel.
This is a juridical condition that is hardly mirrored in the Arab world,
where 900,000 Jews were slaughtered or expelled from Arab states after
1948. Yet, it is the Palestinians - not the Israelis - who cling relentlessly to the idea of
Jihad or holy war. The unchanging struggle to evict the Jews from "all of
Palestine" (that is, from Israel as well as from Judea/Samaria/Gaza) is
driven by this idea.
Nor do Israel's Oslo supporters, in advancing Palestinian legal claims,
seem to recall that the P.L.O. urged Saddam Hussein to launch annihilatory
attacks upon Israel during the 1991 Gulf War - at the same time that Arafat
embraced Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, sending units of the Palestinian
Liberation Army (PLA) to assist with the inter-Arab killing, rape and
torture of Kuwaitis.
Following the Iraqi aggression, Arafat and the PLO openly supported Baghdad
in different ways. At the Cairo Summit of August 10, 1990, Arafat
deflected attention from the invasion toward the crises in Afghanistan and
Kashmir. Abul Abbas sent his own paramilitary forces into the occupied
state to help "police" the sheikhdom. So, too, did the PFLP's George
Habash and the DFLP's Nayef Hawatmeh. Mohammed Milhem, senior aide to
Arafat, publicly threatened Fatah-led terrorism "everywhere" in support of
Iraq.
Arab critics of Israel speak of Jewish migration to Palestine after World
War I, neglecting to mention that there has been a substantial and
continuous Jewish presence in the land for over three thousand years, and a
steady Jewish majority in Jerusalem. Nor do they care to remember that
when, after World War II, the General Assembly proposed to partition
Palestine, this followed an earlier (1922) and illegal partition by the
British which gave almost 80% of the land promised to the Jews by the
Balfour Declaration to create the Arab state of Transjordan. Thus, at the
time of the 1947 partition vote in the United Nations, the Jews had already
been unlawfully deprived of four-fifths of their entitlement.
How did protracted warfare first arise between Israel and the Arabs? Not
even militant Arab leaders or anti-Zionist historians could conceivably
accept the view that the 1948-49 conflict was a war of Jewish origin. On
February 16, 1948, the U.N. Palestine Commission reported to the Security
Council: "Powerful Arab interests, both inside and outside Palestine, are
defying the resolution of the General Assembly and are engaged in a
deliberate effort to alter by force the settlement envisaged therein."
The Arabs themselves were unambiguous in accepting responsibility for
starting the war. Jamal Husseini informed the Security Council on April 16,
1948: "The representatives of the Jewish Agency told us yesterday they
were not the attackers, that the Arabs had begun the fighting. We did not
deny this. We told the whole world that we were going
to fight." As for the British commander of Jordan's Arab Legion, John
Bagot Glubb, he remarked candidly: "Early in January, the first
detachments of the Arab Liberation Army began to infiltrate into Palestine
from Syria. Some came through Jordan and even through Amman....They were
in reality to strike the first blow in the ruin of the Arabs of Palestine."
Israel came into being on May 14, 1948. The five Arab armies of Egypt,
Syria, Transjordan, Lebanon and Iraq immediately invaded the new
microstate. Their combined intention was expressed publicly by Azzam
Pasha, Secretary General of the Arab League: "This will be a war of
extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the
Mongolian massacres and the Crusades."
Israel's critics maintain that the 1967 War was one of Israeli aggression
rather than a war of Israeli self-defense. Yet, on May 15, Israel's
Independence Day, Egyptian troops began moving into the Sinai, massing near
the Israeli border. By May 18, Syrian troops, too, were preparing for
battle along the Golan Heights, 3000 feet above the Galilee, from which
they had shelled Israel's farms and villages for years.
Egypt's Nasser ordered the U.N. Emergency Force (UNEF), stationed in the
Sinai since 1956, to withdraw, whereupon the Voice of the Arabs proclaimed,
on May 18, 1967:
As of today there no longer exists an international emergency force to
protect Israel. We shall exercise patience no more. We shall not complain
any more to the UN about Israel. The sole method we shall apply against
Israel is total war, which will result in the extermination of Zionist
existence."
Two days later an enthusiastic echo came from Hafez Assad, then Syria's
Defense Minister, who proclaimed openly: "Our forces are now entirely
ready...to initiate the act of liberation itself, and to explode the
Zionist presence in the Arab homeland....The time has come to enter into a
battle of annihilation."
President Abdur Rahman Aref of Iraq joined the chorus of genocidal threats:
"The existence of Israel is an error which must be rectified. This is our
opportunity to wipe out the ignominy which has been with us since 1948.
Our goal is clear - to wipe Israel off the map."
On June 4, Iraq formally joined the military alliance with Egypt, Jordan
and Syria. The Damascus regime's commitment to military final solutions for
Israel has been described by Ahmed S. Khalidi and Hussein Agha as stemming
from "...an apparently strong conviction that the struggle with Israel is
no mere political or territorial dispute, but rather a clash of destinies
affecting the fate and future of the Middle East." Moreover, Syria's
approach to Israel, say Khalidi and Agha, remains "bound up with the view
that force, whether active or passive, is the final arbiter of the conflict
with Israel and the ultimate guarantor of any settlement in the area."
Was Israel the aggressor in 1967, as the Arabs continue to maintain? It
hardly seems possible. The jurisprudential correctness of Israel's resort
to anticipatory self-defense is well-established in longstanding customary
international law. The Law of Nations is not a suicide pact. Israel could
not have been expected to wait patiently for its own annihilation.
Indeed, when the Government of Golda Meir decided not to exercise the
lawful option of anticipatory self-defense in October 1973, when Egypt and
Syria were preparing to launch yet another war of aggression against the
Jewish State, her country almost paid for it with collective disappearance.
And although Israel eventually prevailed against the Arab aggressors, it
did so at a staggering cost in human life. The Yom Kippur War produced
2326 deaths of Israeli soldiers, nearly ten thousand injuries and hundreds
of prisoners. These costs to Israel were the direct results of A'man's
(Military Intelligence Branch) failure to predict the Arab attack, a
failure known in Israel's intelligence community as the Mechdal, a Hebrew
term meaning "omission," "nonperformance" or "neglect."
The Arabs argue that Israel has no claim on Jerusalem beyond power
politics. Yet, Jerusalem has long been a Jewish city, and calling for an
end to Israel's sovereignty over an undivided Jerusalem is simply a call
for an end to Israel. When, in 1947, the United Nations called for an
international (U.N.-administered) city, it was not the Jews - but the Arabs
- who refused. When the Jordanian army seized the Old City during its war
of aggression against Israel in 1948, it promptly desecrated all Jewish
holy sites in the area, turned Jewish cemeteries and synagogues into
urinals and murdered
all Jews who remained on the Jordanian side of the 1948 armistice line.
During the 1967 War, Jordan's King Hussein - a celebrated man of peace to
Israel's Oslo supporters - spoke as follows on Radio Amman: "Kill the Jews
wherever you find them. Kill them with your arms, with your hands, with
your nails and teeth." Of course, Jordanian control over East Jerusalem
from 1949 - 1967 was entirely unacceptable under international law from the
standpoints of both the Arab kingdom's method of acquisition and its brutal
methods of occupation.
Do Israel's Oslo supporters object to these earlier and egregious
violations of international law by the Kingdom of Jordan? If they do, they
certainly haven't mentioned them.
The statement that Jerusalem is holy to the three monotheistic religions is
now generally taken as self-evident. Yet, for Muslims, even for those who
regard the city as theirs because of Canaanite origins, it is not
Jerusalem, but the Saudi Arabian city of Mecca, that is paramount. It is
Mecca, not Jerusalem, to which Muslims must ake the pilgrimage at least
once. For Christians, Jerusalem contains some, but not all, of their
holiest shrines.
For Jews, all main holy sites are within the post-1967 Jerusalem municipal
borders or in very close proximity. Jews at prayer anywhere in the world
face towards the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Muslims, even those praying on
the Mount, face away from it,
towards Mecca. When they pray on the Mount, Muslims have their backs
toward the Dome of the Rock, while those praying in the Al-Aqsa mosque also
look away from Jerusalem and toward Mecca.
In the Hebrew bible, Jerusalem is mentioned 656 times; Jerusalem's
well-being is central to all Jewish prayer. In the Koran, Jerusalem is
never mentioned, not even once. With the brief exception of the Crusader
period, no conqueror of Jerusalem made the city a capital. Driven into
exile by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 B.C.E., the Jews
returned fifty years later and rebuilt Jerusalem as their capital. It was
the capital of the Jews, again, under the Maccabees.
The rights of both Jews and Christians were trampled on by the Muslim
conquerors of Jerusalem. Churches were made into mosques. Slaughterhouses
were deliberately established near Jewish places of worship. Mosques were
built next to churches and synagogues so that their minarets could
literally overtower them.
In the 2554 years between 587 B.C.E. and 1967 C.E. Jerusalem was conquered
more than twenty times, and as part of many empires, was ruled from
different and distant capital cities. Only for the Jews (for more than 650
years), for the Crusaders (for 188 years) and for the State of Israel
(since 1949) has Jerusalem served as a capital city.
The newly official map of "Palestine" issued by the Palestine Authority
(PA) shows the State of Palestine as comprising all of the West Bank
(Judea/Samaria), all of Gaza, all of the State of Israel and a slice of the
Kingdom of Jordan. Additionally, it excludes any reference to a Jewish
population, and lists holy sites of Christians and Muslims only. The
official cartographer, Khalil Tufakji, has been commissioned by the PA to
design and to locate a proposed Capitol Building, which he has now drawn to
be located on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, on top of an ancient Jewish
cemetery.
On September 1, 1993, Yasser Arafat reaffirmed that the Oslo Accords are an
intrinsic part of the PLO's 1974 phased plan for Israel's destruction: "The
agreement will be a basis for an independent Palestinian state in
accordance with the Palestinian National Council resolution issued in
1974....The PNC resolution issued in 1974 calls for the
establishment of a national authority on any part of Palestinian soil from
which Israel withdraws or which is liberated..."
Later, on May 29, 1994, Rashid Abu Shbak, a senior PA security official,
remarked: "The light which has shone over Gaza and Jericho will also reach
the Negev and the Galilee."
Speaking of maps, it will be instructive to consider the following: The
Arab world is comprised of 22 states of nearly five million square miles
and 144,000,0000 people. The Islamic world contains 44 states with one
billion people. The Islamic states comprise an area 672 times the size of
Israel. Israel, with a population of fewer than 5 million Jews, is -
together with Judea/Samaria and Gaza - less than half the size of San
Bernardino County in California. The Sinai Desert alone, which Israel
transferred to Egypt in the 1979 Treaty, is three times larger than the
State of Israel.
What about Palestinian compliance with the so-called Peace Process?
Incontestably, the PA/PLO is guilty of multiple material breaches of the
Oslo Accords.
For example:
1. The PA has failed to confiscate arms and to disarm militias. The PA
police are obligated to disarm all militias acting in areas under its
jurisdiction, to confiscate all weapons other than pistols, and to license
pistols in accordance with regulations to be established by the two sides
(Annex I, Art. II, 1 and art. XI). In fact, all of the militias which were
operating when the PA assumed control over Gaza and Jericho - Hamas,
Islamic Jihad, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Fatah -
remain armed. In total violation of the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian
Authority is now establishing a military industry in Gaza. According to
information gathered by Israeli security forces, the PA has even
established factories for manufacturing ammunition.
2. The PA has refused to present Israel with lists of Palestinian
policemen. To enable Israel to prevent terrorists from joining the
Palestinian police force (an expectation that Israel has thusfar been
unable to satisfy), the PA is obligated to submit the list of all potential
recruits for Israel's approval (Annex I, Art. IV, 4). This requirement is
especially critical regarding those Palestinians who were recruited from
the territories, where Hamas and Islamic Jihad influence is strong.
Nowithstanding, the PA has not submitted any of the names when it recruited
forces for Gaza and Jericho. The PA repeated its commitment concerning
recruitment for the
additional areas governed by the Interim Agreement, but it has continued
its policy of systematic noncompliance.
3. The PA has exceeded the permissible number of policemen. The
Gaza-Jericho Accords of May 1994 limited the number of Palestinian
policemen to 9000 (Annex I, Art. III, 3), but during the period when the PA
controlled these two areas they enrolled approximately 20,000 people in
their so-called security forces. The Interim Agreement expanded the PA's
jurisdiction to additional parts of Judea/Samaria and increased
the permissible number of policemen to 24,000 in areas A and B, including
Gaza (Annex I, Art. IV, 3). Already, however, the PA police have signed on
more than 30,000 men and perhaps as many as 40,000 or even 50,000. This
would suggest that the PA police
are effectively being recruited not as a police agency, but as an army.
4. The PA continues to refuse to extradite suspected terrorists. The PA
is obligated to turn over to Israel for trial all individuals for whom
Israel provides an arrest warrant and proof of terrorist activity (Annex
IV, II, 7). Yet, to date, Israel has requested several dozen suspects in
mass murder, murder or attempted murder of Israelis, not one of whom has
been handed over to Israeli authorities. Leading PA officials have made it
perfectly clear that they have absolutely no intention of honoring the
extradition provisions of the Oslo Accords.
5. The PA has failed to use its court system for the punishment of
terrorists. The PA police are obligated to "arrest and prosecute
individuals who are suspected of perpetrating acts of terror and violence."
(Annex I, Art. II, 1). Yet, for the past two years, not one of the top
leaders of the military wings of Hamas or Islamic Jihad has been sentenced
- a policy of Palestinian law-violation that continued even after the
February-March 1996 wave of terror bombings against Israeli men, women and
children.
6. The PA leadership has been complicit in incitement to terror. The
leadership of the PLO and PA are obligated to refrain from incitement to
terrorism (Art. XXII). Yet, there have been many statements by Yasser
Arafat, Nabil Shaath, Faisal Husseini and others calling for Jihad and
praising those who have brought bombs to Israeli men, women and children.
This includes specific praise for those Hamas terrorists who carried out
mass murders of Israeli civilians.
The list of PA/PLO violations of Oslo goes on and on. There is the failure
to prevent incitement (codified at Annex 1, Art. II, 35); harassment of
suspected former collaborators (codified at Art. XVI); failure to provide
information on Israeli MIAs (codified at Art. XXVIII of the Interim
Agreement and at Art. XIX of the Gaza-Jericho Agreement); the failure to
change the PLO Covenant (codified at Art. XXXII), a failure that means that
the PLO/PA has still not renounced its intent to annihilate the Jewish
State; the abuse of human rights and the rule of law (codified at Art.
XIX); the failure to hold democratic elections and establish a democratic
regime (codified at
Art. 3 of the Declaration of Principles); the failure to control PLO police
activity in eastern Jerusalem (codified at Annex I of both agreements - the
Gaza-Jericho Accord and the Interim Agrement - which carefully delineate
the areas in which the Palestinian security forces may operate); the
opening of PA offices in eastern Jerusalem (codified at Art. I, 7), in
defiance of the obligation to locate all PA offices outside of Jerusalem;
and the conducting of foreign relations. The PA is explicitly prohibited
from carrying on foreign relations.
In numerous places in the major codifying documents, it is agreed that the
issue of the PA's foreign relations will be dealt with only in the final
status negotiations. There are other PA/PLO violations of Oslo, any one of
which could comprise an entire magazine article. They include unilaterally
halting security cooperation with Israel, in contradiction to Art. II(2) of
Annex I to the Oslo Accords; failing to coordinate movement of Palestinian
police (under Art. V(6) of Annex I to Oslo 2; the movement of Palestinian
policemen between Area A and Area B, or in Area C, must be coordinated in
advance with Israeli security officials; detaining Israeli citizens
(according to
Art. XI (4d) of Annex I to the Oslo Accord: "Israelis shall under no
circumstances be apprehended or placed in custody or prison by Palestinian
authorities."); failing to enforce restrictions on Visitor's Permits (under
Art. 28 (13b) of Annex III to the Oslo 2 Accords, "The Palestinian side
will notify Israel of any extension."); and constructing, without
authorization, a Gaza strip sea port and the Dahaniye airport (the first in
violation of Art. XIV (4) of Annex I to the Oslo 2 Accords - the second in
violation of Art. XIII(3) of Annex I to the Oslo 2 Accords).
Generally, Israeli and Arab proponents of "peace" feel that, for Israel,
the Oslo agreements represent a pretty good bargain. Ignoring the entire
history of genocide against Jews that led to Israel's statehood in the
first place, they neglect to consider that this "bargain" involves nothing
less than another Jewish diaspora.
But there is no more indefensible component of the pro-Oslo argument than
the one that goes like this: The accomodation with the Palestinians opens
the way to peace treaties with Syria and Lebanon, which, along with peace
treaties already signed with Egypt and Jordan, will leave Israel in a state
of peace with all its immediate neighbors for the first time. Looking at
the aforementioned map of Palestine (which incorporates the current State
of Israel), at the aforelisted PA/PLO violations of Oslo - especially the
refusal even to abrogate a codification of genocidal intent - and at the
incessant Arab and Islamic calls for Jihad - is there any reason to believe
that Israel's enemies will now yield their doctrinal and religious
expectations to the diametrically opposite expectations of international law?
Indeed, have Israeli supporters of Oslo forgotten that Sadat defended his
1979 Treaty with Israel in the Arab world by identifying it as no more than a needed
tactical expedient? President Sadat claimed that the Treaty was "founded
upon Islamic rules, because it arises from a position of strength, after
the holy war and victory Egypt achieved on 10th Ramadan 1393"(October 1973).
The Treaty itself provides a legally permissible rationale for abrogation
by Egypt. A minute to Article VI, paragraph 5, of the Israel-Egypt Peace
Treaty stipulates: "It is agreed to by the Parties that there is no
assertion that this Treaty prevails over other Treaties or agreements or
that other Treaties or agreements prevail over this Treaty."
Al Da'wa (The Mission), a prominent Islamic publication, identifies the
status of Israel with the status of the individual Jew. Here, Israel is
merely the Jew in macrocosm: "The race (sic) is corrupt at the root, full
of duplicity, and the Muslims have everything to lose in seeking to deal
with them; they must be exterminated."
Following are some recent statements by senior PA officials, all of which
are flagrantly anti-Jewish and several of which incorporate sordid
anti-Jewish stereotypes:
(1) "Five Zionist Jews are running the policy of the United States in the
Middle East: Madeleine Albright, William Cohen, Dennis Ross, Miller and
Martin Indyk. It is not
possible that the American nation, which consists of 250 million people,
can not find anyone other than five Zionist Jews to conduct the peace
process with the Palestinians." PA Justice Minister Freih Abu Middein,
Yediot Ahronot, April 13, 1997
(2) "We are fighting and struggling with an enemy who is Shylock. We must
know that he is Shylock." Othman Abu Gharbiya, PA Chairman Arafat's
Adviser on National Political Guidance, in a radio interview, Voice of
Palestine, March 15, 1997
(3) "The Jewish lobby is working very hard to jeopardize the process." PA
Chairman Yasser Arafat, in an interview, Beirut Daily Star, March 25,
1997, Agence France Presse, March 26, 1997
(4) "Israeli authorities...infected by injection 300 Palestinian children
with the HIV virus during the years of the intifada." Palestinian
representative Nabil Ramlawi at a session of the United Nations Commission
on Human Rights in Geneva, Jerusalem Post, March 17 1997.
The theme of Palestine as the grave of Israel and of the Jews in general is
a persistent motif in Arab orientations toward Israel. Here the following
claim, made by Dr. Yahya al-Rakhawi in Al-Akhbar, the organ of Egypt's
Liberal Party, on July 19, 1982, is typical: "When the State of Israel was
established and...was recognized by many, in both East and West, one of the
reasons for this recognition was the desire of the people in the East and
West to get rid of as many as possible of the epresentatives of that human
error known as the Jews. Behind this motive was another, secret purpose:
to concentrate them in one place, so that it would be easier to strike at
the right moment."
At this very moment, Israel's Islamic enemies are making preparations for
just such a strike. To assist in these preparations, an ongoing war of
terror and attrition against the Jewish State is laying the foundations for
the planned war of annihilation. Although it may no longer be possible for
Israel to prevent such a war entirely, a war that would involve various
unconventional weapons, the Government may still diminish expected harms by
recalling the true history of Arab-Israeli conflict and by extricating the
beleaguered country from the lethal consequences of Oslo.
Rene Louis Beres
West Lafayette, Indiana
------------------------------------------------------------------------
LOUIS RENE BERES (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971) is Professor of Political Science
and International Law at Purdue University. He is the author of many books
and articles dealing with Israeli security matters
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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