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----- Original Message -----
From: Shulman, Charles <shulmc@...>
To: 'Rabbi Dr. Nisson E. Shulman' <neshulman@...>; 'Rabbi Dr. Zalman
Kossowsky' <rabbi@...>; 'Rabbi Eli Shulman (Yahoo)'
<elishulman@...>; 'Rabbi Moshe Shulman' <shulman@...>; 'Rabbi
Yaakov Neuburger' <bneub4800@...>; 'Rabbi Shlomo Hochberg'
<Shlomoje@...>; 'Dr. Daniel Klapper' <daklapper@...>
Sent: Tuesday, January 09, 2001 6:07 PM
Subject: 'Peace Psychosis' In The Mideast

The Last Word

George F. Will

NEWSWEEK

Jan. 8 issue

'Peace Psychosis' In The Mideast



Many realists worry that for Jews gathered in Israel, history may have

saved

its worst for last.



Bill Clinton may have saved his very worst for last. With remarkable-even
for him-self-absorption, as he tap-dances toward the exit he is pursuing

as

his crowning legacy something that only the cynical or delusional could

call

a "final" Middle East "peace agreement." In three weeks Clinton will be
gone, leaving intensified Middle East chaos for others to cope with.


Israel's Ehud Barak has resigned as prime minister, triggering Feb. 6
elections that polls indicate he will lose in a landslide. For him, the

long

term is five weeks. Yet by then he hopes to have achieved a "permanent"
solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that is now in its sixth
decade. Yasir Arafat founded the Palestine National Liberation Movement,
committed to Israel's destruction, when Eisenhower was president and
Ben-Gurion was Israel's prime minister. Through 14 Israeli prime

ministries

and nine U.S. presidencies, Arafat has remained so committed.

It has come to this: Clinton has asked Barak-who has a negligible
constituency, and who has never asked Israeli voters for a mandate for
anything remotely resembling the dangerous menu of territorial and other
concessions he already has offered Arafat-to dismantle Israel's capital by
ceding to Arafat sovereignty over Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem.
Clinton also has asked Barak to surrender to Arafat sovereignty over the
holiest place in Israel's capital, the Temple Mount, location of the

Second

Temple, destroyed in A.D. 70.

RIGHT OF RETURN

Arafat is affronted by the offer because it is conditioned on his

forsaking

the "right of return." That is the claimed right of up to 4 million

people,

who left Israel during its violent birth pangs in 1948, to return to their
homes. Imagine identifying the possessors of this right, and the possible
permutations of it.

Today about a million Palestinians remain in what are propagandistically
called "refugee camps." In 1945 there were many millions of refugees and
other displaced persons in Europe, many in camps. By 1950 this problem was
essentially solved. Why, 52 years after the failure of the Arab war to

kill

the state of Israel in its infancy, are there still camps populated by the
children, grandchildren, even great-grandchildren of people displaced in
1948? Because Arafat and other Arab leaders use these festering sores to
foment irredentist extremism.

Acknowledging a "right of return" would be, for Israel, demographic

suicide.

That right is integral to Arafat's aim, the destruction of the Jewish

state.

Insistence on the right is tantamount to root-and-branch rejection of the
supposed goal of the post-Oslo peace process-"two states for two peoples."
That process has been a fiasco because it has assumed that Arafat simply
wants to govern a Middle Eastern Belgium-a small bourgeois nation located

on

whatever territories he, with American help, can extort from Israel. This
assumption requires those who hold it to constantly deny that Arafat means
what he constantly tells Arabic-speaking audiences-that "with our blood

and

our martyrs we will redeem Palestine." Last Wednesday, taking time out

from

deliberations about the Clinton-Barak offer, Arafat expressed optimism

about

one day seeing "a Palestinian boy or a Palestinian girl raising the flag

of

Palestine over the walls and churches and minarets of Holy Jerusalem."

Which

is to say, over all of Jerusalem.

Writing in the London Times Literary Supplement, Edward Luttwak of the
Center for Strategic and International Studies says, "It is not a

rhetorical

exaggeration to speak of a peace psychosis, for that is what psychotics

do:

they impose their own imaginings on others, persuading themselves... in

this

instance, that after a lifetime of struggle, Arafat wanted to end his days
as a compromising negotiator, rather than as a conqueror." As evidence

that

Arafat still sees himself as a conqueror, Luttwak reports that in 1998 a
Palestinian editor of a newspaper published in East Jerusalem was

kidnapped

by Arafat henchmen, held for a week and beaten. His offense? He printed on
page three rather than page one an article, written by an Arafat flack,
comparing Arafat to the conqueror Saladin, who wrested Jerusalem from the
Crusaders.

IGNORED EVIDENCE

Barak's surreal 18 months of ignoring all such evidence has given Israel

the

worst governance in its history, as he has emboldened Arafat by making
concession after concession in the hope that the recidivist liar would
recognize Israel's right to exist. Until now Barak seems never to have met

a

concession he would not consider and soon offer, and evidently he

seriously

considered Clinton's latest and most reckless proposals for appeasing
Arafat. But on Friday, in the aftermath of another terrorist bomb attack

in

Tel Aviv, and in the context of his plunge in the polls, he said Israel
"never" would "transfer sovereignty of the Temple Mount-the anchor of our
identity." At last, a sticking point.

The United States has cast itself as "honest broker" between the only
democracy in the region and those avowing their determination to destroy

it.

And the future of the Palestinian people is prefigured in the corrupt and
violent thugocracy-the Palestinian Authority-that currently misgoverns the
West Bank (per capita GNP, $2,300) and Gaza (per capita GNP, $1,000).

In Washington an Israeli diplomat who shares Barak's thinking stoutly
insists he does not "trust" Arafat. But Arafat is utterly reliable. He can
be trusted never to keep an agreement and always to be candid about his
ultimate objective, possession of all of Palestine-meaning the

annihilation

of the "Zionist entity." The diplomat serenely-and surreally-says optimism
is integral to Zionism. Actually, Zionism was born of profound pessimism
about the ability of European Jews to achieve fulfillment or even safety
without a national homeland, and the Zionist state was born of history's
severest instruction in pessimism-the Holocaust. Pessimists are realists

who

worry that, for the portion of world Jewry gathered in Israel, history may
have saved its worst for last.

2001 Newsweek, Inc.





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