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Ship Of Truth
By Charles Krauthammer Washington Post Friday, January
11, 2002
What does it take for the world to acknowledge the obvious truth that
Yasser
Arafat has no intention of making real peace? How much incontrovertible
evidence is required before one admits that the Oslo "peace" was a
fraud and
a deception? Are 50 tons of smuggled weaponry insufficient to
demonstrate
that the truce the United States is seeking to establish would be
nothing
more than a breathing space for Arafat and the terrorists he supports
to
rearm, regroup and prepare for the next, more explosive phase of the
war he
began on Sept. 28, 2000?
The weapons were on the ship Israel intercepted en route from Iran to
Gaza.
The ship's captain has been a member of Arafat's Fatah for 25 years. He
is
an officer in the Palestinian navy. His ship was purchased by the
Palestinian Authority. His instructions came from Arafat's arms
paymaster.
Arafat is shocked -- shocked! -- by these revelations. Comically, he
has
ordered an investigation. This will rival Hitler's investigation of the
Reichstag fire. Palestine is a nasty police state where, if you make a
sideways crack about Arafat in the men's room of the local cafe, you
find
yourself arrested within hours by one of Arafat's eight separate
security
forces. To believe that a $100 million arms shipment could have been
made on
anything less than Arafat's orders is to know nothing about the
Palestinian
revolution.
The ship's cargo is a candy store of terror. Two tons of explosives.
Countless machine guns. Fourteen-hundred mortars. And dozens of
Katyusha
rockets, the quintessential weapon of terror: They go 12 miles and have
no
accuracy, perfect for random killing in Tel Aviv.
Arafat's strategy is crystal clear. After Sept. 11, after the American
rout
of the Taliban, after the Dec. 1-2 terror bombings in Jerusalem and
Haifa,
he came under enormous international pressure to restrain the violence.
So, he orders his terrorist allies to cool it. Temporarily. (Hamas
announced
it was suspending suicide bombing "until further notice.") He lies low,
plays nice, tries to sucker the Americans with a few low-level arrests.
Meanwhile, he leaves the entire Hamas infrastructure intact and orders
$100
million worth of weapons -- obvious preparation for war, later.
This is plain as day. Yet the State Department professes puzzlement.
"We
have told him [Arafat] we need a full explanation."
Need a full explanation? I can save State the time and the translator's
fees. Arafat is embarked on a strategy of war -- and has been ever
since he
signed the September 1993 Oslo "peace" accords on the White House lawn.
Don't take it from me. Take it from the mouth of one of the leading
Palestinian moderates, Faisal Husseini. Shortly before his fatal heart
attack last year, he openly admitted that Oslo was "a Trojan Horse . .
.
just a temporary procedure . . . just a step towards something bigger."
That something bigger is "Palestine from the river to the sea,"
Husseini
said, i.e., from the Jordan to the Mediterranean. That means
eradicating
Israel. Oslo? Just a way of "ambushing the Israelis and cheating them."
How?
Oslo gave the PLO an army, autonomy, money and territory -- the perfect
base
from which to fight for the ultimate eradication of Israel.
There is nothing new here. This strategy has been the declared PLO
position
ever since it adopted the "Phased Plan" in Cairo in 1974. Phase 1:
Accept
any territory offered of whatever size within Palestine. Phase 2: Make
it
the forward base for the war to destroy Israel.
Our refusal to acknowledge this overwhelmingly obvious strategy is one
of
the great acts of self-delusion in diplomatic history. European Union
foreign policy chief Javier Solana says that he hopes the weapons ship
incident will not scuttle peace talks. The peace efforts, says a U.S.
official, will not be derailed. "The Zinni mission will continue, ship
or no
ship."
This is madness. The ship is not an incident. The ship is not an
accident.
The ship is an announcement, inadvertent and therefore indisputable, of
Arafat's duplicitous intentions: a temporary truce -- as he girds for
war, a
far wider, deadlier, more explosive war.
What to do? Dare to face the truth. Arafat is not a peace partner. Any
truce
Gen. Anthony Zinni gets him to sign will have the same durability as
the
dozens of truces Arafat signed while destroying Lebanon in the 1970s.
If we want peace, Arafat and the Palestinian Authority have to go. They
must
be de-legitimized, de-recognized, de-funded by the United States. And
by
Europe. And if that does not bring them down, Israel should be allowed
to go
in and do the job itself.
(c) 2002 The Washington Post Company
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