Arafat living in the past

Stephen Winn, Deputy Editorial Page Editor
September 19, 2000

The Kansas City Star - Saturday, September 16, 2000 - Opinion Page

See you soon.

If you were a Palestinian parent living on the West Bank, this is the kind of letter you might have received from your 15-year old son this summer. When the program directors are old PLO operatives, summer camp is more than just nature walks and goofy songs.

A New York Times story last month detailed how the Palestinian Authority uses 90 summer camps on the West Bank and Gaza to train tomorrow's terrorists. Tens of thousands of children attend the camps.

Pictures showed masked teenagers rehearsing the kidnapping of an Israel official and assembling Kalashnikov rifles. Some campers talked about how they would someday fight against Israel. A 16-year-old boasted about how the Palestinians would seize Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa.

Well, some people will shrug, what do you expect when an old terrorist like Yasser Arafat is left in charge of things?

But how could he and other Palestinian leaders be so stupid?

Years ago they supposedly agreed to abandon violence and work toward a future in which the Palestinians and Israel could co-operate and live together in peace.

The Palestinian Authority simply hasn't lived up to its promises. And its summer camps are a perfect example of how Palestinian leaders continue to live in the past as they let the possibility of a Palestinian State slip through their fingers.

President Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians a country of their own at the Camp David talks this summer. But Arafat refused, insisting that he could not "give up" Jerusalem and its religious sites. The Islamic sites incidentally have long been under the operational control of Arab authorities.

Incredibly, Arafat also demanded the right to flood Israel with Palestinian refugees even if they had a state of their own.

Arafat apparently wanted rhetoric, not an actual country. Even Israel peace activists were stunned. After blowing, his chance at Camp David, Arafat, as in days of old, was off on a world tour to drum up support for his intransigence.

He met with the Russian president, for example, as though Moscow were a powerful patron for Arab autocrats rather than an economic cripple and international laughing stock in dire need of assistance itself.

Perhaps the most devastating sign that Palestinian leaders are trapped in the past is their willingness to listen to other Arab leaders around the Middle East who urge ceaseless struggle against the state of Israel.

Not ceaseless struggle for their own countries, of course. But they want the Palestinians to keep fighting Israel as their proxies.

In rejecting Clinton's pleas to accept a state with American and Israeli guarantees, Arafat chose to listen to the advice of other Arab leaders who said he could not abandon the struggle for Jerusalem. Unlike Arafat, these other Arab leaders rule over actual countries with tanks, missiles, warplanes and thousands of regular army troops. Yet they have been unable for decades, through either war or diplomatic pressure, to win control of Jerusalem's Old City.

Having failed themselves, they assign the task to the stateless Palestinians under the leadership of an aging bumbler they have mocked and scorned for decades.

To fully savor the hypocrisy, consider that the Arab countries once had control of Jerusalem's Old City themselves. They didn't give it to the Palestinians, however. They let Jordan's King Hussein have it, and he lost it after foolishly joining the Arab war against Israel in 1967.

Jimmy Carter, who among, recent American presidents has shown the most sympathy for Arab concerns, once made this remark: "I have never met an Arab leader that in private professed the desire for an independent Palestinian state."

This is something that Arafat should have figured out a long time ago.

The only country that has ever given the Palestinians land is Israel. The only Mideast country that has ever actually offered them a state complete with the economic and military support it would need to survive is Israel.

Yet Israel is the country that Palestinian leaders still teach their children to hate. They may no longer be active terrorists, but they are still fools.

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