Posted on 06/23/2003 5:40:57 AM PDT by SJackson
No matter how many conditions Bush placed on the creation of a Palestinian state under Yasser Arafat, any such announcement would constitute a reward for two years of nonstop terror against Israeli civilians.
Almost one year ago to the day this Shabbat, Natan Sharansky met privately for 90 minutes with American Vice-President Richard Cheney. Two days earlier, Sharansky had delivered the keynote address at the World Forum of the American Enterprise Institute in Beaver Falls, Colorado. In that address, he hammered away at his trademark theme that peace will never come to the Middle East without the creation of a viable Palestinian democracy.
Speaking only days before President Bush's scheduled major policy address on the Middle East, Sharansky concluded: "I believe it would be a tragic mistake if just in the midst of this campaign of terror, the president of the United States rewards Arafat with a declaration that he deserves to head a state. There is no doubt that such a state would be a terrorist one."
Now he was delivering the same message to Cheney: No matter how many conditions Bush placed on the creation of a Palestinian state under Yasser Arafat, any such announcement would constitute a reward for two years of nonstop terror against Israeli civilians.
The normally laconic Cheney shot to attention when he heard these words.
"But your own government has already signed off on this," he told Sharansky, confirming the latter's worst suspicions. Sharansky nevertheless repeated, as Cheney scribbled notes, that without the removal of Arafat and the entire Tunis junta, the creation of an atmosphere in which Palestinians could express themselves without fear of reprisal and the cessation of incitement against Israel in the Palestinian schools and media, peace was impossible.
President Bush's upcoming speech had already undergone 30 drafts at that point. It was about to undergo another crucial shift based on Sharansky's conversation with Cheney.
Two days later, on June 24, 2002, Bush announced at the outset: "Peace requires a new and different Palestinian leadership." He did not mention Arafat once.
The president stressed that a Palestinian state must be earned. He offered no timetable for the creation of such a state. Gone was Secretary of State Colin Powell's call for a "time-specific" political horizon to satisfy Arab leaders and the Palestinian masses. Instead, Bush made clear what the Palestinians must do to earn their state: Create a viable democracy under new leaders, with an independent judiciary, financial transparency, independent local authorities, and freedom of expression. Bush placed his faith in democracy as the key to peace between Palestinians and Israelis.
Nothing remains today of Bush's vision of liberty blossoming "in the rocky soil of the West Bank and Gaza." A Palestinian state, democratic or not, is the explicit goal of the Quartet's road map. It represents the familiar EU and UN position that the Palestinians must have a state, and all else is irrelevant.
They have never had any use for the president's claptrap about democracy, for which they view the Arabs as inherently unsuited.
Timetables have returned with a vengeance. The Palestinians are to have a provisional state by the end of the year for having done nothing more than repeating the same assurances they have repeated so many times since Oslo.
The time frames set forth in the road map - a provisional state by the end of 2003 and complete statehood by the end of 2005 - have nothing to do with the time required to create a Palestinian society uninfected by murderous hatred of Jews and Israel. That would take years of concerted and determined reeducation, as it did in postwar Germany and Japan. Rather, the time frame was dictated by what the road map signatories felt their Arab "allies" and the Arab street would accept.
Let 100 Mahmoud Abbases declare their recognition of Israel and say terrorism against Israeli citizens was a tactical mistake, it still won't make a bit of difference as long as the vast majority of Palestinians support homicide bombings and view Abbas (aka Abu Mazen) as a quisling for proclaiming otherwise.
THE ARAB world, Palestinians included, continues to nurture Abdel Aziz Rantisi's goal of not a single Jew remaining alive in all of Palestine. Eighty percent of Palestinians, according to a recent poll, believe that their aspirations "cannot be realized as long as the State of Israel exists."
Peace is impossible as long as a fundamental asymmetry exists between the positions of the Palestinian and Israeli publics. The overwhelming majority of Israelis accept the idea of a Palestinian state; few Palestinians have made peace with Israel's existence. That is why the Americans deemed Palestinian recognition of Israel's existence as a Jewish state at the outset a nonstarter.
The road map deliberately obfuscates that asymmetry by calling on "all official Israeli institutions to end incitement against Palestinians."
What incitement?? The Palestinians have not made even the slightest feint in the direction of ending the cult of death and martyrdom and glorification of Jew-killing in their media and schools. Even as Arafat was condemning last week's bus bombing in Jerusalem, the perpetrator was being hailed by the official Palestinian media as a martyr.
The hero's welcome conferred on Ahmed Jbarra by both Abu Mazen and Arafat, and Jbarra's appointment as a special adviser to Arafat for his "great contribution to the Palestinian cause" - i.e., murdering 14 Jews in downtown Jerusalem in 1975 - legitimizes terror.
Not only has Abu Mazen done nothing to end incitement, which would be relatively easy, but he made it clear that he can or will do nothing to end terrorism.
Far from having committed himself to doing the hard things required to disarm and dismantle terrorist groups, as Assistant Secretary of State William Burns claimed before the House International Relations Committee last week, Abu Mazen has made it clear that he will not move against Hamas and other terror groups. Under no circumstances will he risk a Palestinian civil war.
The cease-fire he seeks with Hamas, and which the Americans are so eagerly pursuing, has nothing to do with fighting terrorism. Indeed, it is the exact opposite. Hamas has repeatedly stated explicitly that any cease-fire, or hudna, would constitute nothing more than a tactical decision to enable the organization to attack Israelis later under more favorable circumstances.
Once again we are hearing American calls to strengthen Abu Mazen, as we once heard calls to strengthen Arafat. Now, as then, the means of doing so is for Israel to refrain from insisting on the Palestinians' compliance with their undertakings to stop terrorism and official incitement, and for Israel to refrain from defending itself in the face of Palestinian inaction.
As Dennis Ross has admitted, during the 10 years of Oslo, "[I]ssues of compliance were neglected and politicized by the Americans in favor of keeping the peace process afloat."
The irony that the "peace process" can be kept afloat only by the implicit admission that the Palestinians cannot, or will not, make peace was, then as now, lost on the State Department. The road map, like the Oslo process before it, has taken on the quality of a fetish. The Oslo process was regarded as an angry god demanding ever-new "sacrifices for peace." And in a weird sort of deja vu, the murder of Israelis today becomes something else - an attempt to undermine Abu Mazen or detour the road map.
Perhaps the vision of a democratic Palestine held forth by Bush in his June 24 speech can never be realized. But if so, as Sharansky has argued so effectively over the years, there can never be peace either.
For an unfree Palestine, the large number of its people deliberately held prisoner in fetid refugee camps will always need an outside enemy to distract them from the failures of the regime. And that enemy will be Israel.
The US cannot further the cause of peace by retreating from the president's June 24 vision of a democratic Palestine.
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Maybe Cheney will remind GWB negotiating with terrorists isn't a good idea, Powell won't.
As for the timetable, though, I don't see any rush on the part of the Bush administration to enact or invoke such a thing.
Bush is a Christian who reads his Bible. I'm sure he knows that a "peace" is not possible among these people, although a temporary truce is (how temporary? Who knows. These can last up to years.)
Eventually, someone must come to one of two conclusions: either the Pales must be forced out of all the so-called "West Bank" and a large Berlin-style fence built; or a Pale state, regardless of nature, must be permitted to take root so that there can be no more excuses, then, when it attacks Israel and Israel crushes it, there will be SOME "international legitimacy" to the same result.
One of them took a photo album from her handbag and was flipping through pictures of her children.
This is my oldest.
He's a martyr now. And here's my second son. He's a martyr, too."
"Ah," the second mother sighed, "They blow up so fast, don't they?"
Yeah ... here we go again with the extremist's mindless mantra: "Booooosh toooo stuuuupid to do his own thinking."
My advice: Never try to match wits with any "stuuuuuuuupid idiot" who uses invisible ink that you can't read.
mis·un·der·es·ti·mate
1: to estimate a person's intelligence as being dramatically less than its actual level
2: to insist that a person who repeatedly hands you your ass is too stupid to be able to do so
The "stuuuuuuuuupid Bush" and his Doctrine relentlessly marches on.
I agree with you SJackson !
Wild Thing
No ..... I am not the one that made the claim, I merely reported it.
Better read it again to see whose claim it is.
And the one who made that claim can, and will, back it up --- in spite of the naysayers --- whom he will allow to hang themselves with their own rope.
It is gratifying to see my definition getting around. I am humbled and proud at the same time. :^)
And as for its use, it does indeed seem that many, many people that really should know better continue to misunderestimate our President. Of course, Mr. Bush knows full well that they do, and exploits it for maximum benefit.
Not all of Bush's detractors have illegitimate complaints. Indeed, I certainly have my share. How about some secure borders, for example? How about backing off from the socialism?
However, I do understand "strategery" (a word coined in a sketch by Will Ferrell on SNL and, as far as I know, never actually used by Mr. Bush). Thus I know that as long as the President's critics refuse to believe that which should be painfully obvious to them by now, he will continue to play them like a cheap fiddle.
How ironic that those who accuse the president of stupidity continue to indulge in it so flagrantly.
I had no idea where it came from. Thanks for letting me know that it was you who composed it! It is a gem! I love it, and use it generously! LOL
"Not all of Bush's detractors have illegitimate complaints. Indeed, I certainly have my share. How about some secure borders, for example? How about backing off from the socialism?"
Reality: "Politics is the art of the possible"
Marxists know that very well. It took them a long time to incrementally indoctrinate the people and bring us to where we are right now (one step forward, two steps back, one step forward, two steps back, ...").
Indoctrinated people have to either be de-programmed (have their hearts and minds changed), or die off before we can un-do the damage. And it can not happen over night --- unless we want to live under a dictatorship.
Or to put it more bluntly, he has been forced to use words manipulatively and insincerely in order to assuage our contemptible, but necessary, allies. Gary Cooper has been forced to masquerade as a used car salesman — saying and doing almost anything to make the sale.
Thanks for providing that. I have to confess that at times I get nervous about Bushes' words and the path on which he is proceeding. Those linked articles, especially the one by Tony Blankley (he's HOT) were MOST enlightening.
That's why I come to FR: to be edcated by my fellow Freepers.
Kudos to you Imal for your definition of miunderestimate. Hah ! I'll remember that !
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