COLUMN ONE: Accepting our limitations

It's summer camp season. As Israeli Jewish children are learning to macrame and swim, 300 of their Israeli Arab friends in the Galilee are learning other lessons. Channel 10 Wednesday broadcast footage from "Camp Return" by Kabul village in the Western Galilee. The story was picked up Thursday in Ma'ariv.

At Camp Return, children are not taught how to make beaded jewelry and popsicle stick houses. They are taught to aspire to kill Jews in suicide bombings.

Saama Vakim, one of the campers, displayed her new necklace to the TV camera. It is a pendant of the map of Israel embossed with a Palestinian flag. She also showed the reporter the "intifada pendant." It included the image of a boy throwing a stone. Saama explained that Jews have no right to live here and should "go back to where they came from to Poland, to Russia."

Rather than learning stories about animals and plants, children at Camp Return are taught tales of the "heroism" of Palestinian terrorists like "the engineer" Hamas bombmaker Yihye Ayyash, who masterminded the murder of over 60 Israelis in suicide bombings before being killed by Israeli security forces in 1996. The children received booklets with "morale boosting" songs and stories glorifying human bombs and their dispatchers who are called "the heroic martyrs."

Their camp songs have lyrics like, "We don't want flour. We don't want sardines. We want bombs, the rule of the bombs." Another ditty the children sing says, "Lift up your head, recognize your holiness. Defeat to Washington. We don't want ID cards [Israeli citizenship]. We will glorify in the blood of the martyr."

The children bed down in tents named after refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. A camp counselor named Hadi Srair says, "We are living under Israeli occupation in Haifa, in the territories and in Majd el-Kurum. We will continue our struggle until victory and the liberation of Palestine."

What is the source of all of this hatred? How is it that these children, who are born in Israel, go to Israeli schools, and benefit from the freedom of this liberal democracy can so pine for the destruction through genocidal means of their fellow citizens?

Clearly, their cultural influences are not emanating from their Israeli surroundings. As the camp's organizers said, their goal is to clear the children's heads of "the Zionist education system's propaganda."

The children's cultural milieu that teaches them hatred and violence is first and foremost the Palestinian Authority. Since it was established in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza in 1994, the PA, under Arafat's lead, has worked to radicalize the Israeli-Arab minority. Before the arrival of Arafat and his minions, most Israeli-Arabs defined themselves as such. Today, the vast majority of Israeli-Arabs define themselves as Palestinians "from the 1948 territories." And, as polling data has shown, 80 percent of Palestinians "from the 1967 territories" believe that they cannot achieve justice as long as Israel continues to exist.

But the Palestinian Authority itself is not the only instigator of this hatred. Yasser Arafat has let it be known that the Palestinian people whom he leads are not an independent actor on the world stage. Three years ago, when he rejected Israel's offer of a Palestinian state in all of Gaza, 95% of Judea and Samaria and the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem, he did not do so in the name of the Palestinian people alone. Arafat rejected the offer in the name of the Arab-Islamic nation. He argued that the Palestinians have no right to make concessions of any kind regarding the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The offer on the table back then called for Palestinian sovereignty over the Temple Mount and Israeli sovereignty under the Temple Mount.

In so reacting, Arafat was signaling that, far from being a distinct national group that stands or falls on its own, the Palestinians are part of something larger. In naming his war against Israel the "Aksa Intifada" and in naming his Fatah terror cells the "Aksa Martyrs Brigades," he was sending a message to the entire Arab-Islamic world that the war is a pan-Arab and pan-Islamic struggle against the Jewish state.

For its part, the Arab world did not distance itself from Arafat's claims. During the Camp David summit, president Bill Clinton pleaded with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah to pressure Arafat to compromise on Jerusalem. Both leaders refused.

Wednesday the police ordered a halt to visits by non-Muslims to the Temple Mount. These visits, the first of their kind in 33 months, had been coordinated with Islamic Wakf officials on the Temple Mount. The order to halt them was another indication of the danger emanating from pan-Arab and Islamic forces arrayed against the country. Just days before Wednesday's announcement, Arafat threatened a renewed terrorist onslaught against Israel in reaction to the limited visits. But Arafat, and his partner PA Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, who called the visits "provocative," were not alone in their threats. Arab League Secretary-General and former Egyptian foreign minister Amr Moussa referred to the visits as "very dangerous" and "an insult to Muslims everywhere."

Many Israelis and our friends in the US have come to understand that for peaceful relations between Israel and the Palestinians to take root, Palestinian society must be transformed. It must abandon its genocidal, authoritarian aspirations and become a liberal democracy. Speaking at the Knesset on Wednesday, US House of Representatives Majority Leader Tom DeLay said, "A prerequisite to a lasting peace is the establishment of a genuine Palestinian democracy that serves the Palestinian people."

And yet, understanding that the cultural and political identity of the Palestinians is a product of the Arab and Islamic world must necessarily give pause to our enthusiasm for pushing forward with this goal. Israel cannot take over the madrases from Riyadh to Damascus to Karachi or close down the television stations in Cairo, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar. Because of this, it can exert little influence over the hearts and minds of the Palestinians.

As well, for all its military might, the US is also incapable of forcing such a change. Today, 16 out of the US army's 33 combat brigades are deployed in Iraq. While incoming US Army Chief of Staff General Peter J. Schoomaker told Congress on Tuesday that the US must increase the size of its army, there is no way that the US will ever raise the force necessary to take over the Arab and Islamic worlds even if it had the will to do so which it does not.

Given the size limitations on the US military, regimes like Syria and Iran are now resting more or less assured that the US will not mount operations on the level of Operation Iraqi Freedom to overthrow them. Because of this, the political consequences of the operation have been smaller than was hoped.

The fact that neither Israel nor the US has the wherewithal to transform Palestinian society by forcing a political transformation of the Arab and Islamic world that it feeds on should not lead to the conclusion that we are powerless to enact changes for the better. It simply means that we should not direct our actions towards a goal the establishment of a pacific, liberal democratic Palestinian state that we have no ability to achieve.

Our limited power to change the Palestinians must force us to look at the situation from a new perspective. We cannot wipe out the ideologies that foment terrorism but we can destroy, through military means, the Palestinians' ability to carry out their attacks. We cannot prevent Arab-Israelis from watching al-Jazeera, but we can take legal action against those who act on the station's violent message.

While it is clear that given their annihilatory agenda, the Palestinians cannot be allowed to have sovereignty over Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip, there are other options that will enable them to have political freedoms that will not threaten our survival. Autonomy arrangements, like those suggested by Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, are one option. Another, as suggested by Tourism Minister Benny Elon, would involve the restoration of Jordanian citizenship to Palestinians in Judea and Samaria and its conferral on Gaza residents. This too would work to satisfy the necessity of placating the Palestinians' reasonable need for a political identity separate from Israel.

In the longer run, if the US were to devote the resources necessary to develop alternative fuels to oil, the cultural attraction of authoritarian jihad fueled by Saudi and the Iranian oil wealth would be decisively curtailed. In its wake, perhaps the Arabs and Muslims will finally be willing to revisit their cultural doctrines and guiding assumptions. At the very least, they would lack the financial resources to act on them.

While we wish that our Palestinian neighbors could enjoy the benefits of liberal democracy as we do, we must recognize that the decision to do so is theirs, not ours, to make. Until they do, our policies must be geared towards the achievement of goals we can actually accomplish.

As for Camp Return, the police raided the camp on Thursday and shut it down on suspicion that the organizers were inciting youngsters against the state. Obviously, this is a necessary step. Israeli-Arabs must understand that they will pay a price for acting in such a maliciously treasonous way. But here too, we must not delude ourselves. As a group, Israeli Arabs can only be expected to embrace their identity as Israelis in response to events that will take place far from the Galilee. And these events will not be influenced by the content of the Israeli educational system.

"...Because of this, the political consequences of the operation have been smaller than was hoped."

This is the first time I have seen a columinist state this fact, concerning the longterm political goals of the Administration in the Iraq/Islamic world. The "deterrence" of invading an Islamic country and rolling the leadership in such a dynamic, high profile, and effective way certainly "got the attention" of the Islamic street. They know America is not a paper tiger as Osama and his Taliban buddy Omar portrayed us right after 9/11

Yet the "ideas" of terrorism remain -- ISLAM -- and the mullahs and imams have quickly recovered in their propagation of militancy, suicide, and blood shed, against Israel and the West. Palistinian Media Watch has chronicled no change whatsoever in the broadcast of the ideas of "jihad" from PA sources. This article only undergirds that fact.

From my own objective observations, and all due respects to Dr. Daniel Pipes "respect" of Muslim culture, this whole region of the world is callous, tyrannical, and self-destructive in nature. Again, rooted in Islam.

And Israel sits right in the middle of this darkness.

IDF Command must be grinding their teeth contemplating the future. G-d bless them and strengthen them and equip them mightily in mind and spirit for the challenges ahead. Because this scenario won't remain static forever, regardless of the naive efforts of the doves and hopeful dreamers.

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