The Next Wave of Terror, Naomi Ragen

I have been biding my time in discussing the whole Abu Mazen, new Palestinian leadership, now let's publish the road-map nonsense....

But today's suicide bombing in Kfar Saba that killed a 23 year-old security guard, and injured 14 by Arafat's Fatah is the last straw. This comes only hours after the so -called Egyptian-engineered "compromise" that supposedly "bent" Arafat to the American will to see a "moderate" take control of the Palestinian government-to-be and has made it impossible for me to ignore this line of propaganda any longer.

Abu Mazen wrote a doctorate denying the Holocaust. As Arafat told a cheering crowd of Palestinian well-wishers aired on the Israeli news tonight: "I am the one who picked Abu Mazen."

Yes, Arafat's hand-picked successor is now going to fight terror. Hello? Is this the same Abu Mazen who made it clear that killing Jews over the Green Line was perfectly legitimate? Is this the same Abu Mazen who picked as his Chief Head of Security Muhammad Dahlan? As Dr. Aaron Lerner points out: "...despite his"moderate" rhetoric, the Preventive Security Service under Dahlan's leadership played a key role in the manufacture of illegal weapons and coordinated and initiated terrorist attacks by the various terror groups. Dahlan himself ordered the bombing of the bus of children in Kfar Darom on the 20th of November 2000.

In an ideal world, the former Gazan chief of the Preventive Security Service would be sitting (once again) in an Israeli prison. But Israelis hope that Muhammad Dahlan's designation as the state minister for security affairs will help stem Palestinian terrorism."

This kind of delusional thinking on the part of Israeli leadership almost got my family killed last year. So this year, I am far less willing to sit back and be a good girl.

The problem, as I see it, is not the fact that Arafat, the discredited terrorist who should be hung for mass murder, is instead "president" and hand-picking people to head an American-supported Palestinian State ten miles from the heart of Israel's population centers. The problem is the Palestinian people, who supported Saddam Hussein, who are in favor of terror, who are anti-Semitic, who never cease their incitement to terror, and who have shown at every opportunity that they do not want a State, but the destruction of Israel and the continuation of terrorist attacks.

We cannot allow coalition victors to create a new set of rules for fighting terror that they themselves wouldn't dream of swallowing, but are willing to force-feed Israel. Rules that allow terrorist leaders who supported Saddam Hussein to pick their successors. That allow former terrorists to "fight terror." That allow people to continue to incite to terror and violence (below you will find the latest information on this incitement). Now is the time to fight this attempt, to expose it for what it is: a cheap way of appeasing Arab "pride" after their resounding defeat at American and British hands.

I am not going to let them take risks again with my life, and my children's so some wrong-headed, doomed theory can again be proven wrong-headed and doomed (how many will have to die to prove the Road Map won't work? A hundred? A thousand?). Mr. Blair is allowed to say the IRA's answers to three questions concerning their renunciation of terror were "conditional and uncertain." When is the Israeli government going to have the guts to say the same about Abu Mazen as Prime MInister, and Muhammad Dahlan as chief of security?

There is only one plan that can create what is necessary for peace in our region, and this is it:

Collect all weapons, and deport anyone found with illegal weapons.

End all incitement to terror and hatred. Close down radio, television, schools, mosques that incite hatred.

Begin a reeducation program for children and adults that will take five to seven years.

At the end of that time, begin to create a new leadership from those WHO WERE NEVER FRIENDS WITH ARAFAT, AND WERE NEVER INVOLVED IN TERRORISM.

In the interim, Israel security forces are the only security forces in the region. Period.

We may not be able to stop the war against us. But at least we don't have to put down our arms and tie our hands behind our back. We don't have to walk over the cliffs like lemmings. Not this time. This time, I'm not going quietly, no matter what my elected leadership and their good friends abroad say.

Naomi Ragen, an American-born novelist who has lived in Jerusalem since 1971 has just published a new novel entitled Chains Around the Grass.  Many of her columns originally appeared in the Jerusalem Post, as well as in other Israel newspapers such as Yediot Aharonot and Maariv. Information on her books and mailing list can be found on her website at NaomiRagen.com.

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No more 'let's pretend'

Jerusalem Post Editorial, August 13, 2003

In the real world, two Israelis were killed in separate suicide bombings yesterday. It is time to stop playing "let's pretend." The road map, in both its conception and implementation, is based on the presumption that if we, the United States and Israel, pretend hard enough then reality will follow. It is not working.

In his June 24 speech last year, US President George W. Bush cut through decades of "let's pretend" when he erected two pillars of moral clarity: first that Arafat must go, and second that the obstacle to a Palestinian state is not Israel, but Palestinian tyranny, corruption, and terrorism.

Since then, the Bush administration has let these pillars crumble, while pretending that they still stand. Rather than the "new leadership, uncompromised by terror" Bush demanded on June 24, we are pretending that Yasser Arafat is gone, and that Mahmoud Abbas is untainted by him.

As fundamentally, the road map, supposedly constructed to implement the June 24 speech, reverts to the same old attempt to pretend that Israel shares responsibility for being attacked, and pretend that Israel, rather than Palestinian behavior, is an equal obstacle to Palestinian statehood.

But this is just the beginning. On top of pretending that Arafat is gone and that Israel must share blame for the transformation of the peace process into a war on terrorism, we are now pretending that the Palestinian Authority is on its way to complying with the road map, and that Israel is somehow in breach.

Why is the PA not mopping up terrorist groups such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the myriad offshoots of Arafat's own Fatah? Let's pretend it is because Israel is building a fence. Or not releasing enough prisoners. Or dismantling enough outposts.

Let's stop pretending. We all know that Israel will never, in the current context, release enough prisoners, dismantle the fence or enough outposts to satisfy the Palestinians and this assumes that it was legitimate for the Palestinians to make demands extraneous to the road map in the first place.

Pretending that Mahmoud Abbas is an independent actor, a democrat, and will wipe out terrorism will not make it so. The "help Abbas" mantra has, if anything, exacerbated the problem by tolerating unending excuses for inaction, even as the infrastructure of terrorism is rebuilt and terrorist attacks increase.

Yesterday's suicide bombings could easily have killed dozens of Israelis, as could have the many similar attack that have been thwarted since the hudna was declared. The game of tolerating missile attacks, suicide bombings, and shootings so long as "only" one or two people are killed is a cynical and bloody one. The lives that are lost and the families destroyed are not pretend they are real and cannot be made whole again.

The US and Israel must speak clearly and with one voice: Either the PA crushes the terrorists now, unconditionally, and without excuses, or Israel will do so itself. It should also be understood that if Israel is forced to crush the terrorists by itself, the PA, as a government that harbors terror, will also be replaced.

It is far from clear that such an ultimatum will impel the PA to act decisively; it is clear that absent such a stark proposition it will not.

This is not just a test of whether the US and Israel have embarked on a process that does not repeat the mistakes of its failed predecessors. It is a test of the seriousness of the entire war against terrorism. The terrorists want to destroy Israel, not create a Palestinian state along side Israel. But even if the cause of a peaceful, democratic Palestinian state is legitimate, how does that cause justify tolerance of terrorism? On November 10, 2001, Bush told the United Nations, "There is no such thing as a good terrorist. No national aspiration, no remembered wrong can ever justify the deliberate murder of the innocent. Any government that rejects this principle, trying to pick and choose its terrorist friends, will know the consequences." It is this doctrine that is being put to the test, here and now.

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