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14 Shevat 5761 - Febuary 7, 2001 | Mordecai Plaut, director Published Weekly
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Opinion & Comment
The True Palestinian Position

The new Israeli prime minister still has to contend with the Palestinians. Since the process of dealing with them was started by President Clinton over seven years ago, every prime minister, Right or Left, has been forced to deal with them by the press of world opinion and the momentum of the events that has made the Israeli dialogue with the Palestinians take on a tremendous, virtually irresistible, force in today's world.

It must be said of the Palestinians that they have shown patience and consistency. Even if some of the documents that they signed may have had ambiguous readings, the Palestinians have spoken consistently about their willingness to use violence and aggression and their insistence on a rigid set of demands: a state of their own that includes all of Yehuda, Shomron and Gaza, as well as Yerushalayim, and their full "right" to live wherever they want including the State of Israel.

The Palestinians have displayed not a bit of flexibility and willingness to compromise, and whenever they speak of progress in talks with Israel it means that Israel (under Barak and Foreign Minister Ben-Ami) has shown some new willingness to come closer to meeting their demands. They are patient and display no sign of feeling pressure to reach an agreement now or ever. They never acknowledged any "window of opportunity" while U.S. President Clinton was in office (and in fact criticized him the minute he left) and seemed totally oblivious to the repeated pronouncements of Israeli prime minister Barak that there were deadlines for reaching an agreement. They appear to have all the time in the world.

Barak's foreign minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami, declared that if they only had a little "quality political time," they could complete an agreement. Though uttered at the height of the recent electoral campaign, Ben-Ami has consistently maintained that an agreement with the Palestinians is achievable Real Soon Now.

Yet the stark truth is that no agreement is possible unless Israel makes all the concessions and gives the Palestinians all that they want -- and even then an agreement is not guaranteed. Unless and until Israel is willing to allow upwards of a million Palestinians to settle within the Green Line, there is no hope of an agreement. As of now, even the Left is unwilling to agree to this, since it will clearly be the end of the State of Israel.

Moreover, the Palestinians vow that they will continue to murder Jews until their demands are met. Most of them say this quite openly. Just last week the GSS arrested six members of Force 17 and charged them with the murders of more than seven Jews, including Binyamin Zeev Kahane and his wife, Hy"d.

These veteran terrorists are part of Yasser Arafat's personal troops, under his direct command and control and not part of any other element of the complex and convoluted Palestinian military establishment. They operate only under his personal orders. If they were involved in terror, it means that the authority behind them is responsible, namely, Yasser Arafat.

Perhaps it can be debated whether to shake Arafat's hand or to talk to him as long as his hand-picked troops are murdering. But the truth should be clear and well-known. It is undoubtedly true that one who refuses to acknowledge what is going on runs the greatest risk of fooling himself.


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