Like all fascists, the terrorists cannot be appeased. They must be defeated. This struggle will not end in a truce or a treaty…[The terrorists] celebrate death, making a mission of murder and suicide... --George W. Bush, Dec. 7, 2000

President George W. Bush, commemorating Pearl Harbor on the deck of the aircraft carrier Enterprise, just returned from the Arabian Sea and action against Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban, put his finger on a rarely noted aspect of the terrorism problem facing not only America, but Israel. The terrorists are, as he noted, not "idealists", but fascists, people in love with death and power and committed to a radical politics of nihilistic violence against the innocent.

They cannot and will not "compromise". They may mouth various left-wing ideologies and use humanistic-sounding "socialist" vocabulary (see the Ba'ath parties in Iraq and Syria, the various PLO factions, including Arafat's Fatah, and recall Nasser's "Arab socialism"). But they are really fascists, little different, in fact, in their vicious antisemitism and vision of the annihilation of "the Jews" and the "Zionist entity", from the Nazis and neo-Nazis, whose hateful Der Stuermer propaganda and Holocaust revisionism are parroted daily in the state-supported Arab media and schools.

This truth has direct bearing on Israel's current situation, and on the unending agony of violence, murder and suicide bombings Israelis have suffered since the inception not only of the current intifada in September, 2000, but of the Oslo Accords eight years ago.

Despite his support from the social-democratic Left in Europe (itself a sad tale of political and moral hypocrisy), Arafat too is a fascist. This is evident not only in his own terrorist career (his PLO literally invented modern terrorism in the 1960's) and current winking at Hamas and Islamic Jihad murder, but also in his ruthless suppression of democracy and dissent in his own "Palestinian Authority". Various human rights organizations, including courageous Palestinian groups, have clearly chronicled Arafat's use of arbitrary imprisonment and torture, and numerous unexplained deaths in his prisons.

The Palestinian Authority has already demonstrated-- politically, economically, humanly--that "Palestine" would be a disaster for the Palestinians. It is not the much-trumpeted and hoped-for anomaly in the Arab world, a basically democratic state with individual rights grounded in a real civil society. "Arafatistan", a thugocracy repressing its own people, and concerned only with protecting its corrupt, self-aggrandizing leadership, is just another tawdry Arab dictatorship.

Arafat rejected Israel's radically-generous Camp David and Taba peace offers over a year ago, without making a counter-proposal. To respond in kind would have meant that he would, truly and finally, have had to recognize Israel's permanent legitimacy. He would have had to give up the old PLO dream of destroying the Jewish state, either by sparking a pan-Arab war of annihilation, or by erasing it through forced acceptance of the so-called "right of return", overwhelming Israel with millions of hostile Palestinian Arab refugees and their descendants.

Instead, Arafat's campaign of murder and violence sparked a war which has cost almost a thousand lives. All these victims, including the children, would be alive today if Arafat, instead of supporting a new, armed "intifada", had not spurned Israel's peace plan as the basis for a conclusive negotiation.

Oslo's "land for peace" accords have already given Arafat--this despite his complete lack of compliance with its provisions--direct control over almost 50% of the disputed territory and over 90% of the area's population. Yet Israel today is, clearly, further from peace than she was in 1993. Hence it should by now be abundantly clear that an Arafat-led sovereign state along Israel's borders would not only not ensure peace, but would be a de-stabilizing dagger aimed at the Jewish state's exposed heart.

It is time, then, to recognize that there is nothing "inevitable" about a Palestinian state. Real peace, as George W. Bush said, cannot be made with fascists, with death-enthralled fanatical Jew-haters whose "politics" embrace only one goal: Israel's ultimate destruction. Such thugs have to be defeated, not rewarded, and replaced—when, and if, they emerge—with more suitable, and truly moderate, interlocutors.