Charles Krauthammer New York Daily News, May 21, 2001 On May 6, the Israeli navy intercepted a Lebanese ship headed for Gaza. It carried a full cargo of weapons, including Katyusha rockets and Strella antiaircraft missiles. These are not weapons of protest. These are weapons for all-out war. The Katyushas can reach the most densely populated parts of Israel. The Strellas can bring down airplanes, military or civilian.

According to the ship's captain, two similar shipments had already made it through to Gaza. Yasser Arafat's war on Israel, begun eight months ago, is about to escalate dramatically.

Arafat has released all Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists from his jails. Many of them are working in his security forces. His own Fatah movement sports a guerrilla army called the Tanzim whose specialty is drive-by shootings of Jewish motorists and shooting into Jewish neighborhoods that border on Palestinian territory.

Thus far, Israel has responded by sending its tanks into Gaza--and then withdrawing. Palestinian spokesmen have denounced these cross-border Israeli raids. "They're not only designed to blur [boundaries]," said Nabil Shaath, Palestinian international planning minister. "They're designed to blur the whole prospect of peace." Boundaries? Peace? This would be comical if it were not so tragic.

Israel gave Palestinians this territory under the Oslo peace accords in return for the solemn Palestinian pledge to renounce violence and to settle all outstanding disputes through negotiations. Last October, Arafat decided to tear up Oslo and start his guerrilla war. Now he complains that according to the piece of paper he has torn up, his territory is inviolable. Even Hitler did not have the audacity to complain about Britain's declaring war on him after he invaded Poland on the grounds that Britain had pledged peace at Munich.

Why did Arafat start the war? The Palestinian Authority's various rationales are becoming baroque.

First, violence broke out, ostensibly because of Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount. Recognizing that it is a little much to expect the world to believe that visit spawned more than 200 days of shooting, rioting, bombing and murder, the Palestinians adopted another tack. They're fighting, they now say, because of the expansion of settlements.

That rationale is equally absurd. In the dying days of the Clinton presidency, Israel offered the Palestinians their own state and Israeli withdrawal from 95% of the disputed territories. The vast majority of settlements would have been uprooted. The remaining ones (grouped on a tiny 5% of the West Bank) would revert to Israel. And Israel would give Palestine an equivalent 5% of their own territory to make up the difference.

Result? A Palestinian state on land amounting to 100% of the West Bank--with no settlements, no Jews.

Arafat turned that peace offer down. Yet now he pretends he is fighting to get rid of settlements.

Why is he fighting? Read the speech he gave [on May 15]. He is fighting because a Jew-free Palestinian state is hardly his only goal. There will be no peace, he pledged, until the millions of Palestinians living abroad are returned to Israel--thus extinguishing it as a Jewish state.

Palestine first, then Israel. For decades the West assured Israel that its security depended on land for peace. Arafat, it turns out, is fighting for land without peace.

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