Arafat's War

Subject: Arafat's War
From: GUEST
Date: 24 May 01 - 04:11 PM

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.

_________________________

Subject: RE: Arafat's War
From: InOBU
Date: 24 May 01 - 04:21 PM

Takes two to fight. Try talking BOTH sides, it is much easier than burying each other. - Larry

Subject: RE: Arafat's War
From: Shields Folk
Date: 24 May 01 - 04:26 PM

Is there a song about it?

Subject: RE: Arafat's War
From: InOBU
Date: 24 May 01 - 04:29 PM

Eric Bogal...They told all the fine young men... Larry

Subject: RE: Arafat's War
From: Dicho (Frank Staplin)
Date: 24 May 01 - 04:35 PM

This has been gone over in threads before. Until the Palestine refugees are allowed a humane settlement, the violence will continue. Israel will continue to spread into the remaining Palestine areas unless stopped. There is no hope for peace outside of external intervention.

Subject: RE: Arafat's War
From: GUEST,Gern
Date: 24 May 01 - 04:47 PM

Is it just me, or is it rather lame to copy someone else's published article and submit it, unidentified, into a discussion forum like this? Who is speaking here? Who wrote the article, where can we find it and who are you? Do you have any words of your own, GUEST? Most participants in these forums speak for themselves. What government intelligence agency is the source of his/her insider info? Whose agenda is being pursued here? Just how many discussion forums will receive this particular cut-and-paste editorial? What this very important issue needs is open, honest discussion -- not a saturation campaign of hysterical fabrications like those posted above.

Subject: RE: Arafat's War
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 24 May 01 - 07:05 PM

Any thread started by an unadorned GUEST is by definiton just intended to screw up the Mudcat, and should therefore be ignored. I suppose I've just broken that rule. (But this is the only time I'll post on this particular thread.)

Subject: RE: Arafat's War
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 25 May 01 - 05:21 PM

Well spotted, Guest Gern. Look at the Saudi Arabia and Afganistan threads as well. I think our mystery poster has a problem.

Cheers (Or Salaam, or Shalom)

Dave the Gnome

Subject: RE: Arafat's War
From: GUEST
Date: 25 May 01 - 05:34 PM

The article that Guest, Gern thinks was fabricated says, at the beginning, that it was written Charles Krauthammer and that it appeared in the New York Daily News on May 21, 2001.

The New York Daily News was one of more than 150 newspapers in the Unites States that carried the article.

It first appeared in the Washington Post on May 18, 2001.

Subject: RE: Arafat's War
From: GUEST,Berque
Date: 25 May 01 - 07:07 PM

The original poster misses one important point. Israel illegally occupies land that belongs to the Palestinians. International law is clear on this (backed by security council resolutions 194 and 242), Israel cannot occupy land taken by force. Israel has moved over 200,000 settlers into land that DOES NOT belong to them, and then uses this as an excuse to militarily defend those settlers. This being said, the Palestinians are justified in using force to expel an invasion of their land. This does not even begin to touch on the right of return of the original 700,000 Palestinian refugees or the status of East Jerusalem.