Israel's slide toward extinction in the last seven years suggests "Wilful Blindness" should be added to the list of the seven deadly sins and Pride should give way to Wilful Blindness as chief among them. Pride destroys a person, Wilful Blindness a people.

The White Paper published in this Outpost was written at the direction of the Barak government, withdrawn prior to release (under a combination of U.S. pressure and internal dissent, which delayed its release by a month), issued in an expurgated version (a section on the massive corruption of the Palestinian Authority's rule was removed) and even then not disseminated abroad (the Israeli consulate in New York complained their officials had to read about it in the New York Times). Indeed even now, although the Prime Minister's Office released it, on the Paper itself there is no indication of its source. It is being repudiated even as it is being issued.

Nonetheless, the White Paper is stark testament to the wilful blindness that has been the hallmark of Israel's government since 1993. Intended as an indictment of Arafat's behavior, the White Paper emerges as a far greater indictment of the behavior of successive Israeli governments which recklessly endangered the very existence of the state -- and even now, pursue the same disastrous policies.

The White Paper begins by asking, "Why were formal commitments important in the post-1993 peace process?" It points to Arafat's background of terrorism, his commitment to eliminating Israel, his pattern of breaching agreements with host Arab countries, and his misgovernment in the zones the PLO had controlled in Lebanon. (Although the White Paper does not specifically mention this, in the year prior to Oslo the Israeli Foreign Office had issued a report compiling a list of over 200 agreements that Arafat had signed and then violated.) In other words, the Israeli government was well aware of Arafat's track record proving that his signed agreements were worthless.

The White Paper explains how Israel decided to solve the problem -- by demanding "formal commitments on some of the most basic and presumably obvious aspects of the process." In other words, the solution to Arafat's ignoring signed agreements was to assume he didn't understand them and to spell out the terms more fully and carefully! The residents of Chelm think -- if one can use the term for their peculiar process of reasoning -- in this fashion.

The White Paper goes on to describe how Arafat from the very beginning -- indeed from his speech on the White House lawn -- gave indications of his bad faith. It describes Arafat's use of the language of "jihad," the Palestinian Authority's persistent incitement of Arab youth against Israel, the refusal to collect illegal weapons, the use of violence against Israel by its security forces, not only in recent months, but going back to 1996 (when the Hasmonean "tunnel" was opened). The White Paper further chronicles the extent to which the Palestinian Authority colluded with Hamas from the very beginning, the bogus trials of Hamas murderers, and the large-scale incorporation of these people into its police forces. As Outpost readers will see, many other violations of the accords by Arafat are spelled out in the White Paper.

And how does the Israeli government justify having continued the "peace process" when it had quickly become clear, on its own admission, that Arafat had made a mockery of it? That is in the White Paper too. "Against the mounting evidence of bad faith," Israel "kept alive the hope for a stable peace, based on the assumption that the process, and its momentum, would modify Arafat's stance on compliance and on the question of violence as an option." In other words, from the outset the government saw that Arafat was reneging on every aspect of its meticulously worded agreements, but

Pride destroys a person, Wilful Blindness a people.

Attached to the White Paper are two appendices which, for reasons of space, we have not printed. One consists of a long list of "key commitments" undertaken by Arafat with citation to the agreement in which it was embodied. Indeed, often numerous agreements are cited since Israel's "solution" to Arafat's ignoring a specific commitment was to repeat it in the next agreement. For example, the commitment regarding limitations on arms and ammunition for the Palestinian police is given as "Gaza-Jericho Agreement, Annex I, Article III.5, Interim Agreement, Annex 1, Article IV; Hebron Protocol, Article 5."

The second, much briefer appendix is called "Implementation of the Sharm el-Sheikh Understandings," the hastily arranged conference called by President Clinton which was supposed to bring an end to Palestinian violence. Israel lists the items it fulfilled and contrasts these with the Palestinian Authority's non-compliance. The theme of these appendices can be summed up as "We live up to our obligations; they live up to none of theirs; we are the good guys; they are the bad guys."

But if, as the White Paper makes clear, Israel knew when it embarked on Oslo that Arafat had never honored an agreement and once the "peace process" began had overwhelming evidence that the pattern

[(Continued on p.4)]

December 2000               - 3 -               Outpost