Power interviewed David Rawson, U.S. ambassador in Rwanda at the time of the massacre. Said Rawson: "We were naive policy optimists, I suppose. The fact that negotiations can't work is almost not one of the options open to people who care about peace. We were looking for the hopeful signs, not the dark signs. In fact we were looking away from the dark signs...One of the things I learned and should have already known is that once you launch a process, it takes on its own momentum... Once the Washington side buys into a process it gets pursued, almost blindly."
The Israeli daily Ha'aretz (November 27) reports that Sharon informed U.S. envoys Anthony Zinni and William Burns that Arafat "had established a coalition of terror with Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, PLO, Tanzim and Force 17 [Arafat's presidential guard]." The last three are of course part and parcel of Arafat's forces. Sharon says he will do all he can for the success of Zinni's mission (which is to restart the "peace process" on the basis of more concessions from Israel embodied in the Mitchell Plan), but there must be "seven days of complete quiet" as the first step toward its implementation.
Sharon is in fantasyland for two reasons. Israel will not obtain seven days of complete quiet. (We noted earlier in this column that Peres has already endorsed "two or three incidents a day" as acceptable.) To quote Steven Plaut: "Now think about this. After nearly a decade of Oslo, after a long series of Oslo 'Accords' and one full year after Ehud Barak offered the PLO all of the 'territories,' plus parts of pre-1967 Israel, plus the Old City with the Western Wall, plus tribute, plus allowing 150,000 Palestinian 'refugees' to 'return' to Israel, an offer dismissed by Arafat as too miserly, after all this we have now reached the situation where everyone on earth knows that a full week without the PLO committing atrocities is simply out of the question. A total nonstarter. A utopian dream."
Second, suppose Plaut were wrong and Arafat did halt terror for seven days. That would not change his avowed goal of replacing Israel with an Arab state or his readiness to revert to terror when "negotiations" stalled. The entire debate about seven days of quiet which dominates Israel today is absurd. The real problem is the asymmetry of goals between Israel and its Arab foes, the first wanting peace, the second Israel's destruction. By its policies of appeasement over the last eight years, Israel has whetted appetites not just in the Palestinian Authority but in much of the Moslem world to the point where they are prepared to pounce.
Americans For a Safe Israel
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Outpost - 12 - December 2001