This is precisely what Arafat has hoped to achieve by his campaign of terror. Back in January 1996, he outlined his strategy in Stockholm at a closed meeting of Arab ambassadors, which was unexpectedly leaked by one of them to the Swedish Christian evangelical paper Dagen (and subsequently published in the Jerusalem Post of Feb. 23). Arafat promised that he would "make life intolerable for Jews" so that they "will give up their dwellings and leave for the U.S....at least a million rich Jews will leave Israel."

2. Israel's inaction leaves the initiative to the enemy, and informs him there is no penalty for continuing violence. Compared to the gains in disruption of Israeli life, the costs to the PA are minimal, chiefly attacks on empty police buildings, with occasional brief tank forays into PA-controlled territory. The only meaningful Israeli action in respect to a building was taking over Orient House in East Jerusalem, which the PA, in patent violation of the Oslo agreements, had used as a combined Foreign Office and "police" center. Orient House has been the PA's meeting place with foreign dignitaries; its various armed forces including Hamas and Islamic Jihad met there; and its "enforcers" used it as a base to abduct Arabs (supposedly entitled to the full protections of Israeli law) to Ramallah for detention and worse. Even here, the government immediately announced it only planned to hold the building for a six month period.

A public desperate for action, any action, turns to off-the-wall ideas like "A Wall."

Yes, Israel also engages in "targeted killings" of individual bomb-makers and planners of suicide missions. This is no doubt inconvenient for them, but except for rare cases (the assassination of Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine head Abu Ali Mustafa counts as a genuine loss to the "terror community"), it does nothing to destroy the terrorist infrastructure. The killings do not threaten the PA nor do they ensure the "safety and tranquillity" of Israeli citizens. The chief effect is to open up "job opportunities" for new zealots. Incredibly, Israel repeatedly reassures Yassir Arafat, the fountain of terror, that he is in no personal danger. In August 2001, addressing Arafat via Israeli Television's Channel One, Defense Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer declared: "Abu Amar [Arafat's nom de guerre], I guarantee your safety. Do not fear. We want you to continue leading your people towards the direction of peace." (Note that even Ben Eliezer does not dare say Arafat is leading his people toward peace; he substitutes the ludicrous "towards the direction of peace.") Arafat knows that he can bring Israel meekly back to the negotiating table at any moment he chooses, as if nothing had happened. He has merely to stop --or even slow--the violence for a few days. And indeed, deciding it was time to go slow after the World Trade Center bombings, under pressure from Arafat, Hamas publicly announced a decision to "suspend attacks" within Israel (presumably leaving open attacks outside the old Green Line of 1949) for the "coming period." While the Peres-Arafat meeting has become a comic on-again-off-again routine (as the "suspension" has yet to be noticed on the ground), it remains at Arafat's discretion to bring Israel to the table, ready to offer up what Sharon calls in advance "painful compromises."

3. Israel's de facto acceptance of what her own leaders repeatedly call an "intolerable situation" reinforces the growing sense in the Arab world that Israel is a paper tiger. This perception energizes the Arab "street," impelling the so-called moderate Arab regimes to ratchet up their pressure on Israel. It also undercuts potential alliances. While Turkey has common interests with Israel in curtailing the power of her neighbors, as a state with a large radical Islamic movement, it knows an alliance has potentially serious costs. The weaker Israel looks, the more Turkish leaders must conclude the risks of an alliance outweigh the benefits. (In the Boston Globe, columnist Jeff Jacoby makes a similar observation about the United States. In a column entitled "We fight now because we didn't fight then," he points out how this country failed to respond--or even worse, responded by taking flight--to a series of terrorist actions: the bombing of U.S. military barracks in Beirut that killed 241 marines, the butchery of 49 Americans at the U.S. embassy in Beirut, the plane seizures and hostage taking in Lebanon, the destruction of Pan Am 103, the blowing up of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, among others. And so the terror network concluded, says Jacoby, that America was mighty in arms but weak in spirit, unwilling to fight-- and the time had come to attack.)

4. Internally, toleration of the intolerable leads to growing indifference by Israelis to the daily bloodshed and loss of the sense of mutual responsibility that had been one of the finest characteristics of Israeli society. One need only think of the enormous efforts Israel exerted, ignoring international boundaries, to extirpate each of those responsible for the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. But now the sense that nothing can or will be done has made Israelis revert to the apathy which the great poet Uri Zvi Greenberg denounced during the Arab uprising of 1936, when Jews also took pride in a policy of restraint, then called havlaga.

In an August 8 article in Ha'aretz, journalist Nadav Shragai quotes Greenberg: "Even being killed without respite is a habit in the nation ...where is there a Diaspora

Outpost               - 4 -               September-October 2001