While the U.S. is hoping to hold the conference in June, it is possible, indeed likely, that Sharon will be saved from his own folly by inter-Arab feuds that preclude the conference from being convened, at least in the short term. Sharon must hope so, given the furor the prospect of the conference is already causing within the right wing of his coalition government.

A meaningful peace conference can only be held once Israel has decisively won a war, and it has not done so.

A meaningful peace conference can only be held once Israel has decisively won a war, and it has not done so. In his Knesset speech Sharon said that the terrorist organizations had stopped functioning and their members were "on the run." How long will those members remain "on the run" with Israel gone? As columnist Don Feder has observed of Sharon: "Instead of cleaning out the terrorist nest known as the Palestinian Authority, he'll agitate it a bit, then withdraw so the suicide bombers can get back to work." Says Feder: "The Palestinians Sharon thinks he can intimidate with a hard kick exist only in his imagination." The terror networks will regroup, rebuild damaged infrastructures, continue to incite and recruit their ever-younger candidates for martyrdom. Indeed, an early IDF intelligence assessment at the conclusion of Operation Defensive Shield found that leading Hamas terrorist leaders were not caught and are already working to rejuvenate destroyed terrorist infrastructure.

And as we have repeatedly emphasized in Outpost, walls, fences, buffer zones, "expanses of security" (the newest euphemism), will be of no avail. As Dr. Arieh Stav, Director of the Ariel Center for Policy Research, points out: "Jews have bitter experience with fences, such as those that were placed around concentration camps, ghettos, and the like...There is nothing more foolish than to build walls of this nature, as history has shown us time and time again." A small illustration of the fence-folly: even before Operation Defensive Shield had ended, Arabs cut the fence surrounding the community of Adora, broke into homes and killed their inhabitants. As for the monitors the U.S. (under European and Arab pressure) wants to station in territory controlled by the PA, they will not hamper suicide bombers or other killers but only the Israeli forces that seek to eliminate them.

By now it has become a truism (even endorsed by Sharon) that the Palestinians are entitled to their own state. But as Arthur Kahn and Thomas Murray pointed out in The Palestinians: A Political Masquerade, published by AFSI twenty-five years ago: "Where a national consciousness can only be fulfilled through destruction of an existing nation, the world is better off if the aspirations of the newly emergent nationalism are not fulfilled. The Arabs of Palestine have allowed themselves to be defined as an 'anti-nation,' one that derives its entire meaning and purpose from the desire to destroy another nation. The conflict with Israel has become the central fact of their identity and they have allowed the elimination of Israel to become defined as a messianic goal." Oslo has not changed this, the experience since 1993 only reinforcing the validity of what the authors wrote in 1977.

Glenn Yago, a director at the Milken Institute in California, described in the Los Angeles Times the hopes and efforts he and many others had still nurtured in 2000, when "giddy with great notions," they sat around conference tables in Nablus, Ramallah, and Jerusalem full of ideas for major investment projects to bring prosperity to the Arabs. All their proposals were blocked by Arafat, whose officials told them: "These are great economic projects and programs, but we can't move forward until the political final status agreement." Yago observes that "there was never a peace dividend for the Palestinian people because their leadership blocked every attempt to earn one. Without a constituency for peace, a constituency for terror quickly formed." The Palestinians, he says, despite our best efforts, "have found no way to build a country or serve a people; only a good way to start Arafat's war."

Sharon lays the groundwork for a new terrible diplomatic defeat.

The government of Israel has finally shaken off nine years of paralysis and acted forcefully against the PA. But this was a response of desperation to the escalating terror attacks under which even Sharon saw that his government -- and country -- would soon crumble. Sharon has no strategic vision, as his repeated endorsements of a Palestinian state and even qualified approval of the Saudi plan reveals.

There is only one course that can significantly improve Israel's security: resuming full military control of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, land to which Israel has legitimate claims religiously, historically (most recently under the terms of the Mandate for Palestine), and by virtue of its victory in the Six Day War, in which the aggressor lost.

Instead, Sharon calls for a regional peace conference whose purpose can only be establishment of the anti-nation as a full fledged state on Israel's borders. He lays the groundwork for a new terrible diplomatic defeat as a new state of Palestine is launched, now in a far better position to implement its Covenant of Death for Israel.

Rael Jean Isaac is editor of Outpost.

Outpost               - 4 -               May 2002