WHY DO THE
NATIONS RAGE?
Tunnels, Mosques
and the Toll of Oslo
Eugene Narrett
The recent violence in Israel should sober those who have sought to placate and compromise with the Arabs. When Israelis were shot with guns they had given Palestinian Arab "police" to secure order among their people, it underscored the fact that Oslo is anti-peace, and that the uproar over completion of a tourist tunnel is merely a pretext for familiar hostilities.
Since August, Yasir Arafat has set the tone, calling repeatedly for an uprising. His bottom line? "The most important point is that we can't accept the Judaization of Jerusalem," he declared September 25 in Gaza, adding,
"Jerusalem is our capital, and has been occupied since 1967."
Mr. Arafat's delusion on this point has been inflamed in recent years by back channel Labor Party suggestions that it would cede part of the city to the Palestinian Authority [PA] (and Hebron, and the Golan to Syria).
Arafat is as shrewd as he is savage, and understands that if Jerusalem cannot be Jewish, then Jews have no place in the Holy Land and are back to their status in 1939 when Britain repudiated its 1920 mandate to "establish a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine," that is, Jordan and Israel.
Arafat's implacable rejection of a Jewish Israel should surprise no one, even those who have forgotten him, pistol on hip, addressing the U.N. in 1974. Years of concessions have emboldened him, as they do all dictators. One tactic for undermining Jewish sovereignty has been to establish PA offices in Jerusalem.
The Netanyahu government for months had requested the offices be closed, noting they were explicitly forbidden by the Oslo accords. Though the PA pretends to swear by this "process," they refused to comply. On August 27, when Israel finally shut down two offices, an Arafat advisor called the closure, "inhuman, dangerous and provocative."
The head office of the PA in Jerusalem is Orient House, and for years it has illegally received foreign diplomats, trying to create a de facto dual sovereignty. Its chief, Faisal Husseini, said in May, "The Israelis should be reminded that their capital is Tel Aviv." This effrontery is implicitly supported by the Clinton administration,
which still resists the resolution of Congress that the American embassy be in Jerusalem. Noting this signal by our administration, the PA's planning minister, Nabil Shaath ("a noted moderate," according to Western media), called closure of the PA offices "a crisis. The Israelis have made a grave mistake," he said. Jaweh Saleh, Arafat's "Minister of Agriculture," proclaimed: "The peace process is finished."
Perhaps it is. If a Jewish Jerusalem is
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provocative and unacceptable to Arab sensitivities, "a national humiliation" as Arafat's advisor, Ahmed Tibi, says, complaints about the completed pedestrian tunnel are seen more readily for what they truly are, the latest pretext for an irrational hostility and endlessly escalating series of demands.
The facts: the tunnel was under construction for 12 years. Most of it, including the portion closest to the Temple Mount, has long been open and in use. A mixed archaeological and tourist project, it offers pedestrians transit from the northern end of the Western Wall to the Via Dolorosa a quarter of a mile away,
the road Jesus is said to have walked on his way to Calvary. The tunnel offers views of medieval and Roman halls, and a water channel built by Jewish laborers under Jewish kings 2100 years ago. It does not run under the Al Aqsa mosque or the Dome of the Rock. Despite the tunnel's patently innocuous purpose and placement,
Arafat and the PA have used it to whip their mobs into a frenzy, citing it as an attack on the mosques and a valid excuse for unleashing another "uprising." As usual, the media have almost unanimously echoed Arafat's claims. From September 26-28, they presented the tunnel as a casus belli, a mortal affront and mortal danger to Arabs and Islam. From CNN to CBS and throughout the mainstream press,
questions were hurled at Israelis. Why wasn't the tunnel's completion announced more publicly? Why hadn't there been a payment to the PA? Why hadn't Israel delayed completion? President Clinton was said to be "seething" that Netanyahu had deceived him, as if completing a tourist tunnel was an act of war. The only aspect of the situation that was in any respect new was that Netanyahu
did not immediately and totally capitulate in response to these senseless complaints. Indeed, a 36 hour closing on the Sabbath was followed by a re-opening and re-assertion of the hollowness of the complaint.
Some things never change, and those who ignore history may well be condemned to repeat it, bloody tragedies returning as bloodier farce. The violence of September 1996 recalls in its irrational pretexts, if not yet in
its scale, assaults 67 years ago, in 1929.
Shmuel Katz, author of Lone Wolf, a biography of Ze'ev Jabotinsky (New York: 1996), recounts how in 1929 the Arabs made a practice of harassing Jews worshipping at the Western Wall. The Ishmaelites banged
(Continued on p.6)
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