One Minute to Midnight
Dr. Irving Moskowitz
BUILDING WHOSE
CONFIDENCE?
The growing U.S. pressure on Israel to implement "confidence-building measures" to appease the PLO raises anew the failure of the PLO to ever offer any confidence-building measures of its own.
The Clinton administration wants Israel to let all Arab workers in Judea-Samaria and Gaza enter Israel, let illegal Arab residents stay in Jerusalem, and permit the PLO to open an airport, among other things. Such one-sided Israeli concessions are supposed to build the PLO's confidence that Israel wants peace.
Yet it is the PLO's behavior --such as giving the "green light" to terrorism and organizing Arab rioting-- which has eroded the Israeli public's confidence that the PLO wants peace. The administration should be pressuring Yasir Arafat to implement some measures to build the Israeli public's confidence.
For example, President Clinton could ask Arafat to change the PLO Covenant, extradite terrorists to Israel, change the name of the public square in Jericho that is named after Hamas bomb-maker Yiyhe Ayyash, and stop using letterhead that shows all of Israel as 'Palestine."
Of course, such actions would not really
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constitute concessions, since they are among the PLO's obligations in the Oslo accords, which it has never fulfilled. But they would be a good first step.
In the meantime, the current process by which Israel alone is expected to implement "confidence-building measures" will only build the PLO's confidence that Israel can always be pressured to make concessions, and that the PLO will never be penalized for its violations.
THE COMING WAR
(Continued from p.8)
mayhem) for coming Jihad.
Israel can take certain steps to prevent an otherwise inevitable war. These steps should involve measures that will prevent a corrosive synergy between enemy-state missile attacks and Palestinian terrorism, a synergy that is now taken by Damascus, Baghdad, Iran and Gaza as the starting point and prerequisite for Israel's mandated annihilation.
Preparing to prevent war on two fronts, Jerusalem must now strengthen its survival position via a suitable combination of deterrence and preemption while it simultaneously starts to fight back against Yasser Arafat and his Islamic partners.
Louis Rene Beres is Professor of International Law at Purdue University.
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