(Continued from p.10)
and pride, (which turned out to be typically short-lived) packed his bags, Mordechai assured his pals Madeleine Albright and Jamie Rubin that he wasn't leaving even if the Prime Minister did. There is an expression for that behavior in plain English. He is a rat who abandons the ship. That's what Carville, who is certainly fond of plain speaking, could say--but he won't, because his real client is and will always be the American president--whose pathetic foreign policy counts the Wye meeting as a "success."Yasser Arafat has entered the political fray in Israel, not simply as the thug at the center of the political debate, but as a participant. It appears that Labor's favorite terrorist is willing to postpone his upcoming declaration of statehood so that he can help get his Labor pol-pals elected. No doubt his Israeli fan club--whose cochairs are the widow Rabin and the parrot Peres--will welcome the news. His American friends in the Clinton cabinet will be thrilled. All this should send a serious message to the voters in Israel--but don't hold your breath.
If the stakes were not so high, one could have a good laugh at the follies which pass for policy in the Middle East. One weekend into the impeachment debate, President Clinton was biting his lower lip in Gaza while a bunch of thugs in grey suits raised their hands in what was hailed as a revocation of the murderous passages (virtually every word in it) in the PLO covenant. The sham proceeding was widely hailed as a sign of "compliance" by the PLO.
To our mind, even the most ardent advocates of the Oslo surrender were not really fooled by the show of hands. To begin with, the covenant was supposed to be revoked in 1993 after the infamous handshake between Rabin and Arafat. However, charter-revocation provided a fig leaf for those faint-hearted friends of Israel who did not have the guts to denounce the entire Oslo agreement. They hid behind a demand for "compliance" by the PLO--even in the face of escalating terrorism and daily violations by the PLO. They insisted that if and when the PLO complied with the Oslo agreements and all the ensuing documents accompanying Israeli surrenders of territory, "peace" would have a chance.
In fact, I challenge anyone to name a Middle Eastern treaty in recent times which has been respected by the Arab nations. Just prior to losing its mind in 1993, Israel's Labor government compiled a list of nearly two hundred agreements signed by Arafat, every single one of which he had violated. Remember when Syria and Egypt were so close they considered themselves one nation, the United Arab Republic? Jordan has been all over the political map in its alliances--one day it loves Saddam Hussein, and four years later it does not. Iran and Iraq signed a treaty in 1976, which was broken when Iraq attacked Iran in 1979. The Camp David treaty between Israel and Egypt is a shambles, abrogated in every respect by Egypt. Egypt's government-controlled press is perhaps the most violently anti-Semitic in the world. While there remains an Israeli ambassador in Cairo, there are no economic, cultural, or scientific exchanges as stipulated by Begin, Sadat, and Carter, the three midwives of the so-called peace treaty. The alliance between Israel and Lebanon forged by George Shultz in 1983 was broken within days by Lebanon.
Oslo, the Hebron agreement, and Wye are similarly doomed. But instead of calling it quits, Israel and its American supporters continue to speak of "compliance."
Compliance was never the problem. Complacency is the problem and the greatest danger.
Ruth King is a member of the executive committee of Americans For a Safe Israel.
mourns the passing of
Dr. William Perl
Rescuer of over 40,000 Jews during the Holocaust, pillar of the struggle
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January 1999 - 11 - Outpost