Here is a joke Israelis like to tell these days: Palestinian Chairman Yasser Arafat is in his office, alone, when his bodyguards, outside the door, hear a loud explosion. Rushing in, they see him on the floor, face bloodied.
“What happened, Mr. Chairman?” they ask.
“A l-l-etter b-b-omb,” Arafat manages to blurt out.
“But a letter bomb would have wounded your hands, not your face,” replies one of the guards.
“I was sealing it,” says Arafat.
Funny, isn’t it? The problem is, no one here has the urge to laugh these days. So Arafat is turning a blind eye to terror coming from his own court. You don’t say! He is not arresting the perpetrators of terror and the terrorists themselves. So what else is new?
While we Israelis can’t decide for the Palestinians who their leaders might be, we definitely have the right and even the duty to draw the immediate conclusion from the events of the last 10 months: Arafat is not the man with whom Israel can hope to make peace. He probably is not made of the same stuff of revolutionary leaders who, at a crucial moment in their people’s history, knew how to make the switch from a freedom-fighter to a nation-builder. Or in other words: He is not a man who realizes that the time has arrived to change from uniforms to a business suit.
If this is the case, what should Israel do? Try to minimize Arafat’s damage? Wait patiently till someone else, who can take yes for an answer, shows up? Topple Arafat and kick him and his rotten regime back to Tunis, where they came from?
You’ll find among Israelis today advocates of all the above-mentioned options, and more. Yet the issue is not the personality of the current Palestinian leader but that there is no real chance of achieving a negotiated peace between Israelis and Palestinians in the near future. There is no point now to dig again in the history of the century-old conflict and show how, in the legendary dictum of Abba Eban, the Palestinians have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. The last one they missed was when they rejected the offers of former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who leaned over backward to accommodate them with proposals that amazed even the most dovish of Israelis.
All the current talk about Barak being too pushy at Camp David — or the summit not being prepared well enough — is beside the point: True leaders should ignore side effects and grab the historic occasion when it presents itself. The Palestinian leader, at such a critical moment, fumbled. Rhetoric aside, the Palestinians simply are not ready yet to settle for what they have managed to get, and they just can’t truly accept the existence of the state of Israel.
Israel shouldn’t wait for things to deteriorate even further; rather, it should act. Instead of being locked in a hopeless, bloody tangle with the Palestinians, it should disengage from them. The accomplishments of the Zionist endeavor surpass our wildest dreams: We have a flourishing Jewish state, with 6 million citizens. We shouldn’t be ruling 2 million Palestinians. We should pull out of most of the West Bank and Gaza and consolidate the state we have, whose borders were accepted by the whole world. We should extend a loving hand to our brothers and sisters in those territories — who now are in daily mortal danger and whom we can’t protect properly — and help them in their transition back to Israel proper. World Jewry then will carve for itself a vital role in assisting in such move. What about the Palestinians? They will live next to us, in their own state, and it will be up to them to decide where and how they should be heading. If they choose to go on fighting with us, they’ll meet the full brunt of our mighty army, which now is being curbed by the nature of the conflict.
If they decide to join us in a peaceful cooperation for a better future, they would be most welcome. One thing is clear: In such a move, Israel will regain its freedom of action and the support of many nations.