Life may not imitate art, but it definitely imitates Jewish jokes. Like the one where a man stalks into an inn and threatens the innkeeper, “You’d better give me supper, or I’ll have to do what my father did!” “What did your father do?” asks the innkeeper. “Went to bed hungry,” the man replies.
That, in a nutshell, is the dialogue Israeli and world leaders had with Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat after last weekend’s serial suicide bombings. “This time, you’d better get serious and stop the terror,” Arafat was warned. And if not — then we’ll just have to let more Israelis be killed?
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon could not have made this plainer. First, he had the Israel Defense Force “send a very clear signal” by destroying two of Arafat’s unused helicopters — the message being, as columnist Charles Krauthammer aptly put it, that Israel could get Arafat but doesn’t dare. Next, the Cabinet declared the Palestinian Authority an “entity that supports terrorism” — after which, lest anyone imagine that this means something, senior ministers hastened to pledge that even if terror continues unabated, Israel will do nothing to oust Arafat or the Palestinian Authority. And finally, to prove how serious it is, the government ordered the IDF to bomb a few more empty buildings — something it has been doing, with no noticeable effect, for the last 14 months.
The international community made it equally clear that Arafat would pay no price for ignoring its warnings. Not one government threatened to sever relations with the Palestinian Authority or cut off its funding (although the U.S. Congress vainly urged President Bush to do so). On the contrary: The European Union deemed last week the ideal time to declare that whatever Arafat does, it will continue its financial support of the Palestinian Authority. Nor did any country fail to state that whether Arafat fights terror or not, they will not permit Israel to topple his government.
It is possible, of course, that even credible threats could be ineffectual: Arafat has proven over the past eight years that all lulls in the violence are strictly temporary. After the deadly suicide bombings of February-March 1996, for instance, he did respond to Israeli and international pressure by arresting terrorists. But when he decided, in October 2000, that another round of terror would suit his purposes, he ordered all those still in jail released.
Non-credible threats, however, are guaranteed to be ineffectual, which makes the slavish insistence on upholding Arafat’s regime completely self-defeating. One of the two main reasons that both Israeli and foreign leaders give for wanting to keep him in power is their belief that only he can sign a treaty with Israel. Yet Israel cannot sign a treaty with him as long as he is liable to re-ignite a terrorist war at any moment, and this will be the case as long as he knows that terror does not endanger his regime.
The second reason — fear that whoever follows him might be worse — is no more convincing, from either the Israeli or the Palestinian perspective.
For Israel, the worst-case scenario — a Hamas regime that aids, abets and incites terrorism — is no different from an Arafat regime that aids, abets and incites terrorism. Is a Hamas-appointed mufti ruling that suicide bombings are legitimate worse than an Arafat-appointed mufti doing the same, as the mufti of Jerusalem did last Thursday? Are the dozens of terror attacks each day that Israel has suffered for the last 14 months less deadly because it is Arafat rather than Hamas who fails to stop them?
For the Palestinians, the worst-case scenario — another corrupt and oppressive regime — is also unlikely to be worse than the corrupt and oppressive police state they now inhabit. And certainly no successor could do worse for them on the diplomatic front than Arafat did: He turned down a state in 97 percent of the territories, with East Jerusalem as its capital, in order to launch a terrorist war that has caused hundreds of Palestinian deaths and destroyed the Palestinian economy.
But by refusing to go after Arafat, Israel is not just sacrificing any chance of an improvement on the altar of baseless fears. It is also actually increasing Palestinian suffering, because the suffocating defensive closures that substitute for an active offense have deprived Palestinians of both a living and any semblance of normal life.
Sharon likes to compare the Palestinian Authority to the Taliban, with some justice. Like the Taliban, Arafat’s regime fosters terror abroad and repression at home, and like the Taliban, its ouster provides the only hope of relief for either the world or its own people. Unfortunately, however, the analogy suffers from one fatal flaw: So far, Sharon appears completely unwilling to assume the role of Bush.