The past two weeks have seen an outbreak of violence in the Middle East unlike anything we have witnessed since the Intifada in the late 1980s and early 1990s."
A simple statement, but there's something fundamentally wrong with it, for it obscures an essential fact: The outbreak of violence in Israel and Gaza and the West Bank was choreographed and prepared for by the Palestinians, and the Israelis were then castigated in the media and at the United Nations for their "overreaction."
Charles Krauthammer said it well: To refer to what has been happening in Jerusalem, other Israeli cities, and the West Bank and Gaza as "violence broke out in the Middle East," a passive voice that casts no blame, is like saying that World War II broke out on Sept. 1, 1939, without mentioning who started the war.
The German invasion of Poland was also well planned and meticulously prepared, and the difference is that the Germans provided their own "provocation" by dressing in Polish uniforms.
Is the world aware of the martial music that played incessantly on Arab radio stations two weeks before Arik Sharon's appearance on the Temple Mount?
Is the world aware of what Ikrima Sabri, the Palestinian authority's officially appointed Mufti of Jerusalem, said to the faithful during their Friday prayers at the Mosque of El Aksa on the Temple Mount? He called for a "Jihad," a holy war, to eliminate the Jews from Palestine.
Had he gotten his way, that war would have been known as the "Rosh Hashanah War," because the Jewish New Year started that same evening.
Immediately after hearing the call for Jihad — surprise! The worshippers rushed the Israeli border guards and threw rocks at Jews worshipping at the Western Wall below the Temple Mount, the Jews' holiest accessible site.
The stones that rained down on those Jews at prayer had conveniently been piled up over a several day period at various spots on the Haram es-Sharif.
In other words, this was a pogrom/riot/Intifada waiting for a "provocation."
Arik Sharon provided it.
Then the media went to work, capturing woeful pictures of children caught in the "crossfire." How is it they weren't at school? What were they doing in the most dangerous place on earth?
And what about pictures designed to suggest that rock-throwing Arab teenagers were being met with overwhelming Israeli force?
Does anyone remember the picture that appeared in The New York Times and so many other newspapers purporting to show an Israeli soldier shouting at a bloodied Palestinian — who turned out to be a Jewish young man from Chicago — beaten to a bloody pulp by an Arab mob? Last week, two Israeli soldiers were lynched by an Arab mob in Ramallah and thrown out of a police station window.
The fact that the Palestinians were also throwing bottles full of gasoline and firing automatic rifles at Israeli soldiers and civilians hasn't seemed to garner the world's attention.
The fact that a Palestinian policeman on joint patrol with an Israeli policeman suddenly turned on him, shouting "Allahu akbar" (Allah is great) and killed him, hasn't gained much notoriety either.
None of this, in the eyes of the world, seems to justify a reaction stronger than "please stop."
When Israel concluded that "please stop" wasn't sufficient, they fought back.
So, the United Nations passes a resolution decrying the "overreaction" of the Israelis to this highly organized, desperate attempt to disrupt the peace process and discomfit, if not dismantle, the State of Israel!
Arafat and his minions may well win the propaganda war. Even in sports, it is the victim who reacts whose picture gets in the paper and whose team gets penalized, and he gets fined and reprimanded. The one who starts the fight may eventually also be fined and reprimanded. However, his actions are rarely depicted on prime time television.
But Arafat, who conveniently left the country, thus absolving himself of responsibility for anything that happened in his absence, has lost something he may never regain — the opportunity to make peace with Israel, which is the only way his people will ever be able to achieve any economic stability.
There is practically no one left in Israel supporting the peace process.
And whom would they talk with?
Arafat has zero credibility. Even left-wing Israelis who plowed ahead when everyone else was telling them what fools they were to trust the Arabs or Arafat, now no longer can hold their heads up. Abba Eban, one of Israel's great statesmen, knew whereof he spoke, when he said years ago: Yasser Arafat has never lost an opportunity to lose an opportunity.
It seemed that Israel and the Palestinian authority had come so close to peace, just a month ago. Ehud Barak had accepted incredible compromises suggested by President Clinton even regarding Arab control over the Muslim and Christian quarters of the Old City.
The one who refused to sign was Yasser Arafat.
The Palestinians will not be able to destroy Israel and "drive the Jews into sea," which, evidently, is still their goal. What they will succeed in destroying is their own future. And that, in the long run, may be the greatest tragedy of this entire tragic situation.
The Arab/Israeli imbroglio defies logic, and always has. And it seems clear that effors to negotiate settlements will never get farther than Ralph Bunche did in 1950, when he won the Nobel Peace prize for negotiating an armistice agreement between the nascent state of Israel and its enemies — Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Libya, and Egypt.
An armistice usually means, "I'm too weak to fight you today, but I'll get you tomorrow."
It seems that tomorrow has arrived.
This is a sad day for the Palestinians, a sad day for Israel, a sad day for the Middle East and a sad day for peace.
It appears that neither in this generation nor in the foreseeable future will the two peoples who could both benefit immeasurably from peace in the region have a change to obtain it.
