"War and Then a Wall"

Abu Afak, Montag, 04. August 2003, 01:41 (vor 7954 Tagen)

By George F. Will
April 3, 2002

"If you start to take Vienna -- take
Vienna."
-- Napoleon

Yes, military tentativeness is ruinous. But what,
for Ariel Sharon, is Vienna?

Today´s war began 18 months ago when Yasser Arafat
-- a Goebbels echoed by gullible news media --
said the violence he orchestrated was a
spontaneous conflagration of popular indignation
about Sharon visiting a holy site in Israel´s
capital, Jerusalem´s Temple Mount. Now the war
may have become the first half of the only
currently feasible formula for Israel´s
self-defense -- a short war, followed by a high
wall.

Israel made the worst diplomatic miscalculation
since Munich when it resurrected Arafat´s
political life by bringing him back to Palestine
from Tunisia a decade ago. The culture of death
that he has assiduously cultivated has produced a
Palestinian population intoxicated with a pogrom
mentality, and convinced that the results of 1948,
not just 1967, can be reversed...."

...Less than two years ago, candidate Bush said:

"A few years ago on a trip to Israel, General
Sharon took me on a helicopter flight over the
West Bank. And what a trip that was. What struck
me . . . is the tiny distance between enemy lines
and Israel´s population centers....""

Note the words "enemy lines." Bush knows that no
Israeli leader can accept restoration of those
1967 borders, which were accidents of war..

.. The vacuum has not been filled by the barely
legitimate regimes of the Arab nations, many of
which are well-described as "tribes with flags."

There is no basis in international law or historic
practice for U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan´s
assertion that Israel´s occupation of the West
Bank is "illegal." Israel´s 1967 borders are
armistice lines from 1948, when Arab nations,
rather than accept Palestinian statehood provided
by U.N. resolutions and accepted by Israel,
attempted to destroy Israel.

The occupied territory on the West Bank is an
unallocated portion of the Palestine Mandate, to
be allocated by negotiations. Jordan was the
military occupier of the West Bank from 1948 to
1967. In 1951 Jordan tried to annex the West Bank,
but no Arab nation recognized the annexation.
Israel took the West Bank when repelling
aggression from there in 1967. Under settled
international practice, Israel is entitled to hold
the land until made secure by negotiated
arrangements.

But Arab nations have nurtured conditions inimical
to regional stability, partly by the novel
invention of four-generation "refugee" families.
In 1945 there were many millions more refugees in
Europe than there were in the Middle East in 1948.
By 1950 Europe´s problem had ceased festering. But
54 years after the founding of Israel, Palestinian
"refugee camps" -- cities, actually -- exist
because Arab nations have been unwilling to absorb
Palestinians and want cities that are hothouses
for developing irredentist fanaticism.

Sharon reportedly wants to exile Arafat, the chief
fomentor of such fanaticism. If so, why the
tentativeness? Sharon should ship Arafat to
Europe, where there is much official sympathy for
him. Arafat would like today´s France, where he
could place his phone calls by the light of
burning synagogues.

http://www.israelint.it/articoli/war_and_then_a_wa
ll.htm