By: Mary Mostert, Analyst
February 7, 2001
In a humiliating defeat in the election in Israel, Ehud Barak said to his supporters:
"Accepting the will of the voter does not shake our certainty in the justice of our way. The path we walked down is the only true path, the path that in the end will lead Israel to peace and security, through the strength to separate ourselves from the Palestinians and place a border between them and us. Only a border will bring quiet, only a border will bring personal security, only a border will bring deterrence, and only a border will bring mutual respect."
"Barak conceded that the Israeli public might not yet be ready for the sacrifices he was demanding and said the same was true of the Palestinians, but time would compel them to change their views."
The election swept into office a man that most Israelis thought would NEVER win - Ariel Sharon, called the "bulldozer" for his fierce, and winning, military tactics. After only 22 months in office, Barak, who was always willing to fly to Washington to listen to Clinton's latest notions about what he should do, not only lost the election, he resigned as head of his party.
As recently as December 2000 Bill Clinton was pushing Barak to give up more territory, even, it was reported in the Washington Post, to the point of talking Barak into "sweeten(ing) the offer he made at Camp David, skating close to suggesting that he would yield Israeli sovereignty over the disputed Temple Mount in exchange for Palestinian renunciation of a 'right of return' for refugees displaced by Israel's founding."
"...People close to the talks said that although a deal on the Temple Mount appears to be within reach, the "right-of-return" issue could yet prove to be a deal-breaker. The Palestinians have long insisted on that right as a core condition of a peace settlement. Israeli officials say that opening their borders to several million Palestinian refugees would essentially mean the end of the Jewish state."
Several million? In 1939, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, there were only 1,500,000 in all of Palestine, which included the West Bank and the Gaza strip. Thirty percent of the population, approximately 445,000 people, were Jews. In 1946, because of the influx of Jews fleeing the Holocaust in Europe, the total population of Palestine had risen to 1,905,000, with more than one third of them, or 678,000, being Jews. When the State of Israel was established by the United Nations by PARTITIONING Palestine, surrounding Arab nations, Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Jordan mounted an attack on the infant state. Many Palestinian Arabs fled as the invasion forces and the Jews fought. Most of the Arabs lived in the partitioned segment, which we know today as the "West Bank" and Gaza. The West Bank actually was part of Jordan.
There weren't "millions" of people IN the land when Israel was established and not all the Palestinian Arabs fled. In 1948, the Arabs remaining in the new State of Israel numbered 170,000 and they were given equal social and political rights with Jews.
In 1967, when Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Jordan attacked a second time, after Egypt demanded the withdrawal of UN forces from the Gaza strip, Israel won again, in a lightening 6-day war. Israel insisted, for security purposes, on keeping the partitioned territory, which brought over a million Arabs inside the State of Israel. Most of the Arabs who "fled" from Israel in 1948, just went to the partitioned area.
There simple are not "millions" of Arab refugees that were "driven out" of Israel. The figure at the time was in the "thousands," not millions, Today the State of Israel's population is 5,643,100, 82% of whom are Jews gathered from more than sixty nations around the world. Before the Jews took control of the area, there is no way that many people could have lived on the land. Prior to 1947 the area was mostly desert and wasteland. The Jews built irrigation systems, water and sewer systems and reclaimed desert land to provide food and water for the "millions of people" who now live there.
And, frankly, it is that infrastructure that tempts many of the poor Arabs in surrounding nations. It is especially tempting to those who once lived on desert land that is now productive land, thanks to the infrastructure. What Arafat and his friends really want is control of all those goodies.
What appears to have happened with the election yesterday is a total rejection of appeasement the Clinton Administration pushed on Barak. Even from here it appeared to me that the more Barak agreed to appeasement of the Palestinians, in exchange for peace, the more violence Arafat and his crowd committed.
Even the papers of neighboring Arab nations seemed to realize that the continuing violence, in the face of concession made by Barak, was what assured Ariel Sharon's victory. The Qatar paper said:
JERUSALEM: Hawk Ariel Sharon yesterday stormed to a landslide Israeli election victory over Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who suffered a massive voter backlash over his failure to bring peace with the Palestinians amid months of deadly violence.
I suspect the issue that brought the Jews out to vote for Sharon was the suggestion, pushed on Barak at the December meeting at Bolling Airforce Base, to agree to Clinton's plan. Clinton was pushing involved "the final status of Jerusalem and its holy sites, borders, the fate of thousands of Palestinian refugees and Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza." The more Barak talked and the more he promised, the more terrorist attacks were launched against civilians.
What the Palestinians succeeded in accomplishing was the election of what they call the "super-hawk," Ariel Sharon, who simply states he will not negotiate anything as long as the violence against Israeli civilians is taking place. Either Arafat reigns in his bullies, or there will BE no further negotiation.
And, Arafat no longer has his good friend Madeleine Albright at his side. Instead he has Colin Powell to contend with who stated as recently as yesterday that US efforts to forge a peace could not move without an end to the violence.
That says, diplomatically, what Ariel Sharon is saying politically. No more negotiations until Arafat and his hoodlums stop killing people.
Peace is nice, but survival has become the issue in Israel at this point and survival always supercedes niceness.
To comment: mmostert@bannerofliberty.com -
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