Palestinian meltdown

There are some headlines a prudent newspaper will key into its computer system. Or, as they used to say in the old hot-lead days, keep in type. Like the one I spotted on my Arkansas newspaper’s front page the other day:

“Arafat decision stirs turmoil.”

So what else is new? The same headline could have run over so many stories out of the Mideast over the past four, murderous years. Or ever since Yasser Arafat stirred turmoil by walking out of the Camp David peace talks in 2000, making Ehud Barak and Bill Clinton look like the suckers they had been.

The Palestinians’ leader then proceeded to stir turmoil by launching still another intifada, confident that at last he had discovered the way to bring down the Jewish state — this time through suicide bombings, a tactic borrowed from some of his less diplomatic rivals in terrorism.

How was he to know he would bring down the Israeli peace movement instead? For nothing could have been better calculated to unify the Israelis, and convince them Israel had no real partner with whom to negotiate.

In retrospect, one can see how Yasser Arafat hit upon his boomerang strategy: Hezbollah had just driven the Israelis out of Lebanon; why not use the same tactics to drive them out of Israel?

It seemed like a good idea at the time. For a while, it even looked like it might work. The Israelis seemed dumfounded as they were hit by one bloody attack after another.

How could Yasser Arafat have foreseen Israel would rouse itself and launch a sweeping counterattack all across the West Bank? That the Israelis would hunt down terrorists, impose curfews, search sprawling casbahs house-by-house, launch missiles against terrorist leaders, defy the usual international criticisms and in general defend themselves? By going on the offensive. Indefinitely. For the duration. However long that might be.

Now the Israelis are even building a wall — a long buffer zone and security strip, really, cordoning off the West Bank — to keep terrorists out. And it appears to be effective. (Naturally, the World Court and the rest of the United Nations apparatus denounced the wall. There is something about the spectacle of a small people not just refusing to die but actually fighting back that infuriates Kofi Annan & Co.)

Turmoil stirred again last week when it became clear that another of Yasser Arafat’s nominal prime ministers had found his tenure untenable. The second premier to submit his resignation — as a prelude to negotiating his staying in office — was Ahmed Qureia, a k a Abu Ala. He’s held on for 10 months, or six months more than the first — Mahmoud Abbas, a k a Abu Mazen.

But what do all these names and pseudonyms matter so long as Yasser Arafat, a k a Abu Amar, stirs turmoil? All the other names might as well be written on water.

And the result of all Mr. Arafat’s strategizing has been turmoil multiplied. The wily tactics and duplicitous deals and general chaos that were to bring down the Jewish state have instead reduced the dream of a Palestinian one to chaos.

All who seek peace favor some kind of Palestinian state. It was supposed to come at the end of a peace process, which will remain a war process so long as Mr. Arafat calls the shots (often literally). It’s as if the old guerrilla fighter cannot bear the thought of peace, for what would he do if peace actually came to pass? Became just another Arab potentate among all the others? Instead of the very embodiment of The Cause? What a comedown.

It becomes clearer through all the blood and violence that all this was never really a struggle over whether there should be a Palestinian state but whether there would be a Jewish one. To destroy it, whether piecemeal over time through guerrilla warfare or all at once in some general Mideast explosion, like the Yom Kippur War of 1973, has always been the aim of those who stir turmoil.

There’s always been light at the end of the tunnel — call it the two-state solution — but, as someone once noted with a deep sigh, there’s no tunnel. All agree on the goal but, every time a way to get there is proposed, turmoil is stirred.

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