Once again, the great sphinx looms over the Middle East. Yasser Arafat has everyone baffled.
Yes, after Arafat started a war just weeks after being offered a generous peace, most Westerners awoke to reality. Even The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman, searching in Arafat for “statesmanship and real peaceful intentions,” discovered “Mr. Arafat, it’s now clear, possesses neither.” (This, on Day 16 of the killing.)
But the bafflement remains. What does Arafat hope to achieve with violence? Israel’s defeat?
Isn’t that totally irrational? How are his rock-throwing mobs and newly trained 40,000-man militia going to defeat the Israeli military machine?
Well, look what happened this year in Lebanon, say the Palestinians. (The best place to follow what Palestinian leaders say to their people in Arabic is at www.memri.org, where indispensable translations are provided by the independent Middle East Media and Research Institute.) A ragtag guerrilla army in an almost open field drove the Israelis into a retreat so disorderly that they left many of their Lebanese allies behind, Saigon-like.
On the West Bank, moreover, the Palestinians enjoy additional advantages: a crowded urban battlefield where conventional armies are almost useless, an aroused population and a sympathetic world press.
The Palestinian strategy is open and clear: Use violence to bring international pressure on Israel; keep the nation mobilized, draining its resources and exhausting its will; bleed it as in Lebanon, but this time in the suburbs of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv; and force it back to negotiating from a position of weakness.
Arafat doesn’t oppose negotiations. He just opposes negotiations where he lacks the upper hand. The aim of the violence is to gain the upper hand, force Israel to sue for peace and then dictate the terms of a settlement.
Among the Arabs, writes defense analyst Ze’ev Schiff, “there is an increasing feeling that they have hit on the formula for bringing Israel to its knees.” How? “Ongoing, low-level war that combines massive terrorism, guerrilla warfare and the international media. … This strategy will expose Israel’s Achilles’ heel; an extreme sensitivity to loss of life and the kidnapping of its soldiers.”
Despite the apparent current lull, the fighting could last for months, even years (as did, for example, the Arab Revolt of 1936-39). Gun battles and casualties. International condemnation, boycotts and oil threats. Suicide bombings, terrorist attacks from Lebanon on the northern frontier.
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How long before Israel sues for peace? Remember, Israel found the first intifada (1987-93) so intolerable that it sued for peace with the Oslo accords. And that intifada–rock-throwing mobs, but few guns and no suicide bombings–was a picnic compared to today.
If Israel is brought to her knees, what terms does Arafat dictate? That’s easy. He’ll demand three things:
First, Jerusalem.
Second, a return not to the 1967 borders, but to the borders drawn by the 1947 UN commission for the partition of Palestine. That Israel is much smaller and barely viable. Arafat tried out that demand last year without success. Should he gain the upper hand, he will insist upon it.
The third is the coup de grace, to be administered were Israel to be totally prostrate. Indeed, it is so devastating that Arafat could forgo the first two and accept the terms Barak offered him at Camp David with but a single additional provision: the return to Israel of the descendants of the 700,000 Palestinians who left in 1948-49.
With a million Israeli Arabs already in open revolt against the Jews, imagine adding another 3 million to 5 million to Israel’s population. With fewer than 5 million Jews, that single provision is demographic suicide. It means the end of Israel as a Jewish state. Within weeks, such a state would be absorbed, like East Germany, by Arafat’s Palestine.
No muss, no fuss, no blood. Victory. Most Israelis would leave, deciding quite rationally that it is better to live as a minority in the tolerant West than as a minority among hostile Arabs.
Notice: just a single line in a new agreement is all it takes to liquidate the world’s only Jewish state. Notice, too, that Arafat and his lieutenants never fail to include the “right of return” when demanding their “just rights” as the price for peace.
Smug Westerners think Arafat is an old fool. He “never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity,” Abba Eban once said. Well, Arafat sees his opportunity now–for fulfillment of maximal Palestinian dreams. The means is this war, and the world is behind him. Only a fool would forgo such an opportunity. Arafat knows exactly what he is doing. The fools are those who think he doesn’t.
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Charles Krauthammer is a syndicated columnist based in Washington, D.C.