"Peace Psychosis in the Middle East"
By George Will
Newsweek Op-Ed

Peace Psychosis In The Mideast Many realists worry that for 
Jews gathered in Israel, history may have saved its worst 
for last.

Jan. 8 issue - Bill Clinton may have saved his very worst for 
last. With remarkable — even for him — self-absorption, as he 
tap-dances toward the exit he is pursuing as his crowning 
legacy something that only the cynical or delusional could 
call a "final" Middle East "peace agreement."  In three weeks 
Clinton will be gone, leaving intensified Middle East chaos 
for others to cope with.

Israel's Ehud Barak has resigned as prime minister, triggering 
Feb. 6 elections that polls indicate he will lose in a landslide. 
For him, the long term is five weeks. Yet by then he hopes to 
have achieved a "permanent" solution to the Israeli-Palestinian 
conflict that is now in its sixth decade.  Yasir Arafat founded 
the Palestine National Liberation Movement, committed to Israel's 
destruction, when Eisenhower was president and Ben-Gurion was 
Israel's prime minister. Through 14 Israeli prime ministries
and nine U.S. presidencies, Arafat has remained so committed. 
It has come to this: Clinton has asked Barak who has a negligible 
constituency, and who has never asked Israeli voters for a mandate 
for anything remotely resembling the dangerous menu of territorial 
and other concessions he already has offered Arafat—to dismantle 
Israel's capital by ceding to Arafat sovereignty over Arab 
neighborhoods in East Jerusalem. Clinton also has asked Barak to
surrender to Arafat sovereignty over the holiest place in Israel's 
capital, the Temple Mount, location of the Second Temple, 
destroyed in A.D. 70.

RIGHT OF RETURN Arafat is affronted by the offer because it is 
conditioned on his forsaking the "right of return." That is the 
claimed right of up to 4 million people, who left Israel during 
its violent birth pangs in 1948, to return to their homes. 
Imagine identifying the possessors of this right, and the possible 
permutations of it. Today about a million Palestinians remain
in what are propagandistically called "refugee camps."  In 1945 
there were many millions of refugees and other displaced persons 
in Europe, many in camps. By 1950 this problem was essentially 
solved. Why, 52 years after the failure of the Arab war to kill 
the state of Israel in its infancy, are there still camps 
populated by the children, grandchildren, even great-grandchildren 
of people displaced in 1948? Because Arafat and other Arab leaders 
use these festering sores to foment irredentist extremism.
Acknowledging a "right of return" would be, for Israel, 
demographic suicide. That right is integral to Arafat's aim, 
the destruction of the Jewish state. Insistence on the right is 
tantamount to root-and-branch rejection of the supposed goal of 
the post-Oslo peace process" two states for two peoples."
That process has been a fiasco because it has assumed that 
Arafat simply wants to govern a Middle Eastern Belgium a small 
bourgeois nation located on whatever territories he, with 
American help, can extort from Israel. This assumption requires 
those who hold it to constantly deny that Arafat means what he 
constantly tells Arabic-speaking audiences that "with our blood 
and our martyrs we will redeem Palestine."  Last Wednesday, 
taking time out from deliberations about the Clinton-Barak offer, 
Arafat expressed optimism about one day seeing "a Palestinian boy 
or a Palestinian girl raising the flag of Palestine over the 
walls and churches and minarets of Holy Jerusalem."
Which is to say, over all of Jerusalem. Writing in the London 
Times Literary Supplement, Edward Luttwak of the Center for 
Strategic and International Studies says, "It is not a rhetorical 
exaggeration to speak of a peace psychosis, for that is what 
psychotics do: they impose their own imaginings on others, 
persuading themselves... in this instance, that after a lifetime
of struggle, Arafat wanted to end his days as a compromising 
negotiator, rather than as a conqueror."  As evidence that 
Arafat still sees himself as a conqueror, Luttwak reports that 
in 1998 a Palestinian editor of a newspaper published in East 
Jerusalem was kidnapped by Arafat henchmen, held for a week and 
beaten. His offense? He printed on page three rather than page 
one an article, written by an Arafat flack, comparing Arafat to 
the conqueror Saladin, who wrested Jerusalem from the Crusaders.

IGNORED EVIDENCE 
Barak's surreal 18 months of ignoring all such evidence has 
given Israel the worst governance in its history, as he has 
emboldened Arafat by making concession after concession in the 
hope that the recidivist liar would recognize Israel's right to 
exist. Until now Barak seems never to have met a concession he 
would not consider and soon offer, and evidently he seriously 
considered Clinton's latest and most reckless proposals for 
appeasing Arafat. But on Friday, in the aftermath of another 
terrorist bomb attack in Tel Aviv, and in the context of his 
plunge in the polls, he said Israel "never" would "transfer 
sovereignty of the Temple Mount the anchor of our identity."  
At last, a sticking point. The United States has cast itself
as "honest broker" between the only democracy in the region 
and those avowing their determination to destroy it. And the 
future of the Palestinian people is prefigured in the corrupt 
and violent thugocracy the Palestinian Authority that currently 
misgoverns the West Bank (per capita GNP, $2,300) and Gaza 
(per capita GNP, $1,000). In Washington an Israeli diplomat 
who shares Barak's thinking stoutly insists he does not "trust" 
Arafat. But Arafat is utterly reliable. He can be trusted never 
to keep an agreement and always to be candid about his ultimate 
objective, possession of all of Palestine meaning the 
annihilation of the "Zionist entity."  The diplomat serenely 
and surreally says optimism is integral to Zionism. Actually,
Zionism was born of profound pessimism about the ability of 
European Jews to achieve fulfillment or even safety without 
a national homeland, and the Zionist state was born of 
history's severest instruction in pessimism, the Holocaust. 
Pessimists are realists who worry that, for the portion of world
Jewry gathered in Israel, history may have saved its worst for 
last.

© 2001 Newsweek, Inc.