Intelligence sources have issued “eight specific terror warnings and dozens of general warnings.” The threat is emanating mainly from towns like Jenin, Nablus, and Hebron in the West Bank, which is under at least the nominal rule of Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas. For the Jewish holiday season stretching from Rosh Hashanah (this year, September 13) to Simchat Torah (October 5), Israel’s security forces have been put on the highest alert level against terrorist attacks. Intelligence sources have issued “eight specific terror warnings and dozens of general warnings.” The threat is emanating mainly from towns like Jenin, Nablus, and Hebron in the West Bank, which is under at least the nominal rule of Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas.
Amid a welter of other incidents including nonstop rocket and mortar fire from Gaza, last Friday terrorists shot at an Israeli civilian vehicle in the West Bank and wounded two. It was the “military wing” of Abbas’s Fatah movement that openly took credit.
This week an extended Israel Defense Forces antiterror operation in Nablus, in which one soldier was killed, led to the arrest of a suicide-bombing cell and of two more Fatah terrorists.
Meanwhile, Condoleezza Rice came to Israel for talks on the peace conference supposed to be held in November between Israel, the PA, and as many Arab states as can be cajoled into attending. In his speech on the Middle East last July 16, President Bush called on the Arab states to “end[. . .] the fiction that Israel does not exist, stop[…] the incitement of hatred in their official media, and send[…] cabinet-level visitors to Israel.”
Bush and Rice know that these words have had no effect and none of those things have been done. They also know that Abbas and his fellow alleged moderate, Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, have done absolutely nothing to end genocidal anti-Israeli indoctrination in the PA, where anti-Israeli (and -Jewish) hatred runs so high that any Israeli who strays into a PA town is likely to be dragged out of his car and lynched by a mob.
But none of this has stopped Rice from continuing to try and arrange the November conference and get as many Arab parties as possible to come to it. For his part, Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert now says he wants to issue only a “joint declaration” with Abbas instead of an “agreement of principles” in which Israel would agree to commit suicide by handing almost all of the West Bank, plus parts of pre-1967 Israel, to the fanatically jihadist PA.
In response to Olmert’s waffling, the PA has, not surprisingly, started to issue threats. Earlier in the week the left-wing Israeli daily Haaretz “quoted associates of Abbas” as telling the paper that he is planning not to attend the conference “unless Israel agrees to reach an agreement with the Palestinians there.” Otherwise, say these associates, the summit could “prove dangerous.”
Abbas’s office released a statement that “all issues of the permanent agreement—including jurisdiction of holy places, permanent borders and the question of Palestinian refugees—must be addressed in the agreement” and demanding a “timetable and mechanisms . . . for . . . implementation.”
An Abbas “senior adviser” told Haaretz that “We can live without the summit, but if it does take place and fail by producing nothing more than a joint statement, then it could prove to be a danger for the whole region.”
Saudi foreign minister Prince Saud al-Faisal added, in a briefing for reporters in Jeddah, that “If this conference will not discuss serious topics aimed to resolve the conflict . . . and oblige Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories, this conference will not have any objective and will turn into protracted negotiations.” Egypt is also said to be reluctant to attend.
Not surprisingly, then, Israel and the Palestinians (backed by Arab states) view the conference differently. Olmert—whether merely because of pressure from the two most right-wing parties in his coalition, Yisrael Beiteinu and Shas, or some awareness of his own of the actual disposition of the PA and the Arab states toward Israel—now seems to prefer a relatively vague “declaration” in which Israel would likely make major, reckless concessions but still short of outright committing to suicide. For the PA this is unsatisfactory and “dangerous”—by which they mean two things.
One is that a summit perceived as too nonchalant toward Israel would vindicate and strengthen Hamas, rival of the official West Bank PA. But the PA officials who spoke of “danger” to Haaretz, knowing they would be prominently quoted on both its Hebrew and English websites, were also using sheer intimidation by hinting at intensified violence.
Such bullying—a kind of verbal counterpoint to the already-simmering physical terrorism—is aimed at exploiting the latest U.S.-driven “peacemaking” to push Israel further toward submitting to the PA agenda. That agenda consists of: displacing Israel from the holiest Jewish sites; shrinking it back down to indefensible borders; and achieving its demographic dissolution by flooding it with “refugees.”
Now Abbas is further demanding, as a precondition for PA attendance, the release of hundreds more terrorists from Israeli prisons and the removal of dozens of security checkpoints in the West Bank. Olmert already plans to comply with the prisoner release. Defense Minister Ehud Barak has already told Rice that Israel will indeed be removing some of the checkpoints despite their key role in preventing West Bank terrorists from reaching Israeli cities.
If it sounds like playing with Israeli lives again, it is. It is not clear what U.S. interest is served by pursuing a fictitious peace process whose only practical outcome is to weaken and endanger a Western outpost surrounded by jihad threats. Ms. Rice appears fatally unable or unwilling to grasp that the PA is a violent regime and society that could not be less interested in peace.
P. David Hornik is a freelance writer and translator living in Tel Aviv. He blogs at http://pdavidhornik.typepad.com/. He can be reached at pdavidh2001@yahoo.com.
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