Updates from AIJAC

Arafat, the Karine A, and demilitarisation

Today, Updates focuses on a series of attempts to interpret what the seizure of the Palestinian weapons ship, Karine A, reveals about Arafat and the Palestinian Authority.

Jerusalem Post publisher Tom Rose, writing in The Weekly Standard, argues that not only is Arafat a lost cause as a peace partner, but the Karine A saga shows that the imperative must be for a democratic Palestinian regime if there is to be any hope for peace.

Then Gerald Steinberg of Bar Ilan University points out the Karine A puts a dent in one of the major arguments assumptions of most presumed Israeli-Palestinian peace deals, the assumption that a Palestinian state can be demilitarised so as not to be a threat to Israel. Steinberg argues that this revelation calls for a re-think of the Oslo assumptions.

Finally, The Wall Street Journal published some reminiscences of Arafat from an unusual source, Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, a Rumanian intelligence head under Communism who defected in the 1980s. Pacepa says, that based on his own direct experience of Arafat, he is not surprised by the weapons ship revelations and argues that the US and Israel need to think about making peace without Arafat.

Arafat's Naval Adventure : It's time for him to go.

by Tom Rose

The Weekly Standard - 01/21/2002, Volume 007, Issue 18

Jerusalem - IF NEW PROOF were needed that reforming Yasser Arafat is a lost cause, the Israeli navy's pre-dawn seizure last week of a cargo vessel destined for Gaza City and packed with 50 tons of weapons supplied by Iran should have provided it. The ship was registered to Arafat's Palestinian Authority, paid for with PA funds, and skippered by a lieutenant colonel in the PA Navy who told investigators his assignment was to deliver his secret cache directly to the PA. At least 7 of the 13 crew members belonged to Arafat's private militias.

The Israeli government called it the largest and most dangerous illegal arms shipment ever attempted. Had it reached its destination, every inch of Israel would have been in range of its cargo, which consisted of long- and short-range Katyusha rockets, LAW and Sagger anti-tank missiles, long-range mortars, sophisticated mines, nearly two tons of hi-tech semtex plastic explosive many times more deadly than what the suicide bombers currently use, hundreds of high-powered sniper rifles, thousands of rocket-propelled grenades, anti-tank grenades, and, most dangerous of all, an undisclosed number of SA-7 (Strella) anti-aircraft missiles capable of imperiling commercial air service into and out of Tel Aviv.

On the other hand, Arafat has been leading one terrorist organization or another for four decades. Why should a little Katyusha-running change anything? As it turns out, it won't. Israel seems to view the episode as just another public relations opportunity to be milked; the United States as a public relations challenge to be managed. Neither regards it as reason to begin the process of replacing Arafat's regime with one less malign.

Not only did the State Department refuse even to discuss breaking with Arafat, but Washington's special Middle East envoy issued no rebuke to Arafat. Quite the contrary. Retired Marine general Anthony Zinni concluded a visit to Israel two days after the boat was seized by telling reporters that he saw "a real opportunity for progress." A State Department official travelling with Zinni said bluntly, "Our mission will go on, ship or no ship."

That passing comment explains why recent American and Israeli efforts at Middle East peacemaking have so miserably failed. Excusing Arafat's criminality only insures more. If it takes the United States five days to so much as criticize the most brazen attempted violation of the Oslo Accords, what crime could ever justify Arafat's ouster?

The obstacle to peace between Israel and the Palestinians is not the inability to resolve particular issues, but the violent, oppressive, and unstable nature of the Arafat regime. Until U.S. and Israeli policymakers realize that peace depends far more on the nature of a future Palestinian state than on its borders, Israelis will not know peace and Palestinians will not know freedom.

If a future Palestine were free, nonviolent, and committed to bettering the lives of its people and to living in peace with Israel, it wouldn't threaten Israel. But a Palestine that resembled the corrupt and dictatorial Palestinian Authority would be a mortal danger.

Dictators make bad neighbours, and before he is an Arab, or a Palestinian, or even a Muslim, Yasser Arafat is a dictator. When he founded the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964, there was not a single "Jewish settlement" to oppose nor an "Israeli occupation" to resist, because the West Bank was ruled by Jordan and Gaza was ruled by Egypt. Arafat created the PLO to destroy Israel. He learned that first he had to consolidate his power over a fractious and scattered people. He chose to do that by killing those who challenged him and oppressing the rest.

It took an inarticulate Israeli general turned prime minister to lay bare the fatal mindset from which Oslo was born. The PLO leader, said the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, was the ideal partner precisely because he was a dictator. Arafat could crack down on terrorists, Rabin said, because, "unlike us, he doesn't have to worry about elections or human rights groups." Thus, Israel itself was midwife to the terrorist-supporting tyranny now in its midst. Rather than requiring that the Palestinian Authority have an open political system, Oslo gave Arafat both the time and the resources to consolidate his rule.

Like other dictators, Arafat has to worry not about losing an election, but about losing his life, and those most likely to take it are the extremists he has armed, funded, and trained. The notion that Arafat could ever crack down on the very organizations he needs to survive is preposterous. For Arafat, upsetting Colin Powell carries little risk. Upsetting Hamas, Islamic Jihad, or even his own private militias carries the ultimate risk.

But there's another, more important reason why Arafat isn't going to crack down on terrorists--namely, that they help him. In fact, these groups provide his regime with the best insurance stolen American aid money can buy: They keep the national focus on fighting the external enemy rather than on the failings of their leader. If Palestinians could vote, things might be different. Arafat might have to defend his record. And quite a record it is.

Many people think Arafat's refusal to rein in the terrorists demonstrates his weakness. But Arafat is far from weak when it comes to dealing with those Palestinians who clamour for an end to corruption, a freer press, religious liberty, or even elections. With these opponents, his retribution is swift and merciless. While the number cannot be known for sure, Arafat's PA is almost certainly responsible for the murders of dozens of political opponents, none of them Islamic extremists.

Since its creation in 1994, his Palestinian Authority has presided over the collapse of the Palestinian economy. He was given billions in aid, and squandered what he and his cronies didn't steal. With GDP down nearly 70 percent, Palestinians have seen their collective national net worth reduced by more than two thirds. Virtually nothing remains of a once reasonably vibrant private sector. Corruption exists on a scale that even the normally approving Europeans cannot abide. Public infrastructure has disintegrated. Public health standards, just seven years ago the highest in the Arab world, are among the lowest. And the disastrously self-destructive terrorist war against Israel that Arafat started last year has reduced Palestinians to the most desperate conditions they have seen since the creation of Israel in 1948.

Arafat denies responsibility for the actions of extremists he cannot stop. Yet he alone controls the state media, whose endless torrent of incitement to murder creates the climate in which young men embrace the vocation of terrorist. A central character on Palestinian television's leading children's show is a 7-year-old boy who aspires to become a suicide bomber. The people's cry for blood, which Arafat purposely foments, Hamas and Jihad can answer, creating in the process new martyrs to fuel the cycle. Arafat and Hamas aren't enemies or rivals, they are co-dependents. Arafat needs Hamas and Jihad to divert the people's hatred, while Hamas and Jihad need Arafat to provide "moderate" cover for their murderous acts. Arafat needs terror much more than he needs Colin Powell.

It seems worth asking why neither Jerusalem nor Washington ever sought to democratize the Palestinians. Particularly in the early stages of Oslo, when Arafat was dependent on American and Israeli support, the Palestinians would have had an excellent chance to build the first democracy in the Arab world. A democratic Palestine would have been a landmark achievement. If only someone had bothered to insist on it.

But it wasn't without reason that no Israeli, American, or European government ever made such a demand. It's just that the reason is a dirty little secret. The truth is that virtually no one in either government believes Arabs to be capable of--or even worthy of--democracy. In Israel, it is the supposedly enlightened left that most passionately rejects the notion that Palestinians could govern themselves democratically. The only reason the right hasn't rejected the idea is that it has never considered it. With the exception of Natan Sharansky, the deputy prime minister who spent nine years as a prisoner of Zion in the Soviet Gulag, not a single political figure has made the case for Palestinian democracy.

How else can one explain that when Secretary of State Colin Powell finally set out his much anticipated "vision" for reaching peace between Israel and the Palestinians, he never mentioned "freedom" or "democracy"? Secretary Powell used a November 19 speech at the University of Louisville to endorse an independent Palestinian state more emphatically than any U.S. official ever had before. But he devoted not even one sentence of his 43-minute address to what kind of state he thought Palestine should be.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is less about land, borders, or even refugees than it is about the inherent inability of dictators to be peaceful. It is dangerously premature to focus on where the borders of a future Palestinian state will be drawn before determining how it will be governed. For until someone gives them a chance to develop a more open political culture, the Palestinians will never taste the fruits of freedom, and peace will never come to the Middle East.

Tom Rose is publisher of the Jerusalem Post.

© Copyright 2001, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.

Jerusalem Post, 11 January 2002

THE DEMILITARIZATION SCAM

GERALD M. STEINBERG

Eight years ago, during the selling of the Oslo Agreement, the Israeli public was promised a "demilitarized" Palestinian entity. The new Palestinian Authority, and the state that was expected to follow, would have a small police force to maintain law and order, but would never be allowed to develop an army. Given the PLO’s history of terror, rockets, tanks, grenades, landmines, and shoulder-launched missiles were out of the question.

A quick check of the Jerusalem Post’s archives turns up dozens of references to demilitarization. In December 1990, Yossi Beilin began talking about "a fully independent Palestinian state in the Gaza Strip. Such a state would be a demilitarized entity." He repeated this formula frequently, and was a successful salesman for the cause. A few months later, Shimon Peres also began to speak about Palestinian demilitarization to meet "Israel’s essential security requirements". Similarly, Meretz leader Yossi Sarid spoke of "a demilitarized independent Palestinian state". On September 3 1993, as the Declaration of Principles was being prepared for signature in Washington, Amos Oz published a column explaining that "If the worse comes to the worst, if it turns out that the peace is no peace, it will always be militarily easier for Israel to break the backbone of a tiny, demilitarized Palestinian entity than to go on and on breaking the backbones of eight-year-old stone-throwing Palestinians…."

When the Oslo agreements created the Palestinian Authority with a small police force (including exact locations of stations, personnel and weapons), Israelis were reassured that the gendarmarie would not become an army. As the number of "cops on the beat" increased by tens of thousands, this was explained as "job creation", and a means to offset support for Hamas. Although the evidence demonstrated that Arafat was building an army, it was easier to believe the myths. In 1995, the Beilin-Abu Mazen "non-paper" on the details of permanent status reiterated the pledge of Palestinian demilitarization.

The reality on the ground, however, was quite different. The "police" provided protection for terrorist operations, and militias such as Fatah’s Force 17 joined with Hamas and Islamic Jihad in launching attacks. The Palestinian Authority also invested heavily in the acquisition of weapons. Tens of thousands of Kalachnikovs, M-16s and other arms, along with ammunition, were smuggled in. Exploiting their VIP passes and Arafat’s helicopters, Palestinian officials imported missiles and components for an arms industry.

The demilitarization myth lost more credibility in October 1996, when Palestinian security forces began to use their weapons. Under the cover of disturbances fomented following the opening of an exit to an ancient tunnel in Jerusalem’s Old City, Arafat’s army killed a number of Israeli military officers. These attacks were quickly understood by the IDF as signalling a fundamental change, and a warning of far more extensive threats in the not too distant future. The Israeli army discarded the demilitarization illusion quickly, and when Arafat took the decision to launch a broad attack in September 2000 (Jerusalem again provided the pretext), the IDF was ready.

The discovery and capture of the Karine-A, carrying 50 tons of weapons from Iran, including landmines, rockets for striking Israeli cities, crates of rifles and ammunition, and C-4 explosives for suicide bombings, confirmed what has been obvious for many years. Indeed, as Benny Begin and other critics of Oslo noted from the beginning, the concept of demilitarization of a Palestinian state was always a fabrication. It was designed and cynically sold to persuade a skeptical Israeli public that Yassir Arafat could change his spots, and make the transformation from terrorist to statesman.

Now, many of the most ardent supporters of the Oslo experiment have recanted and admitted their mistakes. Ex-Leftists such as Amos Oz and A B Yehoshua have become Arafat’s most bitter critics, recognizing that instead of accepting the trade-off between independence and demilitarization, the Palestinian leader continues to rely on "the armed struggle". For Oz, "worse has indeed come to the worst", but the "tiny, demilitarized Palestinian entity" of 1993 turned out to be a foolish myth, which has already cost hundreds of Israeli lives.

After forty years, it is now clear that Arafat is not going to change his strategy, and any decline in violence will be strictly tactical and short-lived, while preparing for the next round. As soon as the pressure decreases, the suicide attacks and drive-by shootings will resume. If Arafat obtains the longer-range weapons he desperately seeks, the next stage will be rocket attacks on Israeli cities.

In this environment, the capture of the Karine-A, with its haul of illegal weapons, is the last nail in the coffin of the Oslo process. While politicians know that the public generally has a short memory, most Israelis will not soon forget the terrible costs of the optimistic naivete and myths such as demilitarization. At great cost, we have learned that no agreement with Arafat will be implemented unless Israel is prepared to enforce its terms.

In this sense, Arafat has made himself irrelevant in terms of ceasefire discussions, or the confidence-building measures as outlined by the Mitchell commission report. Such measures will require a new generation of Palestinian leaders that can demonstrate credibility and the commitment to implement agreements that are reached.

Dr. Gerald Steinberg is Director of the Program in Conflict Resolution at the BESA Centre for Strategic Studies at Bar Ilan University.

THE ARAFAT I KNOW

Ion Mihai Pacepa

Wall Street Journal, January 10, 2002

(Gen. Pacepa was the highest ranking intelligence officer ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc. He is author of Red Horizons [1987], a memoir.)

Last week, Israel seized a boat carrying 50 tons of Iranian-made mortars, long-range missiles and anti-tank rockets destined for the Palestinian Authority. The vessel, Karine A, is owned by the Palestinian Authority and its captain and several crew are members of the Palestinian naval police. I am not surprised to see that Yasser Arafat remains the same bloody terrorist I knew so well during my years at the top of Romania's foreign intelligence service.

I became directly involved with Arafat in the late 1960s…when he was being financed and manipulated by the KGB. In the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel humiliated two of the Soviet Union's Arab client states, Egypt and Syria. A couple of months later, the head of Soviet foreign intelligence, Gen. Aleksandr Sakharovsky, landed in Bucharest. According to him, the Kremlin had charged the KGB to "repair the prestige" of "our Arab friends" by helping them organize terrorist operations that would humiliate Israel. The main KGB asset in this joint venture was a "devoted Marxist-Leninist": Yasser Arafat, co-founder of Fatah, the Palestinian military force.

Gen. Sakharovsky asked us…to help the KGB bringing Arafat and some of his fedayeen fighters secretly to the Soviet Union…to be indoctrinated and trained. During that same year, the Soviets manoeuvred to have Arafat named chairman of the PLO… When I first met Arafat, I was stunned by the ideological similarity between him and his KGB mentor. Arafat's broken record was that American "imperial Zionism" was the "rabid dog of the world," and there was only one way to deal with a rabid dog: "Kill it!" In the years when Gen. Sakharovsky was the chief Soviet intelligence adviser in Romania, he used to preach…that "the bourgeoisie" was the "rabid dog of imperialism," adding that there was "just one way to deal with a rabid dog: Shoot it!" He was responsible for killing 50,000 Romanians.

In 1972, the Kremlin established a "socialist division of labour" for supporting international terrorism…A year later, a Romanian intelligence adviser…in Beirut reported that Arafat and his KGB handlers were preparing a PLO commando team headed by Arafat's top deputy, Abu Jihad, to take American diplomats hostage in Khartoum, Sudan, and demand the release of Sirhan Sirhan, the Palestinian assassin of Robert Kennedy.

"St-stop th-them!" Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu yelled in his nervous stutter… Just six months earlier Arafat's liaison officer for Romania, Ali Hassan Salameh, had led the PLO commando team that took the Israeli athletes hostage at the Munich Olympic Games, and Ceausescu had become deathly afraid that his name might be implicated.

… It was already too late to stop the Abu Jihad commandos. After a couple of hours we learned they had seized the participants at a diplomatic reception organized by the Saudi embassy in Khartoum and were asking for Sirhan's release. On March 2, 1973, after President Nixon refused the terrorists' demand, the PLO commandos executed three of their hostages: American Ambassador Cleo A. Noel Jr., his deputy, George Curtis Moore, and Belgian charge d'affaires Guy Eid.

In May 1973…Arafat excitedly bragged about his Khartoum operation. "Be careful," Ion Gheorghe Maurer, a Western-educated lawyer who had just retired as Romanian prime minister, told him. "No matter how high-up you are, you can still be convicted for killing and stealing." "Who, me? I never had anything to do with that operation," Arafat said, winking mischievously.

In January 1978, the PLO representative in London was assassinated…evidence [showed] that the crime was committed by the infamous terrorist Abu Nidal, who had recently broken with Arafat… "That wasn't a Nidal operation. It was ours," I was told by Ali Hassan Salameh, Arafat's liaison officer for Romania. Even Ceausescu's adviser to Arafat…was taken by surprise. "Why kill your own people?" Col. Constantin Olcescu asked. "We want to mount some spectacular operations against the PLO, making it look as if they had been organized by Palestinian extremist groups that accuse the chairman of becoming too conciliatory and moderate," Salameh explained. According to him, Arafat even asked the PLO Executive Committee to sentence Nidal to death for assassinating the PLO representative in London.

Arafat has made a political career by pretending that he has not been involved in his own terrorist acts… James Welsh, a former intelligence analyst for the National Security Agency, has told a number of U.S. journalists that the NSA had secretly intercepted the radio communications between Yasser Arafat and Abu Jihad during the PLO operation against the Saudi embassy in Khartoum, including Arafat's order to kill Ambassador Noel…

For over 30 years the U.S. government has considered Arafat a key to achieving peace in the Middle East. But for over 20 years, Washington also believed that Ceausescu was the only Communist ruler who could open a breech in the Iron Curtain. During the Cold War era, two American presidents went to Bucharest to pay him tribute. In November 1989, when the Romanian Communist Party re-elected Ceausescu, he was congratulated by the United States. Three weeks later, he was accused of genocide and executed, dying as a symbol of communist tyranny. It is high time the U.S. end the Arafat fetish as well. President Bush's current war on international terrorism provides an excellent opportunity.