There Are No Non-Military
Solutions

Steven Plaut

It has become the vogue in many circles to represent Middle East savagery as part of some sort of "War of Civilizations". In fact, it is simply a war by barbarism against all civilization. It is also considered chic to represent the Middle East conflict as a "cycle of violence", and as fundamentally symmetrical. The shallow appeal to a supposed "cycle of violence" is nothing more than a manifestation of the laziness of those unwilling to invest the energy needed to understand the conflict, or by those motivated by things worse than laziness when it comes to Jews.
At the beginning of the Oslo "peace process", the PLO officially renounced terror and swore to resolve all conflict with Israel through peaceful negotiation. In exchange, the entire world followed the leadership of the Israeli Left and legitimized the PLO, rescuing it from its pariah status and its exile in Tunisia, while Israel allowed the PLO to manage and govern the bulk of the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. By the mid-1990s, some 95% of West Bank and Gaza Palestinians were "liberated" from Israeli "occupation" and were ruled by the oppressive Palestinian Authority. The removal of Israeli occupation was the direct cause of the outbreak of the worst round of Palestinian barbarism in history.
It has been repeated so endlessly and so mindlessly that Palestinian terror is a supposed consequence of Israeli "occupation" of the West Bank and Gaza that the most glaring and obvious fact of all is being ignored by the entire world. Palestinian terrorism these past eleven years was not caused by Israeli occupation but by its removal!
As a result of Israel's offering to allow the PLO control over the West Bank and Gaza, and Israel's willingness to acquiesce in Palestinian statehood in the medium run, the PLO and its affiliates have murdered 1300 Israelis, most of them civilians and many of them children, since foreswearing the use of violence. Proportionate to population, this is like 22 September 11ths for the United States. The world has grown so accustomed to the daily news reports of Palestinian barbarism that most have lost their shock value.
Nevertheless, several points need to be re-emphasized.
First of all, the notion that the terror is coming from "renegade" organizations outside the PLO and which the PLO cannot control is little more than an insult to the world's collective intelligence. Recently the bulk of the violence (including many of the suicide bombers) has come from the "Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades", from the Fatah, and from the Tanzim. All of these are under the direct personal command and control of Yassir Arafat.
Second, Palestinians have long used ambulances of the "Red Crescent", (the PLO's version of the Red Cross, directed by Arafat's own brother) to transport weapons and explosives and terrorists. The PLO then has the audacity to complain before the CNN crews and the world media that Israel is behaving in an "inhumane" manner when it stops ambulances at checkpoints and refuses to allow them to cross into Israel without inspection or delay. (The very idea that Palestinians can legitimately be denied automatic entitlement to free Israeli medical treatment is something CNN and the New York Times have never quite brought themselves to contemplate. This is curious since, in the United States, non-citizens and even citizens have no such automatic entitlement to free medical care.)
The PLO is doing everything it can to escalate the violence and turn it into an existential threat to the Jews. Israeli intelligence has turned up hard evidence that the PLO is seeking to construct chemical weapons of mass destruction. Palestinian terrorists have already experimented with lacing their terror bombs with poisons. The world media largely ignores the fact that the PLO operates a large military-industrial complex, much of it from North-Vietnamese-style underground tunnels. These have produced large numbers of ground-to-ground rockets. In 2003 alone the Palestinians fired 210 Kassam rockets from the Gaza Strip into Jewish civilian areas. When Israel enters the Gaza Strip to demolish the tunnels into Gaza from Egypt, through which weapons are smuggled in to murder Israelis, it is accused of "inhumane behavior", the International Solidarity Movement designer-jean pro-terrorists try to block the Israeli bulldozers, while the US State Department never speaks a word against these Egyptian tunnels.
There are other indications that the PLO is seeking to escalate the war. While the PLO once held the world's Gold Metal for plane hijackings, it has abstained from such things since the beginning of its Oslo legitimization by the world. What goes unremarked is that Israeli intelligence has successfully foiled and stopped nine separate recent attempts by Palestinians to shoot down civilian airliners landing at Tel Aviv's Ben-Gurion airport. If Israel were to turn the West Bank over to PLO control, many of the landing routes into Tel Aviv airport would pass unavoidably over the Palestinian territories, making them hostages held by the very same terrorists who have already made nine recent attempts to fire shoulder-held missiles at landing jetliners.
Even if anyone thinks the Palestinians might have had some legitimate claim to statehood, the Palestinians forfeited any right to sovereignty they might have had due to the past century of Palestinian atrocities and terror. True, Israeli governments in the 1990s nevertheless were naively and foolishly willing to allow the PLO to exercise control over these territories in exchange for peace. But Israel got war and mass murder of its civilians in exchange, not peace, so the foolhardy Oslo deal is now off and should never have been implemented.
The only way to suppress the carnage is for Israel to re-occupy the West Bank and Gaza in full, implement open-ended military control there and a long-term program of de-Nazification (based in part on the Allied programs at the end of World War II), and expel the terrorists and destroy their infrastructure. Everything else is wishful thinking and delusion. While the terror has partly subsided over the past few months, since the start of the construction of the fence, the real reason for this is the stepped-up campaign by Israel of assassinating Palestinian terrorist leaders, not erection of the fence itself.
While I have my strategic doubts about the fence, if Israel is going to build it at all, it should be around the large Palestinian cities. These would fence the Palestinians in, rather than fencing the Jews out. When the world bellyaches, Israel should simply respond: If the Palestinians ever abandon Islamo-fascism and Nazi-like atrocities, then Israel may no longer need any fence.
Meanwhile, like in the famous Gene Autry song, let the rest of Judea and Samaria be unfenced and free, open Israeli range.
The endless post-Oslo Middle East violence and terror was triggered because Israel indicated that it was on the run, exhausted, unwilling to fight, and ready to capitulate. It will end only when Israel returns to its determination to end the terror through military victory and force of arms. The same United States that has understood that there is only a military option for dealing with terror in Iraq and Afghanistan must back up such a return by Israel to pre-Oslo sanity.
There are no non-military solutions to the problems of terrorism.

Steven Plaut is professor of economics at the University of Haifa