Herbert Zweibon

Now that Arafat is dead, world leaders see an opportunity to jump-start the moribund "peace process." Says Prime Minister Blair: "I have long argued that the need to revitalize the Middle East peace process is the single most pressing political challenge in our world today." And President Bush: "We've got a great chance to establish a Palestinian state, and I intend to use the next four years to spend the capital of the United States on such a state." To be sure, the President predicates this commitment on the emergence of a peaceful, democratic polity prepared to live harmoniously beside Israel.

On a scale of probabilities this ranks with the likelihood that beheadings-chieftain Abu-Musab-al Zarqawi will morph into George Washington. The territories under the control of the Palestinian Authority are a giant al-Qaeda training camp with all institutions -- schools, media, mosques, political organizations, even summer camps -- devoted to inciting hatred and producing shahids, martyrs for murder.

What is often overlooked is the long history of Palestinian Arab extremism. AFSI's pamphlet The Palestinians: A Political Masquerade, published almost thirty years ago, noted that in Mandatory Palestine, the Husseini clan won out against the marginally less anti-Zionist Nashashibi clan, and they did so in the tried and true Arab fashion — by assassinating their rivals. The absolutely uncompromising leadership then, as now, was unwilling to come to any accommodation with Jewish Palestinians even when it was in their political interests. When the British wanted to establish a legislative assembly that would have made the Arabs, as the numerically stronger element, dominant, the Arab leadership refused, fearing this would give some political legitimacy to Jews.

As The Palestinians points out, the Arabs of Palestine are an "anti-nation," one that derives its entire meaning and purpose from the desire to destroy another nation: the conflict with Israel is the central fact of Palestinian Arab identity and the elimination of Israel the messianic goal.

To think the nature of Palestinian Arab nationalism can be transformed by holding elections in January is an absurdity.

There are no leaders in the wings eager for accommodation (nor could they survive, if there were). There are Arafat’s old guard from Tunis like Mahmud Abbas and Ahmed Qurei, early comrades in Fatah. Just last year Abbas said in Cairo that “cracking down on Hamas, Jihad and the Palestinian organizations is not an option at all.” Abbas has the additional distinction of writing a PhD dissertation (later a book) explaining that the Holocaust was a hoax. The new chairman of Fatah, Farouk Qaddoumi (who rejected Oslo and so never joined Arafat in the Palestinian Authority) has said "We will pitch our tent as far as our bullets reach." Then there are rival locals like Muhammad Dahlan, architect of the current terror war, and Marwan Barghouti, reportedly the most popular single figure because he sits in an Israeli prison, convicted of a series of murders. And, of course, there is Hamas, whose best known leaders have recently been eliminated by acts of Israeli derring-do.

Whoever the elections install, the outlook is for factional strife, as rival groups of gunmen struggle for dominance, and more terror against Israel. Already gunmen have killed two of Abbas' bodyguards. And while Abbas has called for a temporary halt on attacks on Israel, Hamas has already turned him down.

No, there will be no peaceful Palestinian state alongside Israel. The danger is that Israel's weak leadership will be pressured to implement the disastrous Road Map (to which Sharon continues to express devotion!) and a terrorist and terror-sponsoring state will be recognized by an eager Europe and a U.S. leadership blinded to reality by its own self-hypnotizing rhetoric of a Palestinian state devoted to democracy, peace and civil liberties.