Posted 10/01/2003 10:27:00 AM by Ocean Guy
Worth Repeating

It's an old story but it continues to amaze me at how many don't understand it. It's worth repeating, and repeating and repeating until it's truly understood: The Arabs don't want Israel to exist.

The Trojan Horse analogy was made most explicitly by the late and unlamented Faisal Husseini, terrorist, agitator, holder of the Palestinian Authority's "Jerusalem portfolio," and darling of the political Left in Israel and abroad. On July 24, 2001, he told the Egyptian al-Arabi newspaper: "Had the U.S. and Israel not realized, before Oslo, that all that was left of the Palestinian National movement and the Pan-Arab movement was a wooden horse called Arafat or the PLO, they would never have opened their fortified gates and let it inside their walls." Asked what he sees as the ultimate goal of the Arafatian Trojan Horse, Husseini answered: "...When we are asking all the Palestinian forces and factions to look at the Oslo Agreement and at other agreements as 'temporary' procedures, or phased goals, this means that we are ambushing the Israelis and cheating them... [I]f we agree to declare our state over what is now only 22% of Palestine, meaning the West Bank and Gaza - our ultimate goal is [still] the liberation of all historical Palestine from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea, even if this means that the conflict will last for another thousand years or for many generations."

The main faction of the PLO and that led by Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), Fatah, for instance, also announced quite plainly, in December 2001: "Fatah believes that the Zionist movement constitutes the biggest threat against not only the Palestinian national security, but also against the security of the Arab world. It also believes that a legitimate Palestinian entity forms the most important weapon that Arabs have against Israel, the outpost of the imperialist powers."

The physical evidence of the Arab position, as described above, is also overwhelming. No map, no official document, no school textbook in an Arab country includes the state of Israel. The official symbols of the Palestinian Authority, whose alleged recognition of Israel was a sine qua non of negotiations, contain maps of all of present-day Israel (from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, just as Husseini stated was the "ultimate goal").

Until that fact is recognized, there can be no meaningful movement towards peace. It's way beyond time to tell the Arabs, that they are about to lose the chance of ever seeing a second palestinian state carved out of what was the British Mandate of Palestine. Negotiaitions only encourage the Arabs to keep holding on to their often and plainly stated goal: the liberation of all historical Palestine from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea.