Arafat is ‘partner for peace’ all right — as in ‘rest in peace, Israel’

Michael Kelly, Washington Post Writers Group, Boston

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“BOSTON — On June 6, 1967, the second day of the Six Day War, Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban laid before the United Nations Security Council Israel’s case for pre-emptively striking in a war sought and forced by the Arab nations.

As the historian Michael Oren describes in his first-rate new account of the conflict, ‘Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East,’ Eban looked at each ambassador before him and said: ‘Look around this table and imagine a foreign power forcibly closing New York or Montreal, Boston or Marseilles, Toulon or Copenhagen, Rio or Tokyo or Bombay Harbor.

How would your government react? What would you do?

How long would you wait?’… Officially, at least, the United States still believes this; and so, before Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon arrived in Washington, various senior Bush administration officials were taking to the newspapers and the Sunday public-affairs talk shows to pressure Sharon to, as Secretary of State Colin Powell delicately put it, ‘recognize who the Palestinian people look to as their leader,’ no matter ‘how disappointed we’ve been with him over time.’

Yes, we have been a little disappointed, haven’t we?

You give a fellow a perfectly good peace process, not to mention the Nobel Peace Prize; award him much of the land he demands and a $90 million monthly budget; let him build an armed force on Israeli territory; and, finally (as America’s former top negotiator, Dennis Ross, recently revealed in a remarkable Fox News interview), get both the president of the United States and the prime minister of Israel to promise him all of Gaza and nearly all of the West Bank as an independent and joined Palestinian state, with a right of Palestinian return to that state, plus a multibillion-dollar reparations fund — and, what does he do?

He goes to war against you… The New York Times buried its coverage of the report on A10 and sniffed that the evidence did ‘not appear to show definitively that the Palestinian leader ordered terror attacks.’… Imagine that the government of the United States believed, on evidence, that a certain Islamic leader was responsible for directing a campaign of murder against Americans.

To ask Abba Eban’s question, what would we do? Actually, the answer doesn’t require much imagination, does it? We would mount an army against that leader and all his followers, and we would bomb them and shoot them and chase them and arrest them and ship them to Guantanamo Bay.

If we had the leader in question trapped in a room, we would not let him out and set him up again as a partner for peace.”

Context added by this archive

A syndicated column written five months after Guantanamo opened, arguing from the American precedent. It quotes the New York Times and the Washington Post against themselves for how they played the Israeli documents.

Cite this clipping

"Arafat is ‘partner for peace’ all right — as in ‘rest in peace, Israel’," The Free Lance-Star, 5 May 2002, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2002-012. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2002-012

This clipping is read closely in the section below

No partner for peace, and the answer printed beside it