A week before the Hadera attack, seven Jews were killed by a suicide car bomb in Afula, a town in the Eastern Galilee. A day after that attack, one Jew was killed and four injured in an attack in Ashdod, on the coast south of Tel Aviv.
Between the announcement of the Declaration of Principles on August 31, 1993, and the time this article is being written on April 14, 1994, 53 Israelis have been murdered by Palestinians from all groups including the PLO. Twenty-nine of them were killed in areas that belonged to Israel before the 1967 Arab war.
In response to the Afula massacre, Yitzchak Rabin announced a closure of Judea and Samaria that was supposed to prevent Palestinians from entering other parts of Israel. Evidently, the closure didn't work. So after the Hadera massacre, Rabin announced that he would be moving troops from Judea and Samaria to the area of the old border to further prevent such travel. The above-mentioned quote came during that announcement.
Rabin is mistaken here. You notice that in very few of my articles do I refer to Yitzchak Rabin as the Israeli prime minister. True, he was thus elected by Israeli citizens. But recent events, and subsequent government decisions, force me to believe that Rabin is not executing the duties of Prime Minister to the benefit of any Israeli -- even ones who believe that this misbegotten peace process is the proper policy for Israel to be pursuing.
Rabin has now, once again, turned his back on close to ten percent of his citizens by pulling the army away from what is still the most volatile part of the country -- Judea and Samaria. He has stated publicly, once again, that these Israelis don't deserve Israeli protection the same way that others do. And he is not even providing adequate protection for that segment of the population that he still professes to represent.
Fifteen Israelis have been killed in one week, and over one hundred have been injured. The week leading up to Israel's forty-sixth birthday has been the bloodiest week in Israeli peace-time history. Still, there are no words of condemnation from Israel's "partners in peace", and nothing more than words from Rabin and his cronies.
Still, Rabin and Peres are intent on playing directly into the hands of Arafat -- the most prolific murderer of the late twentieth century. In response to Rabin's announcement, Opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu stated, "what we have here is a process in which murderers are controlling Israel." Whether Netanyahu was referring to Arafat, or to Rabin and Peres, is immaterial. The policies of each are quite similar, and are having the same effect on Israeli security, morale, and independence. Even US State Department officials have told Rabin to stop playing into the hands of Arafat, because he is now more accommodating to the murderer than the United States is.
In response to Netanyahu's comments, "Mr. Rabin replied that those who criticize his pursuit of peace with the Palestine Liberation Organization are playing into the hands of the militants." (Toronto Globe and Mail, April 14.) There are two problems with this kind of reaction. Firstly, Rabin is not pursuing peace, he is pursuing war. This is not the first article warning of the current slide to war, nor will it be the last. Rabin knows that he is leading Israel, and whatever peaceful elements are left among Palestinian Arabs, to war. Yet, he continues.
The second problem continues from the first. Israel is being led to war. War, not peace, continues to play into the hands of the militants. Thus, Rabin's policies are the ones that encourage the militants to continue and expand their activities.
Netanyahu commented after the Hadera attack, "Arafat's process is not a process of peace. He wants to carry out the destruction of Israel."
This is nothing new. This has been PLO policy all throughout its thirty-year history. What is new, is the Rabin government's position. It has always been the position of Israeli governments that terrorism and murder will never be allowed to pay off. However, since Rabin took office in 1992, Palestinian anti-Jewish terrorism has paid off, big time. With every new concession, or with every new attack on Jews to which Rabin pays nothing but lip service, terror and murder pay off. More Israelis are being killed in these streets of Israel now than at any other time in Israeli history. Yet the perpetrators of these outrages are being awarded with the state they have always wanted, on a silver platter, in the backyard of the nation they are trying to annihilate.
Anyone who thinks that a PLO state will live in peace with Israel need only look at two things to learn the truth. The first is the PLO covenant, which has not been amended, and which still calls for the destruction of Israel. If the PLO forms a state, this will become the only national constitution in the world that calls for the destruction of another nation.
The second thing to look at is the list of Israeli victims, and the spiralling numbers that are quite evident. Israel is buying peace with people who want nothing other than its destruction. Israeli policies will lead to peace. Unfortunately, it is only the peace of the grave.
Copyright 1994. Reproduction in electronic or print format by permission only.
