For years we have been forced to witness the wholesale abandonment of land, and of responsibility, while successive Israeli governments have insisted that it is preferable to negotiate with arch-murderers than to protect Israeli citizens and defend its land and resources. The entire world, it seems, has forgotten that Yasser Arafat is the worst murderer on the face of this earth in the past fifty years, that it matters not to him whether his victims are soldiers or invalids in wheelchairs, men, women or children, or even athletes striving to uphold the brotherhood represented by international sporting events.
What is more important is that Arafat has demands, and the Israeli society is took weak internally, too tired, too cowardly, to remember that it has one of the strongest defense forces in the world. Israeli leaders are too timid, too shortsighted, to really lead, and instead they bow to whatever demands are placed on the table.
But the Oslo process is old news. We have been witnessing this spectacle for over a decade, for it started long before Oslo.
What is news is that the world has also forgotten other things. For instance, take today's funeral of Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad. Syria is one of four countries on the US State Deparmtent's list of terrorist states. Yet that is not enough to prevent the US Secretary of State, the head of the department that maintains that list, from attending his funeral. That does not prevent CNN, an American news network, from devoting hours of time to live coverage of that funeral.
Since the world seems to forget these things, perhaps some reminders are in order. In them, one will find a more appropriate eulogy for Assad than any that will be broadcast today.
Hafez Assad has occupied Lebanese territory for 22 years. He has installed puppet regimes in that country who do nothing without his approval, and whose public statements are only those approved by the Syrian leadership. He has used this occupation to achieve two ends. First, Lebanese territory quickly became a launch pad for murderous attacks into Israel by Syrian-backed terrorist bands. This necessitated Israel's presence in the south of Lebanon in order to protect its own northern towns.
Second, Assad plundered Lebanese agricultural land, using it instead to grow narcotic producing crops for sale throughout the industrialized world. Assad became the largest drug lord in the world, surpassing Manuel Noriega of Panama and the drug lords of Colombia who have merited arrest and imprisonment in the US.
Assad attacked Israel in 1973 in an attempt to annihilate the smaller state, simply to satisfy Assad's pan-Arabist dreams - dreams he continued to harbour and to act upon, as evidenced in Lebanon.
In 1982, Assad saw fit to test Syria's nerve gas capability by gassing to death an entire town. 20,000 residents of Hama were killed in one day, without any response from the rest of the world.
Since the mid-1970's Assad has granted asylum to Arab terrorist groups whose sole aim is the destruction of peaceful democratic regimes in Israel and the rejection of all peace initiatives in the region.
Today, heads of state and representatives of government from around the world are gathering in Damascus to honour this man - a murderer, a terrorist supporter, a drug lord, and a person whose death makes the world a better place in which the rest of us can live.
A person can often be understood by who his associates and friends are. Assad's funeral is being attended by heads of state from countries like Iran, Iraq, and Libya, and other terrorist regimes like the PLO, represented by arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat.
At the same time, though, French President Jacques Chirac is in attendance, as are the foreign ministers or equivalents of Britain and the United States, as well as world media outlets like CNN. Such honour granted to a remorseless murderer is inexcusable. It is a sickening spectacle of which the world should be ashamed. True peace can never be attained when its opponents are accorded such honour.
Copyright 2000. Yehuda Poch is a writer living in Israel. Reproduction in electronic or print format by permission only.
