Foreign Policy

The very bloody coup by Hamas in Gaza is a chilling reminder that the legacy of Arafat lives on in the Palestinian and Arab world. Hamas is heavily funded by Iran and a puppet of Syria, with the sworn purpose of destroying Israel. As we have seen recently, they obviously have no problem destroying fellow Palestinian Arab Muslims either when they belong to the secular Fatah party of the elected President Mahmoud Abbas.

News reports of the blood letting and slaughter have been numerous, and I'll not use this space to regurgitate them. Instead, I will sound a caution that Hamas cannot be tolerated just as - for too long - the world tolerated Yasser Arafat.

For more than three decades, Arafat trained, promoted, and utilized terror - while most of the world not only watched, but rewarded him. As the Wall Street Journal editorialized recently, what has happened in Gaza "is a consequence of the cult of violence that has typified the Palestinian movement for much of its history and which has been tolerated and often celebrated by the international community." Arafat used his brand of terror in attempts to overthrow the governments of Lebanon and Jordan by assassination. He used it at the Olympics Munich in 1972 against Israeli athletes, and shortly after was invited to address the U.N. General Assembly. American Presidents received him, negotiated with him, signed treaties with him, and treated him as a legitimate head-of-state when in fact he was no more than a lawless, murdering mobster. Feeling tolerated, vindicated, rewarded and emboldened, Arafat continued his quest to destroy Israel while eviscerating any vestige of a true Palestinian culture that remained and staining the sands of the Middle East with the blood of countless suicide killers and their innocent victims.

In November, 2004, just weeks after Arafat's death, I was invited to represent the United States at the Jerusalem Summit, an international conference of elected officials, government ministers, academia, and intellectuals to discuss the nature of terrorism and what to do about it. My entire speech (text here) was focused on the mistaken notion that by tolerating what is clearly evil for too long, invariable too many good people die. That was the result when America tried to tolerate the evil of slavery in our founding. It was the result when the world tolerated the Third Reich and Hitler's ascent to power, and we now see the results of the world's tolerance of radical Islam and jihad for the last four decades.

To further make my point, I quoted President John Kennedy who observed that, "unchallenged aggression, sooner or later, will lead to war." Kennedy was right then, and his observation is certainly right today. Unfortunately, the international community, including America, is too often reluctant to condemn evil, call it by its name, and refuse to recognize it as a legitimate representative of any constituency.

Specific to the passing of Arafat, and what it may have meant to the Palestinians and the Arab-Israeli conflict, I said at that time, "The extent to which [Arafat's] legacy of violence, of destruction, of hatred and terror, of poisoning the minds and hearts of infants so they grow up perverted, becoming human weapons-of-war – the extent to which this still exists after Arafat is gone, will determine whether a new day has indeed arrived in the peace process, or if we merely have a different chapter in the same book."

We now see that through Hamas, Arafat's legacy of terror very much continues. With the international tolerance and even rewards terror earned during his reign, tragically, we cannot be to surprised that this blood-letting occurred. For followers of Arafat and Hamas, as the Journal said, "The way of the gun has been paying dividends for 40 years."

In Jerusalem, 3 ½ years ago I said, "many very serious questions remain to be answered: are the Palestinians capable of leaving the horrors of the past behind, will they reform their schools and their teaching, will they police themselves and dissolve the terrorist organizations within, are they even capable of governing themselves?" Sadly, the answers to those questions – at least as of now – are not encouraging.

So what's next in Gaza? A noted Middle-East expert from the Brookings Institute, Martin Indyk, says, "The big danger is that Hamas will convert Gaza into a kind of al-Qaeda-like base for all the bad actors in the region." Unfortunately, this is both an intelligent and accurate assessment. Also unfortunate is that it comes at a time when the international community, including much of the Congress, would prefer to not even discuss the threat of Islamic jihad. Some are convinced it is no threat at all or even non-existent. This notion, of course, was a prevailing attitude of Chamberlin and many of the British about Hitler and the Nazis, too. 

Consider these additional facts about Gaza:

• Because of an exceptionally high birthrate, the youth population in Palestinian territories is expected to nearly double in the next 20 years.
• Yet, youth unemployment is nearly 40% for men and even higher for women.
• Iran pledged $250 million to the Hamas-led government in 2006.
• Gaza is roughly twice the geographic size of Washington DC, but home to1.5 million Palestinians, and has a population density 9X greater than the West Bank.

Gaza is but a small spec of real estate on the globe, but jihadists don't need a lot of space to train, nor huge armies to execute their strategies. They thrive among the poor, desperate, and hopeless of the world. People who can be controlled by fear and violence, and are already fanatically conditioned and victimized through the perversion of their religion.

Ariel Sharon convinced Israel to withdraw from Gaza without conditions or compensation, giving the Palestinians yet another chance to create their own government, have their own home, and live in peace. As yet further evidence that tolerating evil never works, it now appears that Sharon's magnanimous gesture will fail to satisfy. In the zero-sum world of jihad, hate, and terror, living in peace is not part of the agenda.