Arafat & Co. Incompetent, Dishonest
As hideous as the terror bombings in Jerusalem were - 13 innocents dead, more than 150 hurt, many gravely - the explosions were a symptom of a still larger problem.
The longer the record grows, the more obvious it becomes that the Palestinian Authority with which Israel is trying to cut a peace deal is by turns a dishonest and an incompetent participant in the peace process.
The PA has routinely disregarded, when it hasn’t flagrantly violated, basic tenets of the Oslo Accords that put the process afoot.
It is bad enough that PA security forces are kicking Palestinians around brutishly and that a panel of Palestinian legislators has declared the government so corrupt it wants Yasser Arafat to fire his entire cabinet.
But abuses and ineptness that are only unfortunate when confined to intra-Palestinian affairs become broadly dangerous when writ large in the vexed negotiations with Israel.
The PA has not rescinded, as promised, the Palestine Liberation Organization’s vow to destroy Israel. It continues to use maps showing Israel as part of an intended Palestine.
The authority has failed to confiscate the growing number of illegal weapons with which the West Bank and Gaza bristle. It has armed many more Palestinian policemen than allowed by the Oslo agreement. Arafat’s lieutenants continue the old PLO habit of speaking moderately to Westerners and inflammatorily to Palestinians and other Arabs. Crucially, the PA is not living up to its commitment to suppress terrorism.
When there is a horror like the marketplace slaughter, the PA bolts into a flurry of very public action, rounds up the usual suspects, then relapses after the world’s attention has drifted off.
Hamas, which ordered last week’s attack, and three other terrorist organizations operate all but openly. Israeli intelligence of terrorist plotting is routinely ignored.
The authority itself winks at riots staged over minor incidents, such as the opening earlier this year of an archaeological tunnel. Palestinian police stand back from violence they easily could suppress. Arafat uses the turmoil as a negotiating tactic.
There are strong indications PA police egged on the recent violence in hair-trigger Hebron until the authority’s default became uncomfortably obvious.
Even a committed PA couldn’t throw a flawless net over terrorism, but Jordan has shown honest enforcement can reduce the breaches to an acceptable risk. There was nothing inevitable about the 140 Israeli deaths from terrorism in the past three years.
It cuts no slack for the current Israeli government’s balkiness or its gratuitous provocations to hold the PA to account for its pattern of misbehavior. (In that regard, one hopeful sign from the last bombing is the call from the Shas Party, key in the Likud coalition, for a national unity government with the Labor Party. The move would isolate the small rejectionist parties that mire Israeli policy.)
Even a deal-eager Israeli government, however, would be stymied by the combination of Palestinian dereliction and the absence in the Oslo Accords of any means to compel compliance.
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