The Omega Letter Intelligence Digest
by Jack Kinsella

Vol: 31 Issue: 15 - Thursday, April 15, 2004

'When There is No Peace'

"For they have healed the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly,
saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace." (Jeremiah 8:11)

For more than a decade, world leaders have attempted to impose a
negotiated, bilateral peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinian
Authority.

The effort began with Oslo, when Yitzhak Rabin reluctantly took the
blood-stained hand of Yasser Arafat as a gesture of peace at the White
House Rose Garden, presumably ending a thirty-year war between Yasser
Arafat's PLO and the Jewish State.

Twelve years of negotiations have produced a state of war more deadly and
more intense than the Intifada in the late 1980's that led to the Oslo
Agreement in the first place.

The White House has reversed its long-standing policy regarding a
bilateral negotiated settlement between the two sides, and has endorsed
Ariel Sharon's 'Unilateral Disengagement Plan' that would, in essence,
give Israel the green light to impose a peace settlement of its own.
Sharon plans to abandon the Gaza Strip to the terrorists and continue to
wall out the terrorists on the West Bank.

President Bush agreed that it was impossible to uproot the several large
Jewish communities (or 'settlements') that already exist inside the West
Bank near the Green Line, including what is called the 'Jerusalem
Envelope'.   And Bush drove a stake into the heart of Arafat's long
planned annihilation of the Jewish state by assimilation, saying;

"The United States is strongly committed to Israel's security and
well-being as a Jewish state. It seems clear that an agreed, just, fair
and realistic framework for a solution to the Palestinian refugee issue as
part of any final status agreement will need to be found through the
establishment of a Palestinian state and the settling of Palestinian
refugees there rather than Israel."

No 'right of return' means no sudden influx of 12 million Palestinian
'refugees' to vote Israel out of existence. Arafat's carefully cultivated
'Phased Plan for the Destruction of Israel' via some kind of 'road map to
peace' just hit a major road block.

The New York Times slammed the Bush administration in an editorial it
called, "Settlements For Peace", in which it both acknowledged the same
inevitable conclusion the White House did, but condemned Bush reaching it.

"It has long seemed inevitable that a lasting peace would allow Israelis
to keep some of the large West Bank settlements contiguous to Jerusalem
and would offer, at most, a very limited right of return for the
Palestinians whose families fled at the dawn of a Jewish state. But by
accepting Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's terms absent any negotiation
between the parties, Mr. Bush is essentially supporting Israel's right to
impose a settlement of its choice on the Palestinians."

ABSENT any negotiations between the parties? Are they KIDDING?
'Negotiations between the parties' have been taking place for twelve
years, with countless signed agreements, from Oslo to Madrid to Camp
David, before embarking on a fictional Road Map to 'Peace' imposed on both
sides but accepted by neither.

The Palestinians prefer the settlement of their choice -- but the New York
Times ignored the fact the only acceptable choice to the Palestinians is
the destruction of Israel and its replacement with a Palestinian State.
It isn't that the New York Times doesn't know this -- they've admitted as
much in previous editorials.  But now that Bush is backing it, the New
York Times condemns it as a 'Sharon Coup'. (I thought Sharon was ALREADY
Israel's political leader?)

But the new Middle East policy change is a Bush policy, and the New York
Times is duty-bound by partisan loyalty to condemn it, even if it is a
policy shift it had argued in favor of, back when Clinton was in office.

According to the Times, what it agreed 'had long seemed inevitable' is now
some kind of 'prize' that will anger America's so-called 'European
allies'.

"Mr. Bush's desire to give Mr. Sharon a prize for pledging to withdraw
from Gaza will compromise any subsequent attempts by Washington to broker
a lasting settlement, to put it mildly. Palestinians and moderate Arab
nations - as well as the European allies, for that matter - are furious
that Mr. Bush acceded to Mr. Sharon's demands."

Assessment:

The Palestinians are 'furious', as well as the 'moderate Arab nations'
(who would THEY be?), -- and then there are our European 'allies'.  In
this context, anybody not actively engaged in combat against the United
States would fit the New York Times' definition of 'ally'. France
condemned us. Germany condemned us. Russia condemned us.  So did China.
With allies like this, who needs enemies?

The Palestinians condemned the US assurances as a 'new Balfour
Declaration.'  Interesting. The Balfour Declaration was a 1917 land grant
from the British Crown to Chaim Weitzman for an eventual Jewish State.

It was a reward for Weitzman's development of cordite, which helped
Britain win WWI. In gratitude, King George granted a Jewish homeland, the
boundaries of which encompassed all the West Bank and much of what is
today Jordan.

What is significant is, unlike the 1947 UN Partition Plan, the Balfour
Declaration was a legal proclamation.  The British took possession of the
Middle East following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in WWI.

The British had the undisputed legal right to issue the grant. The UN's
right to repartition it again after both Balfour and San Remo was an
invention of the times.

The British double-crossed the Jews in 1923 at the San Remo Conference,
carving up the original land grant between the Jews and the Arabs, giving
the Jews 1/6th of the original grant.   If there is an 'illegal
occupation' of the West Bank, the illegal occupiers, according to the
original, legal, Balfour Declaration, are the Palestinians.

The New York Times, like the rest of the liberal global establishment,
just doesn't get it.  At long last, it appears the Bush administration is
starting to. . .

"The violence we are seeing in Iraq is familiar. The terrorist who takes
hostages or plants a roadside bomb near Baghdad is serving the same
ideology of murder that kills innocent people on trains in Madrid, and
murders children on buses in Jerusalem, and blows up a nightclub in Bali,
and cuts the throat of a young reporter for being a Jew," Bush told
journalists.

Arafat didn't get the message.  If he did, he would understand that Bush's
statement was a US declaration of war against the Palestinian Authority,
Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

The battle lines have been drawn -- terrorists are terrorists, and
Palestinian terrorism has just come into the gun sights as targets in the
Bush war on terror.

"And in that day will I make Jerusalem a burdensome stone for all people:
all that burden themselves with it shall be cut in pieces, though all the
people of the earth be gathered together against it." (Zechariah 12:3)