Territory - The Only Yardstick

There will be no lasting peace between the Arabs and Israel because Israel is not permitted by its "friends" to gain advantages from military victories. So the Arabs always have an incentive to breach any "peace settlement" reached and go to war. It costs them nothing except human lives. And they regard their lives cheap as compared with defeating infidels.

Whether Arafat's terrorism has paid off will depend on the tug-of-war between the State Department, the National Security Council and other advisors of President George W. Bush. It will have paid off handsomely if it remains US policy to rebuild the Palestinian economy and push Israel back to something like its pre-1967 borders, paving the way for its eventual destruction. A victory for the State Department would give the PLO a good prospect of a state the size offered by Ehud Barak — with East Jerusalem. It would also herald a long period of anti-American and anti-European Moslem terrorism.

The Saudi "peace offer" must be judged against this background. It offers Syria the Golan Heights, though Syria is and has been the patron of more than a dozen terrorist organizations during the past 30 years and has used them to expel the US from Lebanon. It offers the PLO recognition and a state leaving Israel with totally insecure borders. And it promotes Saudi Arabia, perhaps the main instigator and financial sponsor of Islamic terrorism, to the role of "peacemaker" implying Western forgiveness of its crimes.

Thus the size of Israel envisaged by Washington becomes the yardstick of the West's ability to stem the Islamic tide. An Israel with a united Jerusalem, the Golan Heights and half of Judea-Samaria including the Jordan Valley means that Arab terrorism does not pay and will not pay in the future. An Israel pushed back to something like its 1967 borders means that Arab terrorism does pay. And the terrorists' V-signs will indicate that, knowing this, they will become active in Western Europe and continue to terrorize Israel, Russia and the United States.