Essay: Terror and Peace: the Root Cause Fallacy

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Indeed, it aggravates it. Any movement toward a negotiated peace that permits any part of Palestine to remain occupied is considered a threat. Negotiations are thus a spur, not a deterrent, to terror. Whenever a "peace scare" breaks out, terrorism increases, as King Hussein of Jordan is well aware. During the time he was trying to arrange for joint Jordanian- Palestinian negotiations with Israel, his diplomats in Ankara, Bucharest and Madrid were assassinated. The talks are off now, and Jordanians abroad are enjoying a rare respite from attack.

Last July Prime Minister Peres of Israel flew to Morocco for peace talks with King Hassan II, and before anyone knew the contents of the negotiations, Syria broke off diplomatic relations with Morocco and the P.L.O. declared it would oppose to the end any outcome. Some interested observers of this overture were candid and clear about the relationship between terrorism and peace, even a hint of peace: "Now," Royal Air Maroc stewards told a New York Times correspondent, "we will have to start worrying about hijackings and terrorist attacks." The fundamental fact of the Middle East today is that those who engage in terror do not want peace, and those who want peace are not engaged in terror. Those who make the slightest move to eliminate the vaunted root cause of terror -- i.e., those who genuinely seek a compromise solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem -- get shot. The latest victim is the mayor of Nablus, whose crime was to take over responsibility for fixing potholes. That was too much accommodation with the Zionist entity, as the rejectionists like to refer to Israel.

Issam Sartawi, the one P.L.O. leader who advocated exactly the kind of solution Americans like to dream about, a Palestinian state living side by side with Israel, was also murdered, shot dead in Portugal in 1983. Not too many Palestinians have since risen to take up his cause. It is truer to say that terrorism is a root cause of the continuing Arab-Israeli conflict than vice versa.

Syria has little sympathy for either half of the peace envisioned in the West. Syria not only rejects the existence of an Israeli state, it has little use for a Palestinian state. Syria and its favorite Lebanese terror group, the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party, have a different vision. An Associated Press dispatch summarizes it nicely: "The secular SSNP seeks the merger of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, pre-Israel Palestine, Iraq, Kuwait and Cyprus" -- Cyprus! -- "into a Greater Syria."

Abu Nidal, a Palestinian who was the author of last December's Vienna and Rome airport massacres and may also be linked to the Karachi airport attack, concurs. "Syria for us is the mother country," he says. "For 2,000 years the Palestinians have not lived in an independent territory. Palestine of the future must be incorporated within Syrian territory."

Such people -- and these are the people going around spraying airliners and synagogues with bullets -- will not retire even if Israel makes the most extreme concession and gives up the West Bank in favor of a Palestinian state. What Abu Nidal and Abu Abbas and indeed every Palestinian guerrilla group demand as a right is not a Hebron vineyard but downtown Tel Aviv. Even a radical West Bank solution will leave all of today's major terror groups and their sponsoring states aggrieved and in the field.

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