By P. David Hornik on 8.31.04 @ 12:06AM
We've come full circle since the Oslo Terror War began back in the 1990s.
The Jerusalem Post recently reported that U.S. army
units are training in a special antiterror school near the town of
Modi'in, between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and that "after completing
their training, the units will return to Iraq." The article goes on
to note:
In November last year, US generals visited Israel to
study tactics adopted by the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] in its
ongoing war against terror.… US army officials later adopted
the IDF's policy of demolishing houses belonging to terrorists
suspected of attacking US troops in Iraq, set up checkpoints
similar to those in the West Bank, deployed sniffer dogs to seek
out explosives, and in a number of cases arrested relatives of
terror suspects to glean information.
Things have come a long way since the Oslo Terror War began back
in the 1990s. Although the war intensified in the fall of 2000 and
became, for a while, a media hit, it started back in the fall of
1993 almost as soon as the first Oslo agreement was signed, and the
first Oslo-era suicide bombing came on April 6, 1994, when eight
people were killed in a car-bomb attack on a bus in the town of
Afula. In the next few years there were many more such attacks
until the situation cooled, relatively speaking, during the three
years (1996-1999) of the conservative Netanyahu government, only to
heat up again soon after Labor's Ehud Barak took the helm and
failed to convince Yasser Arafat to accept the state alongside
Israel that was supposedly the Palestinians' goal.
Back in the '90s, though, you couldn't get Israeli or American
heads of state (except -- though some dispute this, too --
Netanyahu) to take seriously the terror that was already raging in
Israel's streets. Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin famously referred to the
victims of the terror as "sacrifices for peace," and he, Shimon
Peres, and Israel's whole Labor and Left establishment kept
insisting that the terror was only the work of the Islamic
organizations while Arafat somehow had nothing to do with it. As
for Bill Clinton, he was so sold on the idea of Arafat as a
peacemaker that he invited him to the White House more than any
other leader and kept trying to wheedle peace out of him even after
the explosion of terror in the fall of 2000.
To be on the Right in Israel in those days was difficult; it
meant constantly pointing to facts -- or even, in demonstrations,
screaming about them -- that no one else paid attention to: that
Arafat had already instituted hate-education in the Palestinian
schools, that there was clear evidence of his collusion with the
Islamists, that terrorists were walking free in the Authority and
were even treated as heroes … it was like arguing in the
early '70s that there would be a bloodbath in Southeast Asia if the
U.S. withdrew its assistance. Some of us also pointed to a deeper
dynamic: whereby, as in the 1930s, catastrophes that later sweep
the world have a way of starting with the Jews.
Well, you know the old saying: "M'Tzion tetze Torah"
("out of Zion shall go forth the law," Is. 2:3). Or, as Eric Hoffer
put it only a little more prosaically in a famous op-ed he
published in 1968: "I have a premonition that will not leave me; as
it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us."
Yes, by 2004 things have come full circle. Israelis have been
forced to realize the seriousness of the terror war they're engaged
in, and now at last are fighting it persistently and effectively at
least on a tactical level. After being ignored, downplayed, and
excused in Zion in the 1990s, in the new millennium suicide terror
has burst forth in New York, Washington, Bali, Moscow, Madrid,
Istanbul, Casablanca, Riyadh, and many other places. The U.S.,
trying to get an Arab society to act rationally and accept peace
and progress, finds itself bogged down in urban warfare in Iraq,
facing fanatics who use mosques and Arab civilians as a shield. And
now American forces are … in Zion, tapping the weary, acrid
wisdom of the Jewish people to help them fight the enemy.
topics:
Education, Bill Clinton, Islam, Law, Iraq, Israel
