Terrorism a roadblock to peace

There is now all of the expected talk about the end of the road map to peace. But the murderous end of a cease-fire cannot be allowed to halt the process.

Here is the odd equation. A terrorist group, a self-declared army, murders 20 civilians on a bus. The military wing of the state in which those civilians were murdered strikes back and kills three highly placed members of the terrorist group. At the funerals, the members of the terrorist group are mourned as if their deaths are more examples of the slaughter of the innocents. Revenge, meaning more civilians murdered, is promised.

None of this has to do with hard politics but it is consistent with how successfully the Palestinian terrorists have been able to achieve veto power in any negotiating situation. Only bloodletting keeps them in the discussion because their policy is no policy and their vision is the fantasy of driving the Israelis into the sea.

We should not forget, however, that these are not less than shrewd men. They continue to ruthlessly dupe the opposition. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was put in power by these terrorists because he was the kind of man they wanted at the top. His predecessor, Ehud Barak, and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat seemed on the verge of some kind of a deal. That was too dangerous, so the terrorists killed so many civilians that the Israelis responded by electing a man who promised to protect them and respond with force against terrorist murder.

Sharon could surely respond with force, but he could not protect them. If he could, he would. Tanks, occupation, martial law and hit jobs on terrorists have only added to the hostility and the body count. The upshot of which was that the terrorists, pretending to be different than they were, declared a cease-fire when Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, came forward as Palestinian prime minister. Then they went back to their single playing card after the interminable length of seven weeks and have now vetoed negotiations with 20 new murders.

This clearly means that nothing should be assumed about the terrorists other than what we all know they will do — kill and kill and kill again. No one can control them because they have no interest in anything other than whipping up reprisals and hostility.

For anyone to demand that they must be controlled for any negotiations to move forward is more than a bit naive. Had the civil rights movement been dependent on Southern terrorist groups relinquishing violence or being stamped out in order to move forward, there might still be segregation in the South.

That is the hard fact that Israel must face. It has to go forward in the creation of a Palestinian state, fully aware that the terrorists cannot be given veto power — especially since they are quite predictable.

The only unexpected thing in our moment is that their playing card of bloody murder will be deprived of a determining position in the hard negotiations necessary to achieve peace.

On the Palestinian question, the road to peace is not only paved with good intentions but with concrete too sturdy to be broken by terrorists’ stop signs.


Stanley Crouch is a columnist for the New York Daily News. His e-mail address is scrouch@edit.nydailynews.com.