In the weeks following the assassination of Yitzchak Rabin, Israel handed over control of six cities to the Palestinian Authority. The New York Times reported at the time.
For Mr. Abu-Ghdeib, a local wallpaper dealer who had enlisted in the police, the building carried added significance, for it was there that he had been imprisoned by the Israelis.
“I shook the door of the cell where I was held,” he said today. “It made my hair stand on end. I saw the place where they had beaten me. I had dreamt of freedom, and today I feel free.”
Mr. Abu-Ghdeib, who had been jailed in Nablus and elsewhere in the 1970’s for taking part in weapons training and a grenade attack on Israeli soldiers, joined the several hundred Palestinian police officers, whose arrival today from the self-rule enclave of Jericho was met by ecstatic throngs.
Tens of thousands of people spilled into streets covered with brightly colored banners and pennants in the largest outpouring of jubilation since Israel began withdrawing its troops last month from West Bank cities and villages under an agreement signed in September. Most of the pullout will be complete by January, ending Israeli rule over much of the West Bank.
And two weeks later:
Under a final cascade of stones, Israeli troops withdrew today from Ramallah, completing a pullout from six West Bank cities and their neighboring villages in preparation for Palestinian elections next month.
“Out!,” shouted youths as a column of Israeli jeeps moved away from a police station downtown, trailed by scores of cheering Palestinians. As stones pitched by the crowd arched toward the receding vehicles, Palestinian officers entered the station, raised a flag and greeted the throng from the roof, waving their rifles.
The scene was similar to others played out this month across the West Bank, and it set the stage for Palestinian elections planned for January 20.
Under an Israeli-Palestinian accord signed in September, Israeli forces have left six cities and more than 400 villages and towns in recent weeks, ending 28 years of control over much of the West Bank.
Then a few weeks later the terror started:
A six-month lull in terror attacks in Israel was shattered in the early morning today when militant Muslim suicide bombers detonated pipe bombs in Jerusalem and Ashkelon, killing 25 people and wounding 77, some critically. Among the dead were two Americans.
Messages received by news organizations said the attacks were an act of vengeance for the death of Yahya Ayyash, a Palestinian known as “the Engineer” for the bombing attacks he organized in recent years against Israel. Mr. Ayyash, who belonged to an armed wing of the militant Islamic movement Hamas called the Qassam Brigades, was killed by a booby-trapped mobile telephone on Jan. 5.
The terror lasted for about two weeks killing over 60 people.
No. 18 buses have been traveling across this tense city largely empty since two recent suicide bombers killed 45 people on the line. Today, as Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani expressed his solidarity with Israel by climbing aboard the 6:30 A.M. run trailed by staff members and a gaggle of television crews, the problem was finding space.
“Who in their right mind is going to get on this bus?” said Cristyne Lategano, the Mayor’s spokeswoman, surveying the mob of photographers, bodyguards and aides wrestling around the Mayor and his host, Mayor Ehud Olmert of Jerusalem. About 10 regular riders found seats in the commotion, only to flee when it became clear that the driver would not be making the regular stops.
Instead, the bus delivered Mr. Giuliani to the scenes of the bombings, where he laid wreaths bearing the banner of New York City. “We’re doing this in memory of the people who lost their lives,” he said.
Suicide bombers have killed 62 people in four attacks in Israel since Feb. 25, including the two bus attacks. The militant Islamic group Hamas, which is opposed to the peace accord between Israel and the Palestinians, has claimed responsibility for the explosions.
When Israel withdrew from those six cities, responsibility for security was given to the Palestinian Authority. Rather than fulfill its obligations to secure the areas it was now in charge of, Arafat (and the PA) ignored (if not encouraged) Hamas. I know that most people don’t connect the withdrawals with the subsequent terror, but I don’t think that there’s any other way to explain. Sure the killing of Ayyash provided a pretext, but the laxer (if not negligent and not complicit) security provided Hamas with an opportunity to operate.
I recall this bit of history because in an op-ed today, former President Bill Clinton asserts:
A decade and a half since his death, I continue to believe that, had he lived, within three years we would have had a comprehensive agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians. To be sure, the enemies of peace would have tried to undermine it, but with Rabin’s leadership, I am confident a new era of enduring partnership and economic prosperity would have emerged.
Nonsense. That assumes that Arafat was negotiating in good faith and was committed to peace. Subsequent terror demonstrated otherwise. Arafat’s claim that there was no Jewish temple in Jerusalem to Clinton in 2000 should have cemented that fact in Clinton’s mind. Instead Clinton waxes nostalgic for a past that never could have been. He does it here too:
There is a real chance to finish the work he started. The parties are talking. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has the necessary support from his people to reach an agreement. Many Israelis say they trust him to make a peace that will protect and enhance their security. Because of the terms accepted in late 2000 by Prime Minister Ehud Barak, supported in greater detail by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, and approved by President Mahmoud Abbas and other Palestinians, everyone knows what a final agreement would look like.
If “everyone knows” then nobody told Arafat or Abbas, because Arafat in 2000 and Abbas in 2008 rejected deals that “everyone knows” would bring peace.
Look Clinton has to believe what he wrote. It’s easier to believe that he would have been successful had Prime Minister Rabin not been assassinated. But he was dealing with one party, which has demonstrated time and again, that it is not interested in peace. I’m sure it’s difficult to acknowledge that his work on peace was based on a false premise.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
Even at the time Arafat and his cronies spared no effort in assuring the Palestinians in Arabic, in every conceivable way, that any “peace” signed with Israel would be merely a step on the way to destroying the Zionist entity. Newspapers, radio, television, sermons in mosques, speeches…at every point the Palestinians were told time and again that their leaders had not agreed to any permanent peace with Israel and would never do so.
Clinton has to know this; desperately he wants to believe that the Palestinians don’t mean absolutely everything they say to each other and what they really mean are the soft words offered to people like Clinton. This attitude is a bit casual with Jewish lives but then again, the west has always been able to deal with Jewish lives in an objective way.