10/31/05
By Mortimer B. Zuckerman
Abbas Must Act
What is the price of trying to make life easier for the Palestinians? A simple answer: murder most foul. Israel voluntarily removed roadblocks; so terrorists in a Fatah group, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, put stolen Israeli license plates on a car, sped by a crowd at a hitching post, and opened fire with automatic weapons. Three young Israelis, including a 15-year-old, were killed, and four others were wounded. Now the entire Palestinian population will have to bear the burden of tighter Israeli security. To protect its citizens, Israel has to ban all private Palestinian cars from the main roads, rebuild roadblocks and barriers throughout Judea and Samaria, and end the turnover of West Bank towns (especially Bethlehem) to the Palestinian Authority.
The lamentable inertia of the PA's president, Mahmoud Abbas, has brought this on his people. The Fatah group freely boasted of what it had done, but Abbas did not pursue the terrorists nor even condemn them. Nor is he doing anything about the smuggling of people and weapons from Gaza and Sinai into the West Bank. Terrorism and the incitement to violence continue unabated outside the attention of western media, which are all too ready to scream if there is an Israeli misdemeanor.
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Israel and the United States try hard to keep faith in Abbas. He is not personally a bad man. He just lacks the will to control the anarchy. All we get from Abbas are nice interviews to the western media explaining how he will persuade the militias to give up their guns, and the media write upbeat stories without bothering to note that in the meantime no terrorist has been arrested, tried, or sent to prison. The lawless, virtually feudal, criminal and terrorist factions within Gaza simply refuse to obey Abbas or to stop attacking Israel. He is so scared of them he has even rejected international appeals to dismantle the armed militias, saying the world should stop meddling in Palestinian internal affairs.
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Hamas terrorism is a disaster for the Gaza Palestinians. They simply will not thrive unless their leadership shows some guts. As the British minister of state put it, the PA has "60,000 troops
the equipment. What they need is the political will ."
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http://www.usnews.com/usnews/opinion/articles/051031/31edit.htm