Lessons for the Next US President
by Louis René Beres (October 2016)
Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin receiving the Nobel Peace Prize following the Oslo Accords
The Palestinian police
If this particular failure were not serious enough, these starkly anti-American Palestinian terrorists, all of whom had openly celebrated 9/11 harms against the United States, were later given weapons training by certain American intelligence agencies, and by the Pentagon. It was General Keith Dayton, operating under authority of two American presidents, who led the incoherent and counter-productive American effort to train Fatah “security forces” in nearby Jordan.
In time, it is now plausible, these Palestinian forces will be supplanted by still another band of Arab terrorists, namely ISIS. Then, looking back, it will finally become evident that U.S. sponsorship of one murderous Palestinian Arab terror faction (Fatah) against another Palestinian Arab terror group (Hamas) had effectively been to the benefit of ISIS.
For those who seek detail, there is a long history on this matter, a deeply humiliating narrative of error, one from which only the Arab side has seemingly learned anything important. For a start, Osama Abu Tayeh was arrested by the PA for March 1996 bombings in Jerusalem. Rejecting Israeli requests for extradition, the PA proudly hired Tayeh for the Palestinian Police, in October, 1996.
Palestinian heroes, all.
A clear and now completely forgotten example would be the active Palestinian Liberation Army (PLA) assistance extended to Saddam Hussein’s torturers, during and after the 1991 Gulf War. As the world has already forgotten the irrepressible jubilation of Palestinian Arab celebrations on 9/11, so too has it pushed out of its accessible memory the intimate and mutually supporting ties that had existed earlier, between PA President Yasser Arafat, and Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Today, as our next president will likely witness the complete collapse of civil order in Iraq and Syria, a vital lesson might still seem elusive. It is that any Palestinian state, soon after its de jure independence, would almost surely fall to even more vicious bands of Sunni terrorists, most plausibly, of course, ISIS or ISIS-affiliates.
Shahid mothers and sons
Illegal immunity
This limitation stems from a broader prohibition that binds all states, namely, the persistently overriding claims of pertinent rules derived from Higher Law, or the Law of Nature. Although PA inaction on extradition is not, strictly speaking, a pardoning or immunizing action, it has exactly the same practical effect.
Such legal wisdom could have substantial practical results. Although it is unclear that punishment, which is central to all justice, necessarily deters future crimes, the deliberate protection or exoneration of any terrorist necessarily undermines the universal obligation to incapacitate that particular criminal from committing further acts of murder. In the case of protected Palestinian terrorists, hundreds of Israelis who are alive today might still be murdered tomorrow as a direct result of the steady PA refusal to extradite or prosecute.
The next American president must finally understand that terrorism must be combated at both operational and jurisprudential levels. More precisely, terrorism is a crime that can and must always be punished. After all, in the absence of a reliable expectation that terrorists will be extradited or prosecuted, international criminal law would simply fail to operate.
It is the state of Israel.
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First published in INN.
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