Posted by Dan Ewert : 4/01/2002 12:30:00 AM (Archive Link)
[This is a blog from several days ago that is just now being posted. My thoughts on the current situation in Israel will be forthcoming.]

Yassar Arafat. Our government continues to negotiate with him and plead with him. We persuade Israel to be nice to him and to show restraint toward him. I continually wonder why. Despite his pleas for a cease-fire, Palestinian violence has continued unabated. I think this leads to one of two obvious conclusions. Either he’s unwilling to stop the attacks against Israelis or he’s unable to. In the first case, he speaks words of peace in public but plans evil deeds in private and is a clear threat to Israeli lives. The government has shown great restraint in not eliminating him as they have several other terrorist leaders. If the circumstances are the latter and he’s simply unable to control his people, then at best he should be ignored. There are apparently other entities in control of things and he is irrelevant. What’s especially frightening about this prospect is that we don’t know who is in charge. Even worse is that there may be no one person in charge. Instead, it’s merely a number of autonomous groups acting on their own suspicions and beliefs with no regard to what Mr. Arafat or anybody else says. In either case, Arafat is clearly not a person with whom we need bother negotiating. We should marginalize him to the irrelevancy he deserves.