In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Ari Weitzner responded to Mahmoud Abbas’s May 26 op-ed entitled “Message to Ariel Sharon: Set My People Free”:
It is utterly bizarre to read the lament of Mahmoud Abbas . . . about the daily incursions of Israelis into Palestinian territory without even a mention of the rockets and other terrorist mayhem that originate there that prompts the incursions in the first place. . . .
None of Israel’s alleged sins cited by Mr. Abbas come close to that of allowing, as a matter of policy, a terrorist organization like Hamas to operate freely in the Palestinian territories, unhindered by a 50,000 man armed Palestinian police force.
William A. Levinson responded as follows:
Mr. Abbas tells Ariel Sharon, “Set My People Free.” Free to do what? Free to continue a 40-year campaign of terror against their neighbors, as they were doing even when the West Bank belonged to Jordan? . . . . Free to lynch as “collaborators” those Palestinians who express willingness to live in peace with Israel? Free to make Nazi-like speeches such as the one by Sheikh Ibrahim Mudairis when compared Jews to cancer . . .
The Palestinians could have had a state in 1937 if they had accepted the two-state solution of the Peel Commission, or in 1947 if they accepted the U.N. partition, or anytime in the 20 years Arabs controlled the West Bank before 1967, or in 1978 if they had accepted the autonomy set forth in the Israel-Egypt peace treaty, or in 2000 if they had accepted the Camp David offer, or in 2001 if they had accepted the Clinton Parameters.
Something other than Ariel Sharon is keeping them from being “free.” Paul Johnson’s article in the current issue of Commentary (“The Anti-Semitic Disease”) diagnoses the self-destruction.