Who Killed the Americans?

And Who Bears Responsibility for their Deaths?

The three security guards who died in yesterday’s attack (via a roadside detonation) on a U.S. convoy near Beit Hanun in the northern Gaza Strip—the guards were escorting a group of embassy officers on their way to interview Palestinian candidates for a Fulbright scholarship program—were not the first Americans to die in the terror war launched by the Palestinian leadership in September 2000. Just recently, an American oleh—and the seven-month-old baby daughter of the friend he was visiting—were murdered by an Islamic jihad terrorist in Negohot, joining a long list of American-born Israelis who have fallen prey to terrorist attacks in the last three years. A number of Palestinians with American citizenship have also died. But these were the first to be murdered because they were Americans, representing the U.S. effort to help both sides return to some semblance of normality.

The murder was claimed simultaneously, but separately, by a group calling itself “Ansar Al-Qaeda” (“Followers of Al-Qaeda”) and by the “Popular Resistance Committees,” a general name for a grouping of unruly terror elements in the Gaza Strip. The former is apparently a bogus claim, although attempts have been made by Osama bin Laden’s operatives to co-opt Palestinian terror activists. The latter is taken seriously by the Palestinian security forces, who suddenly found it in themselves to arrest overnight a number of “Popular Resistance” figureheads. The attack may yet turn out to be a joint effort with Palestinian Islamic Jihad, whose Syrian and Iranian backers are still seething over U.S. support for Israel after the Israeli Air Force raid in Syria.

But the real question, at the end of the day, is not the specific identity of the thug who pulled the trigger. Broader attitudes, both among the Palestinians and within the region as a whole, are to blame for this murder, as well as for the ongoing murder operations against Americans doing their duty in Iraq (and elsewhere).

As recently documented by a number of monitoring groups, the messages in Arabic emanating from the Palestinian Authority, through media fully under the  control of Arafat’s Fatah indoctrination system, are profoundly at variance with the soft voices murmuring in English about how sorry they are for what has happened. The glorification of murderers continues apace, as does the systematic vilification of America and all that it stands for.

To paraphrase what Ambassador John D. Negroponte said in the UN about Syria, Arafat, too, is on the wrong side in the so-called “war on terror”—or, to call it by its proper name, the global war on totalitarian Islamism. A former Muslim Brother from Egypt, Arafat has provided the Islamist purveyors of hate with a comfortable working environment, except for a short period of pressure in 1996-99; and has made the present conflict (the “Al-Aqsa intifada”) synonymous with the revival of Omar’s and Saladin’s conquests of Jerusalem. That is precisely why Ehud Barak and other  influential “centrists” in Israel—and not just the hard right—clearly feel that it would be profoundly wrong to reward this man’s efforts (as the so-called Geneva Document proposes to do) with a victory in the struggle over the Temple Mount. Nothing would provide a greater boost to the form of terrorist struggle practiced by the anti-American Islamists across the region than a willingness (by a group of modern, rationalist Israelis who see no reason to fight over ancient stones and caverns, but who fail to see the underlying twenty-first-century, World War IV political imperatives) to accept such an outcome as a result of the present conflict.

Meanwhile, impatience with Arafat is not confined to Jerusalem and Washington; the Egyptians too (let alone many among the Palestinian elite, as distinct from the impressionable masses) are beginning to fume at his destructive role and the constant delays in creating a unified security structure. But while they play a positive role in pressuring him behind the scenes, they have not been helpful—to say the least—in contending with the underlying anti-Americanism poisoning parts of the Arab world. Any regular listener to Sawt al-Arab, the radio station that projects Egypt’s views all over the region, would be forgiven if he thought he had come across a mouthpiece of Saddam supporters (the “Iraqi resistance”) fulminating against “the Anglo-American occupation”; and, sooner or later, the listener would be treated to a heavy hint about “Zionist control” of U.S. institutions. It is against this background of blatant attacks on the American agenda in the Middle East—along with the issues of strategic balance and Israel’s qualitative edge—that the Bush administration and Congress should weigh the Egyptian (and Saudi) requests for highly sophisticated precision-guided munitions.

Finally, there is the European attitude toward terror. “This time,” the EU’s foreign policy chief Javier Solana reportedly told Arafat, no amount of “I’m sorries” would help; the time has come to act. Fine—but it should come as no surprise that many Israelis (Justice Minister Tommy Lapid said as much out loud) heard something else, something more sinister: Until now, when it was just ordinary Jewish citizens who were being murdered, we let you get away with it, indeed, acted to ensure that you would not pay a price, but now that it is Americans….

Had the European and international message been as blunt then—before Gaza and Haifa, before the children’s bus in Jerusalem and the family murdered in Kibbutz Metzer, and before the Dolphinarium—if the EU had owned up to the folly of supporting Arafat for so long, who knows how many Israelis, and Palestinians, would still be alive today.