To the editor:
It appears from his column, "Regime Change, Part 2" on April 23, that Thomas Friedman still doesn't understand what went wrong with the Oslo Process. His prescription for "nurtur[ing] an alternative Palestinian leadership" is really a prescription for repeating the disastrous errors in the implementation of the once promising Oslo Process.
It's time to recognize that no real progress can be made until the Palestinian Arabs finally do the first thing they solemnly promised to do at the start of the Oslo Process a bloody decade ago--abandon terror, as both a tactic and a strategy.
It's also time to recognize reality and stop misusing terms.
When we demand Israel freeze and even remove "settlements," which are by no means illegal under International Law, we are both appeasing terrorists and endorsing ethnic cleansing. While this may prove to be necessary, all those interested in human rights and the ideal of people of different backgrounds living together in peace should be repulsed by the very idea.
The eagerness with which so many view the ascension of Mahmoud Abbas is itself a sad commentary on the asymmetry of the Arab-Israeli conflict. In the context of Palestinian Arab society, Mr. Abbas is rightly considered a moderate; in a more normal society, this Holocaust denier who in his book "The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism," claims to refute what he calls "the Zionist fantasy, the fantastic lie that six million Jews were killed," would be considered an extremist to be shunned.
Let us stop referring to "restarting the peace process" and recognize there never was a peace process. Israel and many of its supporters deluded ourselves into believing there was a peace process, but we can no longer deny that for Yassir Arafat and the Palestinian Arabs it was nothing more than a scam designed to give them control over a de facto state from which they could more easily launch terrorist attacks.
Let us insist that anything we're going to call a peace process be a true peace process.
Let us insist that the Palestinian Arabs not agree to a temporary cease fire and then use it to reinvigorate their terrorist infrastructure, but dismantle the Tanzim, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and numerous other terrorist organizations the Palestinian Authority has nurtured.
Only then would it be possible to have meaningful negotiations, with compromises by both sides, leading to a lasting peace.
Sincerely,
Alan Stein