With Israelis mourning another terrorist attack and the Arab world complaining about Israel's response, the Mitchell commission has offered a set of common-sense proposals that could cool Middle East tensions. The problem is that many people involved in the conflict want to keep things hot. The obvious fact is that each round in this cycle has been initiated by the Arab side, often with the undisguised approval of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and other Arab leaders around the Middle East. Palestinians threaten Israeli military positions, and the Israelis respond. Arab terrorists detonate a bomb inside Israel, and the Israeli government retaliates.
Palestinian forces launch mortar attacks on Israeli settlements, and Israeli troops respond.
The sequence of events is hardly disputed by the Palestinians themselves. But they claim that their fundamental grievance justifies their tactics. Yet last year the United States and Israel offered Arafat and the Palestinians a secure state of their own on some of the land that Israel won while defending itself from the Arab world during the 1967 Middle East war. This offer was better than anything the Palestinians had ever been offered before from anyone, including the Arab states. But the Palestinians not only rejected this offer, they responded to it with a new outburst of violence.