Wall Street Journal (WSJ.COM 10/26)
Commentary

This Is Israel's Fight Too

by Benjamin Netanyahu, 
a former prime minister of Israel.

The principle could not have been more clearly articulated. 
President Bush, addressing the American people last month, 
promised that his administration would make no distinction 
between terrorists and the regimes that harbor them. "From this 
day forward," the president boldly declared, "any nation that 
continues to support terrorism will be regarded by the United
States as a hostile regime."

On the other side of the Atlantic, British Prime Minister Tony 
Blair was equally emphatic about the need to hold states 
accountable for sheltering terrorists when he issued an 
unambiguous warning to the Taliban regime:
"Surrender the terrorists or surrender power."

But while the principle was clear, its application was not. 
First, there were calls to include Iran and Syria in the coalition 
against terror. Since the Khomeini revolution in 1979, Iran has 
served as an ideological beachhead for militant Islam and has 
sponsored international terrorism. Syria, for its part, has long 
been the headquarters of a dozen terrorist organizations with a 
global reach, affording them political and diplomatic support and 
allowing Syrian-controlled Lebanon to serve as a training ground. 
To even consider putting these two nations into a coalition against
terror undermines the moral clarity that is needed to win a war 
against evil.

The treatment of Israel, a nation that has been fighting terror 
since the day it was born, by much of the free world has been 
equally shortsighted. It is one (arguable) thing to leave the 
only democracy in the region on the sidelines of the antiterror 
coalition so as not to offend Arab and Islamic sensibilities. 
It is another to try to exculpate the Palestinian terrorists 
attacking Israel or try to force Israel to make concessions to 
them.

Some policy makers even tried to differentiate between Palestinian
terror and other terror, erroneously defining terrorism in terms 
of the underlying grievance of its perpetrators rather than the 
means employed to address those grievances.

Since terrorism, the deliberate killing of innocent civilians in 
order to achieve political goals, was not clearly defined at the 
outset, the term has become utterly malleable. Just as the Soviets 
used words such as "justice" and "freedom" to condemn the West 
during the Cold War, today's terrorists denounce American and 
Israeli "terrorism." The spokesman of the Palestinian Authority 
even had the audacity to liken Israel's antiterrorist incursions 
into Palestinian-controlled Ramallah to the terrorism that struck 
New York, not to mention his ghoulish comparison of Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon to Osama bin Laden.

Unfortunately, amidst this moral obfuscation, an Israel that 
continues to face the unprecedented terrorist onslaught that 
Yasser Arafat unleashed last year is expected to abide by a 
different set of principles than those so clearly formulated in 
the wake of the Sept. 11 attack.

After an Israeli cabinet minister was assassinated in a hotel in
Jerusalem, a reprehensible moral equivalency that equates 
terrorists with their victims was taken to a new level when some 
diplomats had the temerity to compare the assassination with 
Israel's targeted killing of the masterminds of Palestinian 
terrorism. Imagine the outrage that would follow if someone 
suggested that the assassination of an American cabinet secretary 
would be morally equivalent to the targeted killing of one of 
the masterminds of al Qaeda terrorism.

Yasser Arafat is perhaps the only leader in the world who is both
directly responsible for terror and whose regime also harbors 
terrorists. The Fatah and Tanzim forces that are directly 
accountable to him have committed over 50% of the terrorist acts 
against Israelis over the past year. Hamas and Islamic Jihad, 
whose suicide bombings have killed and wounded hundreds of Israeli 
civilians since the peace process began, operate with impunity
in Palestinian-controlled areas.

But rather than unequivocally supporting Israel in its battle 
against a terrorist regime, many voices in the free world have 
called on Israel to make concessions to the Palestinian Authority. 
Far from "calming tensions" in the region, such concessions will 
only embolden terrorists by sending the message that terrorism pays. 
Talk of a Palestinian state at a time when Arafat uses the media 
under his control to call for Israel's destruction is rewarding 
Arafat's decision to achieve through terror what he could not 
achieve through negotiations.

President Bush is a strong friend of Israel. Surely his 
administration understands that the goal of the war on terrorism 
must be to destroy terrorist regimes, not create them. I am 
convinced that if the principles the president has articulated in 
fighting this war against evil are adhered to, the war against 
terrorism will be won.

The government of Israel must deliver the same message to Arafat 
that the free world has conveyed to the Taliban: Surrender 
terrorism or surrender power. What is required of the Palestinian 
Authority is not merely extraditing the specific terrorists who 
shot Rehavam Zeevi and crushing the organization that sent them, 
but also rooting out the entire terrorist infrastructure that 
operates within its territory.