Takeover of Orient House Shatters the Trojan Horse

The Israeli takeover of Orient House, headquarters of the shadow Palestinian government here, expresses the renewed Israeli consensus that has emerged in recent months against partitioning this city. Thanks to Yasser Arafat’s holy war, the Palestinians have lost any chance, at least for the foreseeable future, of convincing mainstream Israelis to redivide Jerusalem.

The old Israeli consensus over Jerusalem emphasized the Jewish historical and religious attachment to the city--”the eternal undivided capital of the Jewish people,” as former Prime Minister Menachem Begin liked to put it. A people who had waited centuries to return to Jerusalem couldn’t conceive of its amputation.

But then former Prime Minister Ehud Barak shattered that emotional consensus when, at Camp David last summer, he offered Arafat sovereignty over at least two of the four quarters in the walled Old City.

Had Arafat responded to that previously unimaginable offer with at least a counteroffer, rather than with terrorism and mob violence, an Israeli public desperate to get on with normal life may very well have endorsed the concessions.

Now, though, Arafat has succeeded in recreating the Israeli consensus about Jerusalem--this time motivated not by historical but security considerations. To insert Arafat’s regime into Jerusalem would mean empowering a Palestinian “police” force that actively assists in attacks on Israeli civilians. And just behind those terrorist police come the Tanzim and Fatah militias and the suicide bombers of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Most Israelis today realize that granting Arafat’s forces proximity to Jewish areas would turn the entire city into Gilo--the Jerusalem neighborhood bordering Palestinian-controlled Bethlehem that has been routinely targeted by Arafat’s gunmen for the last 10 months.

Just as the meager borders of a Jewish state suggested by the U.N. partition of 1947 became obsolete when the Arab leadership rejected partition and opted for war, so too the Camp David concessions offered by Barak have been voided by Palestinian intransigence.

It seems surreal to recall that, barely a year ago, Israeli leftists were confidently invoking the imminent redivision of Jerusalem.

Indeed, a popular left-wing sticker that appeared around the time of Camp David proclaimed that “The Conflict Will End in Jerusalem”--that is, with its partition into two capitals for two states.

While an ideological hard core continues to insist that Jerusalem is negotiable, even many Israelis who once supported partitioning the city now concede its untenability.

That renewed Israeli determination is reflected in an article in the newspaper Maariv, written by veteran left-wing journalist Ron Meiberg, who lauded the takeover of Orient House as a “creative” and bloodless response to officially sanctioned Palestinian terrorism. The takeover, he writes, “restores one’s trust in the good sense of the government”--this, from a journalist who was one of the earliest and most vociferous critics of the Israeli occupation and who has bitterly attacked Ariel Sharon for decades.

The eviction of the PLO from Orient House is a fitting response to the Palestinian acknowledgment that the Oslo peace process was an act of deception.

In an interview with the Egyptian newspaper Al-Arabi shortly before his death, Faisal Husseini, the Palestinian leader who headed Orient House, compared the 1993 Oslo peace accords to the Trojan horse, an attempt to subvert and ultimately destroy Israel through territorial concessions.

He said in this interview: “Had the U.S. and Israel not realized, before Oslo, that all that was the left of the Palestinian national movement ... was a wooden horse named Arafat or the PLO, they would have never opened their fortified gates and let it inside their walls .... When we are asking all the Palestinian forces and factions to look at the Oslo agreement and at other agreements as ‘temporary’ procedures, or phased goals, this means that we are ambushing the Israelis and cheating them.” And, he concluded, “our ultimate goal is the liberation of all historical Palestine from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea, even if this means that the conflict will last for another thousand years.”

With the closure of Orient House, Israel has taken an essential step in dismantling the Trojan horse inserted into Jerusalem.