Palestinians Are a Bad Lot--but Necessary to Peace : The West Bank is no longer a buffer against Arab attacks; negotiating a settlement is Israel’s real security.

Efforts are building in the Arab world, largely at the instigation of Saddam Hussein, to link America’s military reaction to the invasion of Kuwait with America’s response to the continued Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Now, in the wake of 19 Palestinians killed in Jerusalem, even Egypt, which has sent troops to Saudi Arabia, has coupled Kuwait and the West Bank.

Palestinians and their supporters assert that the West’s demands for Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait must be paralleled by demands that Israel withdraw from the territories occupied in 1967. This argument ignores that Israel attained its added girth as the aftermath of another Arab attempt to push it into the sea (or worse), while the occupation of Kuwait resulted from naked Iraqi self-interest. At the same time, equally erroneously, many Israelis and their supporters have rushed to parry the saber-rattling for Hussein with a chorus of: “See, we told you all along. Now the Palestinians have unmasked themselves and revealed their true ugly face.”

Nonsense. Raising a clenched Palestinian fist for Saddam Hussein is, while foolish and self-defeating, nothing new. The Palestinians have been brutes all along--from the massacres of Jewish settlers in the 1930s to the slaying of Israeli athletes in Munich and dozens of similar murders and hijackings, to the hacking to death of their own for the “purity” of the intifada.

Even the most moderate Palestinians have reached that position only in acquiescence to Israel’s strength. Said Hammami and Issam Sartawi, the highest-ranking PLO proponents of reconciliation with Israel in the 1970s and 1980s, (and killed by the Abu Nidal faction for their efforts) admittedly shifted to the peace camp only after the Arabs failed again to flatten Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur war. Several months after the defeat, Hammami declared in an article in the London Times that the Palestinians “had no choice but to compromise with the Israeli entity which was established on our land against natural justice and find a way to coexist with it.”

Yasser Arafat’s declaration two years ago of Israel’s right to exist reflected not love and friendship but a similar reluctant look at reality. The prominent Americans and Israelis who have been recanting their meetings with Arafat because he has disappointed them are acting like betrayed lovers who forgot to open their eyes when they were courting. They should talk to Arafat; they don’t have to dance with him.

The Palestinian heart is no reason for Israel not to negotiate with the Palestinian mind. The Palestinians’ embrace of Hussein does not alter the fact that holding 1.7 million people under military occupation erodes Israel’s moral ground. It does no good for Israel merely to keep a lid on the West Bank while preparing for an attack by Iraq. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be at the center of the Middle East the day after the gulf crisis ends, and failure to move now will translate into far greater pressure on Israel later.

What happened Monday at Jerusalem’s Temple Mount illustrates the danger of a vacuum. Both sides are culpable: There is evidence, in the number of rocks that had been stockpiled, that the Palestinians had prepared for a confrontation; and Israeli extremists lit the fuse with their marching and demands to rebuild the Second Temple on the grounds of the holy mosque.

Then, to hold together the Arab coalition against Hussein, the United States had to condemn Israel.

Proponents of Israel’s retaining the West Bank and Gaza claim that the territory is needed as a buffer against invading Arab armies. But it should be clear after the past few weeks’ news about Iraq that the West Bank is no buffer against long-range missiles. And if there were an Arab invasion, how would Israel contain the 1.7 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza?

On the map, the West Bank is a flat finger of land; on the ground, it is a clenched fist. Not long ago I was in the Dahaisha refugee camp, a 15-minute drive southeast of Jerusalem. I sat with a group of Palestinians in a sweltering house with the windows and doors shut so the Israeli patrol passing outside would not burst in and disrupt our talking. On one wall of the cinder-block hut were photographs, in frames made of matchsticks, of relatives who had been killed. Nailed to the wall above them was a basket woven with the red, green, black and white of the outlawed Palestinian flag. The Palestinians can be brutal, but their intifada is an authentic and deeply felt nationalism.

What we have seen in microcosm this week is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has the capacity to upset all balances in the Middle East. For the future, there are only two choices: more of these incidents, blowing up into a jihad, or Israel and the Palestinians making peace.

We have also seen that if there is no movement toward peace, then down the road in another Arab-Israeli war the goodwill of America may not be taken for granted.