YOU'RE AN ARAB AND   YOU  DON'T SPEAK HEBREW? THANK THE U.S.A AND ISRAELI RESTRAINT By David A. Chodack Something is radically wrong here. The Palestinians moan and cry about how oppressed they are under the Israeli occupation and how they are being slaughtered by Israel's superior military might and therefore need and deserve the support of the whole world to end this brutal situation. Yet, once again the Palestinians are being offered a chance for peace and a chance to actually have a state of their own and once again they are on the verge of rejecting it, because they can't have everything they want. Instead of being grateful, or even conciliatory, the Palestinians are back to making non-negotiable demands, backed of course, by threats of terrorist violence. The Western powers, led by the United States, finally made a long-overdue symbolic gesture by refusing to deal with Yasser Arafat, at least directly and officially. Instead they allowed Arafat to appoint a Prime Minister with no real power as his front man, while Arafat remained the power (and the troublemaker) behind the throne. Then President Bush came up with a Road Map to peace in the Middle East, announced the creation of a Palestinian state within three years and began pressuring the Israelis to go along, under the pretense that somehow a Palestinian state would benefit them as well as the Palestinians and everyone would then live as one big, happy family. The Palestinian response was, of course, more suicide bombings.  President Bush's answer to this, was that the Road Map called for the Palestinians to disarm terror groups, dismantle them and put their members in prison. But, of course, the Palestinians couldn't really do this, since the Israelis had decimated their security forces (because those security forces had been actively involved in fomenting terror, rather than stopping it) and besides, Mahmoud Abbas, the anti-Arafat, refused to even try to rein in or dismantle the terror groups, because he did not want to alienate the terrorists and preferred negotiating with them instead. Instead of the forcible disarmament and arrests the "Roadmap" called for, the Palestinians generously, if reluctantly, agreed to a three month cease-fire, a proposal immediately and wisely condemned by the Israelis as a ploy to give the terrorists a chance to regroup and re-arm. Never-the-less, after some arm-twisting by the U.S., the Israelis not only agreed to this, but actually made new concessions to the Palestinians in order to keep the "Roadmap" on track and get peace negotiations started. The Israelis have begun pulling out of parts of the West Bank and Gaza and returning them to Palestinian control. They have even begun releasing Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails and negotiating with the Palestinians on plans for a Palestinian state. And what have the Israelis and the Americans gotten in return? Threats and demands. Not satisfied with the major concessions they have already gained and emboldened by the fact that the Israelis and the West are once again caving in, rather than insisting on the destruction of groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad, they are now demanding that every single murderous terrorist be released from  Israeli prisons, no matter how unreasonable or illogical this may be. If Israel does not release all the Palestinians in its prisons, including convicted terrorists and murderers and accede to all the other Palestinians' non-negotiable demands, the cease-fire - which the Israelis never asked for and agreed to go along with only reluctantly - will be over and the terrorism will resume, not in three months, when the terrorists have had a chance to regroup, re-arm and absorb all their formerly jailed comrades back into their murderous ranks, but immediately. Would the U.S, agree to a three month cease fire with Al Quaeda? Would we agree to let all the prisoners in Guantamo and all the convicted terrorists in our prisons go free? Then why do we think this is such a great deal for the Israelis? The rationale for demanding the immediate and unconditional release of these murderous thugs - many of them directly responsible for the deaths of innocent women and children - should be familiar to all Americans and should strike fear and anger in their hearts, because it is the same rationale Palestinians and other Arabs used to demand the release of Sirhan Sirhan after he shot Bobby Kennedy: to the charming, peace-loving Palestinians, these are not murders and criminals, they are heroes, just like Sirhan.  Therefore, it is time for the world, or at least the people of the United States, to stand back for a minute and think about what's really going on here. What type of people make heroes out of cowards who plot to blow up buses and cafes and hijack airliners and cruise ships so they can kill as many innocent civilians as possible? What kind of people deliberately start not one, but several wars, lose every one, complain and howl about how oppressed they are after losing those wars and then demand to set the terms of the peace? Before they will stop fighting and accept their own state? The answer, at best, is people who do not have a very firm grip on reality and people we have no business siding with. The fact is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has festered for so long primarily because the Palestinians have been coddled and babied by the world for far too long. They have been allowed to believe that they and their problems are special  (Do you know that the United Nations has two separate refugee organizations? One is to deal strictly with the Palestinians - guess who supplies most of its budget and if you guessed the Palestinians' Arab or European Union brothers, think again) and another one to deal with all the other unspecial refugees in the entire world, except of course the Jews who were kicked out of Arab countries and are not considered to be refugees entitled to help) It is time for the world - especially the United States - to step back and say enough is enough. If the Palestinians insist on creating their own problems and perpetuating the war with Israel, then they should be left on their own to deal with the consequences. They must be made to realize that one way or another, the Intifada is over. If they blow it this time, the alternative to peace must be not a return to the status quo, but all out war. For far too long, the Israelis have been far too restrained, far too accommodating in an effort not to alienate the U.S. and the Europeans, but enough is enough. They should have killed Arafat and the PLO in the early 1980's in Lebanon, rather than bowing to Henry Kissinger and Ronald Reagan and letting him escape to Tunisia. They never should have let Arafat come back from Tunisia and re-establish himself in the West Bank. Their reward for  repeated conciliation and restraint has been nothing but dead Israelis. Now, it's the time of reckoning. Let there be peace or let there be war. Letting the situation continue to fester while the terrorists pose as victims benefits no one but the terrorists themselves. Instead of eliminating terrorists on a tit-for-tat basis, in response to each new provocation, the Israelis should show the Palestinians once and for all, exactly how intimidating their military power really can be. They should go after the terrorists on a full-time, all-out basis, seeking them out and killing them wherever they rear their ugly heads, not just after they have committed some new atrocity. Instead of making half-apologies and rationalizations for their attempted assassination of Abdel Rantisi, the Hamas spokesman, they should have  sent a strong, unequivocal message, by infiltrating the hospital where he was being treated and finishing the job. Then they should have gone after Sheik Yassin, the Hamas "spiritual" leader and every other terrorist they can find - all at once, rather than one at a time -  and then when the Palestinians have the funerals, with thousands of terrorists marching through the streets firing automatic weapons, bring in the helicopters, bring in the aircraft and the tanks and the  ground troops and confront them en masse when they've crawled out of their hiding places to expose themselves and can no longer claim to be innocent civilians. For too long now, the United States, in a misguided attempt to win friends and influence in the Middle East, has tried to pretend we can be an honest, neutral broker between the Israelis and Arabs, when the obvious truth is that the Israelis are our natural friends and allies and the Arabs, particularly the Palestinians, are not. If we really want to be honest brokers of  peace, then we should remain strictly neutral and stay out of the situation and let nature take its course. Then, when the Palestinians want to know why they should stop the violence and what they will get in return, they can be given a simple, honest answer: "You will get to live, instead of dying. And, someday, if you prove that you can really renounce terrorism and live like human beings, you'll even have a Palestinian state - but not one run by Yasser Arafat or Hamas, other terrorist thugs of your choosing. Otherwise, if you reject peace again and return to violence,  the alternative to peace will not be a return to the status quo. It will be war and you will have no one on your side and any armed Palestinian will be a dead Palestinian. The game of Let's Pretend benefits no one but the terrorists. If the U.S wants to see peace in the Middle East and cultivate friends and allies, then Arabic language leaflets should be dropped in the West Bank and Gaza, as well as in Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Egypt and especially Saudi Arabia, with a simple message: "Do you speak Hebrew? No? Then you should thank the United States and all the pressure we have put on Israel to show restraint, because after starting and losing all those wars, Lord (Allah) knows that's the only reason you don't."