: 10.0pt"> Why There Won't Be A Palestinian State- Yasir Arafat knew it on 9/11. You could see it in his haunted eyes, slumped shoulders and ashen face. His dream of a Palestinian state ruled by him died with the World Trade Center. Only the United States could force Israel to create a Palestinian state, and the United States would never do that after such a mass casualty foreign terrorist attack on American soil.

Such attacks require long planning and preparation in locations safe from investigation and attack, i.e., in countries whose governments support or are indifferent to the terrorists, or in "failed states" - countries lacking effective governments - with populations largely friendly to the terrorists. Afghanistan provided Al Qaeda with such a sanctuary for the 9/11 attacks. An independent Palestine would be a terrorist-supporting state, so the United States won't permit it to exist, let alone pressure Israel to create it.

The US government, with the exception of its clueless State Department, is lying about this. See Thomas Libscomb's May 8 article in UPI:

"What the world is seeing is America's first "oriental war." ... It is not necessary to govern Parthia or Afghanistan ... It is only necessary to make sure Parthia or Afghanistan do not have the power to disturb areas of strategic importance. ... And with a lot of lies, the liberal use of bribery, and a surprisingly few soldiers, it is possible to play this game for centuries."

Arafat had made the wrong call. He was a political terrorist and had chosen, again, the path of terrorism to achieve political goals, only to be blind-sided by Al Qaeda's millennial terrorists whose successful excesses had just made it impossible for the United States to tolerate terrorist states. Political terrorists generally use terror to achieve political goals with the knowledge that excessive terror against a superior foe will be counterproductive. Millennial terrorists use terror to foster a coming "end of an age", or in Al Qaeda's case, the beginning of a new one. And they don't believe it possible to use too much terror. Ralph Peters calls them "apocalyptic" terrorists.

Worse, the Palestinian people, led by Hamas and followed by Arafat's Palestinian Authority, shifted from political to millennial terrorism after 9/11 (the suicide bombings basically the whole Palestinian culture has become psychotic and many other Arab societies are getting there). Arafat's decisions played a significant but not decisive role in creating this situation.

The result of this is that Israel can't be coerced into creating a Palestinian state, as that would pose a direct and immediate threat to Israel's survival. A suicidal Palestinian state cannot be deterred from using weapons of mass destruction on Israel, while its geography would bring every major Israeli city within easy range of Katuysha-type artillery rockets with nerve gas warheads.

The Lebanese Shiite terrorist group, Hizbollah, has some of this capability already it has several thousand such rockets, and purportedly has several hundred relatively ineffective nerve gas warheads (small high explosive charges disperse the gas over a relatively small area as opposed to pressurized sprayers dispersing it over a wider area) for those, but only Israel's northern cities are within range. Hizbollah's primitive nerve gas rockets, launched en masse, might kill several thousand Israelis and permanently injure twenty times that number, but only 50,000 - 100,000 Lebanese Shiites would survive Israel's nuclear retaliation.

Five to six thousand Katyushas launched from the West Bank with nerve gas warheads using pressurized sprayers could kill or permanently injure more than a million Israelis. While Israel retaliation could certainly kill almost all the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, the suicidally psychotic Palestinians would probably count that a victory. Deterrence is not reliable enough to be effective in such a situation. The only effective way to keep the Palestinians from launching such an attack is to deny them the means.

9/11 made it a vital American interest that there not be a Palestinian state. The mass psychosis of Palestinian society has made it an Israeli survival interest that there not be a Palestinian state.

The events which created this situation after the early 1990's Oslo agreement begin with Israel's ceding of de facto control of West Bank and Gaza media and schools to Arafat's Palestinian Authority (ex-Palestinian Liberation Organization and its more extreme competitor, Hamas. The teaching of hatred of Israel and Jews in West Bank/Gaza media and schools became far more virulent, with the result that suicide bombing has permeated the culture to the point where the Palestinian Authority can neither stop such attacks nor calm its people.

The decisive events, however, were the assassination of Israel Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin and Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon under pressure from Hizbollah suicide bombers. These two events seem to have convinced the Palestinian people, as well as Arafat and his emerging kleptocracy (the Palestinian authority) that it was safe to dump negotiations with Israel (they were afraid of Rabin) and that they might be able to win (a nebulous term for them ranging from Israeli concessions to outright genocide of Israel) through violence, notably through suicide bombings.

So Arafat's negotiations with Israel Prime Minister Barak were a sham. Arafat never intended to accept any possible concessions from Barak for creation of a Palestinian state - he wanted impossible concessions and thought he could get them through violence. Arafat's admissions since 9/11, and documents captured by the Israelis last month, prove this, though it also appears that the genocidal hatred he fostered, or permitted to be fostered, created a tiger which he could ride but not direct.

But Arafat knew that American pressure on Israel was essential to achieving whatever goal he had beyond remaining in control of the Palestinian Authority, and understood immediately that 9/11 made that impossible. Since then he has concentrated on staying in power.  - Thomas M. Holsinger

The World Bank estimated that damage to Palestinian property by the Israeli invasion of the West Bank came to some $361 million and would take a year to repair.