In Black and White

You knew the truth. You didn’t need the U.S. government to confirm it, and after all this time just seeing the words in print shouldn’t matter that much – but it does. Click on the link http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/67584.pdf and see if the 1973 State Department Memorandum – declassified this year – doesn’t make you sick inside.

You knew the truth. You didn’t need the U.S. government to confirm it, and after all this time just seeing the words in print shouldn’t matter that much – but it does. Click on the link http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/67584.pdf and see if the 1973 State Department Memorandum – declassified this year – doesn’t make you sick inside.

The Khartoum operation was planned and carried out with the full knowledge and personal approval of Yasir Arafat, Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and head of Fatah…The terrorists extended their deadline three times, but when they became convinced that their demands would not be met and after they reportedly received orders from Fatah headquarters in Beirut, they killed the two United States officials and the Belgian Charge.

Machine gunned to death, to be precise. There’s more in the memo, of course, but that is the part that matters. Cleo Noel, George Curtis Moore and Guy Eid, diplomats in service to the American and Belgian governments, were murdered with the “full knowledge and personal approval” of the man with whom Colin Powell, as National Security Advisor to President Reagan, opened formal American relations in the waning days of the Reagan Administration. The man who was entertained in the White House by President Clinton more often than any other foreign person. The man on whom countless American diplomats – traitors to their compatriots Ambassador Noel and Mr. Moore – relied as a “partner for peace” in the Middle East.

That’s where the sick feeling comes from.

The bubbling disgust and anger many Israelis Jews felt having people treat Arafat as if he was just another diplomat from just another country, was about the betrayal of the dead. Watching people – including Jews and Israeli government officials – talk to and negotiate with Arafat, knowing he had the blood of their children, grandparents, mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers on his hands was wrenchingly hard, even if they believed it was in the name of a better future. And all the while, the American State Department promoted and protected Arafat knowing he had the blood of THEIR brothers on his hands and not even bothering to pretend to be disgusted.

Imagine what our world might look like today had the U.S. mustered its righteous anger with Arafat after the murders in 1973 – if we had avenged their deaths and held Arafat to account. We might have short-circuited airplane hijackings, the Coastal Road and Maalot massacres in Israel, and the death of U.S. Navy diver Robert Dean Stethem. Instead, we got intifadas, bus bombings, the Passover Seder bombing, and the cowardly murder of the infant Shalhevet Pass. We got Palestinian veneration of violence and bloodshed that ruined the next generation of their children. We got refinement of the techniques of terror that gave us al-Qaeda, the U.S. embassy bombings, New York, Iraq, Afghanistan and Bali – and almost brought us a massacre in shopping malls in Illinois in the days before Christmas.

There is a straight line from 1973 to 2006, and it runs through the State Department. There is scant, but still comfort in President Bush’s unwavering refusal to meet with Arafat – he knew better even without having read the memo.