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Today we think of Fallujah as the site of ongoing battles between courageous American forces and assorted enemy fighters. But back on the last day of March of this year, Fallujah was briefly known for the manifestly unheroic behavior of its Arab/Islamic combatants. Then it was the place where Islamic insurgents openly dramatized their long-cherished practice of desecrating the dead.

The ineradicable image of charred American bodies hanging from an Iraqi bridge in Fallujah on that day brought to my mind a similar atrocity several years earlier in Palestinian Ramallah. There, an unspeakably barbarous mob tortured, disemboweled and gouged out the eyes of two defenseless Israelis who had gotten lost on the roads. There, as on March 31 2004 in Fallujah, “ordinary” Arabs, many of them undeniably ecstatic with blood lust – crossed every boundary of civilized human behavior.

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In Ramallah, literally thousands of Palestinians, including women and young children, danced with jubilation near the torn corpses of Vadim Norjitz and Yossi Avrahami. On the next morning, virtually every mosque in the Arab/Islamic world listened with open delight as its inspired clergy heaped fevered praise upon the murderers.

The March 31 Iraqi atrocities against American civilians stemmed from the same cultural mindset as Palestinian atrocities against Israelis. Moreover, Iraqi suicide bombers have learned a great deal from their Palestinian cousins. Witnessing that Palestinian crimes against humanity have led both Israel and the United States to move closer toward accepting the creation of a Palestinian state, certain Iraqis can now conclude quite rationally that mutilating Americans is far more than a convenient way to let off steam. It is also a purposeful way to end the U.S. “occupation” and to reinstall a genocidal regime.

As the events in Fallujah essentially reproduced those in Ramallah, so too would a state of “Palestine” quickly resemble and export the chaotic conditions of present-day Iraq. Leaving aside the many valid reasons why a Palestinian state is unwarranted according to international law, creation of such an additional Arab/Islamic country today would undoubtedly enlarge existential risks to Israel and would clearly provide yet another secure base for suicide-bombing terrorism in the region.

Moreover, as a fully sovereign state unencumbered by any outside military forces, its predictable preparations for new spasms of war and terror would proceed with utterly no constraint or inhibition. In time, “Palestine” would surely become the launching point for direct WMD attacks upon neighboring Israel and, indirectly, for WMD terror against certain parts of Europe and the United States.

We know from the history of this long-bloodied planet that there are both crimes of passion and crimes of logic, but the two need not always be mutually exclusive. If a Palestinian state is soon to be carved out of the still-living body of Israel, Arab/Islamic terrorists and murderers will recognize immediately that atrocity may also yield significant political victory. Combining De Sade with Clausewitz, PLO, Hamas and their Palestinian sister organizations will assuredly begin to fashion an entire country animated by the savage sentiments of Fallujah and Ramallah.

Not surprisingly, the phrases “Death to Israel” and “Death to America” are always screamed in chorus. A hater of the sort found in Fallujah and Ramallah is always attached to a howling mob. In such overwhelmingly passionate hatreds, one simply cannot be alone. With particular reference to Israel and the United States, a newly formed Palestinian state would rapidly become the murderous lynch mob in macrocosm, the collective hater writ large.

Driven to “liberate” the “Zionist Entity” and to inflict suffering upon American citizens in their towns and cities, leaders of Palestine would never settle for anything less than the specific behavior called for by the Islamic Resistance Movement against “unbelievers.” In the precise words of the Hamas Charter: “I swear by that (sic.) who holds in His Hands the Soul of Muhammad: I indeed wish to go to war for the sake of Allah! I promise to assault and kill, assault and kill, assault and kill.”

The frenzied bacchanal of Fallujah and Ramallah must be understood, at least in part, as a form of religious sacrifice. Both incidents exhibit indisputable elements of the classical sacrificial rite. A principal function of sacrifice is always to restore harmony to the primitive community and to strengthen a disintegrating social fabric.

The fiendish killers in Fallujah and Ramallah had stumbled upon vulnerable surrogates for their own overflowing private and collective hatreds. A state of Palestine would seek and find comparable surrogates in Israel and America. Indeed, Israel in its entirety would immediately be identified by the new Arab state as the altogether perfect object of sacrifice.

Everywhere in the Arab/Islamic world, the post-Holocaust concentration of Jews in Israel is taken as decisive proof of Allah’s plan for another Jewish genocide. Ironically, for this world, the state created to prevent a second Holocaust has been allowed only to make further Jewish annihilation distinctly practicable. Religiously, any sort of peace with Israel is still described by both Hamas and the Palestinian National Authority as “nothing less than a poison threatening the lifeblood of Islam.” A new state of Palestine, bent upon sacrificing its collective enemy of “Jews and Crusaders,” would like nothing better than to transform all of Israel into Fallujah and Ramallah and also to allow its protected territory to be used for terrorist preparations against the American “Great Satan.”

Here is what Dr. Ahmad Abu Halabiya, member of the Palestine Authority, preached recently on official PA television: “Have no mercy on the Jews, no matter where they are, in any country. Fight them, wherever you are. Wherever you meet them, kill them… torture them with your hands….Wherever you are, kill those Jews and those Americans who are like them.”

If you liked Fallujah, you’ll love Palestine!

(c) The Jewish Press, 2005. All rights reserved.

LOUIS RENE BERES (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971) is the author of many books and articles dealing with international relations and international law. He is Strategic and Military Affairs columnist for The Jewish Press.

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Louis René Beres (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971) is Emeritus Professor of International Law at Purdue and the author of twelve books and several hundred articles on nuclear strategy and nuclear war. He was Chair of Project Daniel, which submitted its special report on Israel’s Strategic Future to former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, on January 16, 2003.