by Clive Jonas

Special to DJW

The Palestinian Authority must institute a comprehensive program of reform and halt suicide attacks against Israeli civilians before serious negotiations to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can resume, said Israel's second-ranking diplomat to the United States last Tuesday in Dallas.

In an appearance jointly sponsored by the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Dallas and the World Affairs Council of Dallas, Alon Pinkas, consul general of Israel in New York, told the crowd gathered at the Crescent Court Hotel that the Palestinians must shoulder responsibility for the breakdown in peace talks and the ensuing two years of armed violence initiated after the failed Camp David summit meeting of July 2000.

"At Camp David the Palestinian leadership was ill-prepared and unwilling to make concessions," he said. "But the issue goes deeper. They continued cultivating an unrealistic narrative and failed to prepare their people for peace."

Pinkas said the Palestinian leadership, which he described as "corrupt and inadequate," had failed to both stop incitement against Israel and improve the lives of ordinary Palestinian people.

Pinkas said the Palestinian leadership, which he described as "corrupt and inadequate," had failed to both stop incitement against Israel and improve the lives of ordinary Palestinian people.

"I empathize with the Palestinian people," said the consul general, "their leadership has failed them and blames everyone except themselves."

This type of ruling authority is not confined to the Palestinians, Pinkas argued, but is symptomatic of the non-democratic character of the Arab world in general. As worrisome, he noted, was the use of suicide bombers as the strategic weapon of choice for Islamic extremist throughout the Middle East.

"This is no longer a local phenomenon, but has become a global problem."

He welcomed President Bush's call last month for a change in Palestinian leadership as a prerequisite for the resumption of negotiations, but said in the meantime Israel must continue its policy of holding West Bank towns under military curfew.

"The current situation is extremely difficult," Pinkas said. "It is not beneficial to us in the long term to have over 600,000 people under house arrest. We do not want to reoccupy Palestinian cities, but terror attacks are down by 90 percent, and if credible leaders do not come forward from the other side, then unilateral decisions will have to be made."

In the meantime Israel would continue work on a security fence being built around the West Bank to reduce infiltrations into Israel's pre-1967 borders, he said. But he stopped short of endorsing a plan circulating among some of Israel's Labor Party politicians advocating unilateral separation from Palestinian areas, which would be accomplished by building a Berlin Wall-type structure to demarcate political borders.

"This idea is being discussed," he said, "but it is not official government policy."

Nevertheless, he stressed the importance of Israel's need to separate from the Palestinians in order to maintain Israel's Jewish majority and long-term viability.