In 1993, Prime Minister Rabin recognized Yasser Arafat and the PLO as the representatives of the Palestinian people. Over the next seven years, Israel ceded most of Gaza and nearly all of the major West Bank cities to Mr. Arafat’s Palestinian Authority and (often with the encouragement of the Clinton administration) (i.e. Dennis Ross, Martin Indyk, Samuel Berger, and rest of American State Dept. - jsk).

Israel chose to overlook the fact that Arafat was arming terrorist militias in the West Bank, doing nothing to put Hamas’ terrorist infrastructure out of business and enabling raw anti-Semitic incitement in the Palestinian Authority controlled media.

In July 2000, Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Mr. Arafat a Palestinian state that would have included Gaza, nearly the entire West Bank and eastern Jerusalem. Mr. Arafat rejected the Barak offer and opened a war of terror that killed 1,000 Israelis and 3,000 Palestinians. While the “peace process” was going forward, Israel unilaterally withdrew its forces from southern Lebanon; Hezbollah and its patrons in Tehran and Damascus responded to this Israeli concession by stepping up their weapons and logistical support for the terror war that Mr. Arafat unleashed in the West Bank and Gaza in the fall of 2000.

But the war proved to be a disaster for the terrorist groups, particularly Hamas. One reason why the current Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, could sign a cease-fire deal earlier this year with Mr. Sharon is that Israel, acting on its own, killed two of Hamas’s leaders and destroyed much of Hamas’s capability as a fighting force. Since February Israel has scaled back its operations in Palestinian Authority-controlled areas against Hamas and other terrorist groups in the hope that Mr. Abbas will restrain the terrorists.

In fact, he is doing precisely the opposite. Much like Yasser Arafat following the signing of Oslo in 1993, Mr. Abbas seeks to co-op Hamas by not forcing it to disarm and instead working with it to maintain a temporary “calms’ (In short, to permit the terrorists to re-group and rebuild to target Israel on another day.)

Although Mr. Abbas has consolidated Palestinian security services, he has not dealt with the larger and far more serious problem: the lawlessness and thuggery usually involving armed members of his Fatah organization, that pervades areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority. Murderous anti-Semitism remains. On Aug. 20, for example, the Palestinian minister of Islamic affairs said the 1969 attack on al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem by a deranged Australian tourist was actually the work of the Israelis.

Further signs of trouble are everywhere. Over the weekend, a Hamas-affiliated Web site announced that dozens of women in the Gaza Strip had, joined its military wing and were planning to carry out attacks against Israel. Hamas boss Mahmoud al-Zahar said two weeks ago that his organization is moving its forces to the West Bank and Israeli towns are “settlements” subject to attack. Even as Mr. Abbas was declaring that the Palestinian Authority would control areas evacuated by Israel, dozens of Hamas gunmen held a “press conference” in Gaza City to announce they would target Israel after disengagement.

Mr. Sharon’s critics on the right suggest that, because Israel has no viable Palestinian peace partner, the Gaza pullout is a mistake, a show of weakness. Hamas and the other terrorist groups are busily spinning it that way. We agree that Sharon’s argument that the defense resources spent on protecting outlying Gaza settlements could be better allocated to protect the country against terrorism. Israel should adopt a policy of relentless and massive deterrence, guaranteeing that Gaza-based terrorists will be hit very hard every time they fire rockets into Israel. For such a deterrence policy to work, it is essential that Washington support Israel when it defends itself against terror.

Cross posted at Israel Commentary