Yesterday evening Daniel Ayalon, Israeli Ambassador to the United States, made a case for Israel to a packed ASEAN auditorium during a particularly contentious time in the Middle East conflict.
"This has not been a period of great inactivity," Dean of the Fletcher School Stephen Bosworth said during his introduction of Ayalon.
"Israel wants peace," Ayalon began. "For us it is not just a strategic choice, it's a moral obligation."
Throughout the speech, Ayalon emphasized that Israel had the right to defend itself in the face of terrorist attacks, and that the Palestinians had failed to live up to mutually negotiated agreements -- the fault, the ambassador said, of Palestinian leadership.
Ayalon confidently defended many controversial policies of the administration of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, including the recent assassinations of key Hamas leaders Dr. Abdel Aziz Rantisi and Sheik Ahmed Yassin, as necessary to stop terrorism.
"We had to take a severe action. [Rantisi] was commissioning on a daily basis suicide bombings of Israel," Ayalon said. "His life could have been spared if the Palestinian Authority had done what they were required to do after the Oslo peace accords and put him behind bars."
"Hamas is our al-Qaida," he said.
Ayalon praised President Bush's "road map" for peace between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
"The content is very logical," he said. "The importance of the roadmap is in its universal acceptance, from the U.S., the U.N., and Russia."
Ayalon also supported construction of a "security fence" between Palestinian and Israeli sections of the West Bank.
"The fence was not built there in 35, 37 years of our presence there. It was a reaction," he said. "Wherever we have a fence, there are no suicide bombers. They cannot cross it. It is simply saving lives."
According to Ayalon, "We don't like the fence, we don't want the fence," and it will "be down tomorrow if terrorism will stop."
The anniversary of the 1978 Camp David accords between Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat prompted Ayalon to muse on the success of those negotiations and what he perceived as a failure of the 1993 Camp David accords between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
"What made Camp David one a success and Camp David two fail? Leadership," Ayalon said. "It is the leader who has to make the decisions."
"I can tell you that when the crucial moment came [for Sadat] to make the decision -- it was painful -- Sadat prevailed against the judgment of all his advisers who told him not to sign."
"In the case of Arafat," Ayalon said, "I can tell you this from personal experience, I was there -- his intransigence was against the better judgment of all his advisers."
Ayalon said there was one key difference between negotiating with the Egyptians and negotiating with the Palestinians. During talks with the Egyptians, "not a shot was exchanged," he said.
The blame for much of Palestinian terrorism, according to Ayalon, lies with Arafat.
"Although Hamas and Islamic Jihad are the most extreme, I'd say that the majority -- 60 percent -- were made by Arafat's forces," he said.
"Morally, there is no difference between him and Hamas leaders," Ayalon said.
"Nobody can deny that [Arafat is] a Palestinian icon and that evokes a lot of sentiments," he said. However, "we would have all moral justification to take action against him."
During the question and answer portion of the speech, Ayalon responded to several interrogations about a perceived U.N. and U.S. "double standard" that favors Israel, calling it a "widely spread misperception."
Ayalon said that Israel must fight the perception of a double standard "by what we do -- by distancing ourselves and separating our military from the civilian population."
When pictures of "an Israeli tank and five-year-old Palestinian boys" appear on television, Ayalon said, "you have lost the PR war right there."
Ayalon emphasized the importance of concessions made by Sharon in negotiations with the Palestinians. Giving up Jewish settlements in the Gaza strip, Ayalon said, was "bold and courageous."
"Here you have to understand how painful the decision was," he said. "We're talking about the heartland. There was a continuity of Jewish presence in the area. [There are] three generations that have to be uprooted."
It is in the face of those concessions, Ayalon said, that he hopes "the Palestinians will live up to the challenge."
Ayalon called the Palestinian demand for a "right of return" for Palestinian refugees to Israel a "misnomer," saying the problem of Palestinian refugees would be solved by the creation of a Palestinian state.
"There is no right of return to Israel of Palestinians," he said. "Why do we create a Palestinian state? So Palestinians can return to Palestine."
He expressed sympathy for the refugees, and said they were being used as a "card" by the Palestinian government to make political demands.
"They were a pawn, I really feel bad for them. They were kept as a card," he said.
