RUTHFULLY YOURS

To adapt Churchill : Never in the field of global diplomacy has so much been given away by so many for so little.

Britain and France’s capitulation to Nazi Germany at Munich has long been a byword for ignominy, moral and diplomatic. Yet neither Neville Chamberlain nor Édouard Daladier had the public support or military wherewithal to stand up to Hitler in September 1938. Britain had just 384,000 men in its regular army; the first Spitfire aircraft only entered RAF service that summer. “Peace for our time” it was not, but at least appeasement bought the West a year to rearm.

The signing of the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973 was a betrayal of an embattled U.S. ally and the abandonment of an effort for which 58,000 American troops gave their lives. Yet it did end America’s participation in a peripheral war, which neither Congress nor the public could indefinitely support. “Peace with honor” it was not, as the victims of Cambodia’s Killing Fields or Vietnam’s re-education camps can attest. But, for American purposes at least, it was peace.

Erekat and other PLO officials who keep threatening to quit are hoping that the Americans and Europeans will “freak out” at the thought of losing Palestinian “peace partners.”

Palestinians understand that the “resignations” are manly aimed at prompting the US and Western countries to to exert pressure on Israel to make concessions to the PLO. The threats to quit are also intended to send a message to the Palestinian public, which long ago lost confidence in the PLO negotiators’ performance, that Erekat and his colleagues are “playing tough” with Israel.

Since the signing of the Oslo Accords 20 years ago, PLO leaders and officials have threatened to resign each time they wanted something from the international community or Israel.

Saeb Erekat, the chief PLO negotiator, who is currently heading the PLO negotiating team with Israel, tendered his last “resignation” earlier this month in protest against “continued settlement construction.”

This was Erekat’s sixth or seventh “resignation” over the past two decades. Erekat will probably enter the Guinness Book of World Records for the number of times he supposedly resigned.