Just imagine, dear European leader, dear fashionable Leftist, dear anti-Israel intellectual: Just imagine that Israel agreed to the creation of an Arab state west of the Jordan River.

The day after the signing of the "historic accords," creating an Arab state out of the hill country overlooking Tel Aviv, spitting distance from Israel’s s major population centers, someone--US Secretary of State Colin Powell, perhaps--will deliver a stirring speech. So as not to jeopardize the phenomenal agreement between Israel and the newly-constituted Palestine, the diplomatic speaker will attempt to equate Hamas and Fatah terrorists with legally armed Jewish civilians. "He had populations inflamed to a high degree"; he might say, "He had extremists on both sides ready to work up and provoke incidents"; "we had considerable quantities of arms which were by no means confined to regularly organised forces."

Such a situation, he will intone, demanded extraordinary political will on the part of both sides, along with not a few American carrots and sticks. The Peace of the Brave has been achieved, he will declare.

The politician will welcome the new Arab state with warm words and praise the two sides for their fortitude. He will stir his audience to tears, mentioning the names of Arab and Jewish victims of what he will call "the cycle of violence." He will invoke Biblical images of the end of days. He will quote, of course, from the Bible and from the Quran.

Imagine that, being an American diplomat, this spokesperson will address the Jewish people directly, one might say, "Feeling their pain," and say that the people of the United States fully identify with the Israeli victims of terrorism, all the more so since September 11th 2001. "We must feel profound sympathy for a small and gallant nation in the hour of their national grief and loss," he will say. For good measure, he might also mention that Israel "has earned our admiration and respect for her restraint, for her dignity, for her magnificent discipline in face of such a trial as few nations have ever been called upon to meet." In his speech, the American will try to reassure the Israelis that they do not stand alone. "It is my hope and my belief that under the new system of guarantees," he may sincerely intone; Israel "will find a greater security than she has ever enjoyed in the past."

Of course, it would be undiplomatic not to praise the Arab side as well. The spokesman will touch on the "reforms" made by the PLO leader and call upon his listeners to "recognise the difficulty for a man in that position to take back such emphatic declarations as he had already made amidst the enthusiastic cheers of his supporters"--images of Yasser Arafat standing before throngs of Arabs and chanting "a million suicide bombers marching to Jerusalem!" might come to mind. The speaker will turn the negotiating process itself into a measure of PLO flexibility, saying, "in consenting, even though it were only at the last moment,"--as is his style, the diplomats will all chuckle--"to discuss" those things which he had declared he had already decided once for all, was a real and a substantial contribution on his part.

Can you imagine all of that? You need not imagine it, for we have already seen it.

All of the foregoing quotations are from a speech delivered by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain on October 3, 1938, defending the Munich Agreement, which handed Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland to Adolph Hitler. The agreement came after a Nazi-backed Sudeten liberation movement called the Sudeten Free Corps instigated a series of violent uprisings--which the Czechs were compelled to quell by force and a Nazi propaganda campaign describing Czech terror and oppression of the Sudeten Germans. Foreshadowing the comments of certain French politicians regarding the Israelis sixty years later, the Nazis had convinced the world community of the day that "this petty segment of Europe is harassing the human race."

Just like the Nazi leaders of pre-War Europe, the PLO leadership have manipulated a fearful world into believing that their territorial demands are limited and reasonable. Yet, just as Hitler had the goal of conquering Czechoslovakia through the diplomatic amputation of the Sudetenland, the PLO seeks statehood only as a means to facilitate elimination of the Jewish state. Don’t take my word for it. A January 1, 2002, manifesto of the Fatah militia and terrorist organization, headed by PLO leader Yasser Arafat, bluntly stated, "legitimate Palestinian entity forms the most important weapon that Arabs have against Israel." The Fatah release marked the 38th anniversary of the establishment of the organization, pointedly emphasizing that it was founded in the late 1950’s and carried out its first terrorist attack on Israel in 1965, several years before Israel conquered Judea, Samaria (the West Bank and Gaza).

Chamberlain concluded his remarks to the British parliament by saying, "The path which leads to appeasement is long and bristles with obstacles. The question of Czechoslovakia is the latest and perhaps the most dangerous. Now that we have got past it, I feel that it may be possible to make further progress along the road to sanity."

By 1946, that road was strewn with the bodies of millions of people. Dear intellectuals, fashionable leftists and European leaders, stop your foolish imaginings before its too late.