Friday, December 17, 2010

Not every problem has a solution even if you increasingly pressure someone to make concessions.

Can Israel Turn Enemies into Peacemakers? - David Suissa
The State of Israel was built not by whiners but by Jews for whom no miracle was impossible - whether that meant defending against an Arab invasion or turning a desert into lush fields of agriculture. This can-do attitude has been the life force behind Israel's military success as well as its economic and cultural renaissance. There is one area, however, where Israel's can-do attitude has been a big failure, and that is in making peace with the Palestinians.
With making peace, it's far from clear whether Israel has a product the Palestinians want to buy. Israel has been under enormous pressure over the years, internally and externally, to "do something" to bring peace. Israel has been too embarrassed to admit that "we can't solve this one," that the parties are too far apart, that peace, no matter how desirable, is simply not in the cards at the moment. What if there is nothing Israel can offer the Palestinians to get them to accept and deliver a durable peace with a Jewish state? What if the truth is that Israel can evacuate 300,000 Jews from the West Bank tomorrow and give up half of Jerusalem and that this would still not bring peace - and might even bring more war?
The Palestinian demand for a "right of return" is a deal-killer. So is a return to nondefensible borders, and so is the presence of a terrorist state in Gaza. The fact that peace is immensely desirable has nothing to do with the reality that it is immensely unobtainable. If anything, the more Israel has shown its desire, the more the price has gone up. The Palestinians have said "no" to every peace offer Israel has ever put on the table. The status quo may be untenable, but a fake peace process makes it even worse. Israel should fess up that it doesn't have the power to turn enemies into peacemakers. (Los Angeles Jewish Journal)

****The issues have been misrepresented over the years: the emphasis now often seems to be on the creation of a "Palestinian state." In fact, this is not at all the issue. The Palestinians ( Arabs living in the area defined by the British Mandate of Palestine, whether they lived there before the Mandate or moved there after --and then had progeny, since the originals are long-since gone ) could have had a state on many occasions and long before the present time. When Churchill spun out Trans-Jordan from the Mandate (all of which was intended by the Balfour Declaration and international agreement after the poat-War splitup of the Ottoman Empire), many Arabs were living there and all could have moved there. There could have been a Palestinian state before the 1948 War at the time of the UN partition. Likewise, between 1948 and 1967 there was no impediment to a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank, ostensibly the present goal of the Palestinians, when the former was controlled by Arab Egypt and the latter by Arab Jordan. In fact, there was no effort to do so. The Palestinian Arabs have been, until energized by the nationalism created out of whole cloth by Yasser Arafat, satisfied to be Arabs living in an Arab state. (Although they identified as Syrians more than anything else and the first mention of "Naqba", or "catastrophe", referred to the 1920s devolution of Palestine to the British Mandate rather than to the French one that included Syria.) The Palestinians are, in fact, indistinguishable from other Arabs albeit with a possible bias to, and affinity for, Syria: they have no separate language, culture and, indeed, their history is not unique in the way that is Syria's or Iraq's or Eqypt's or Saudi Arabia's. There are pitiful attempts to create a history of affinity with the land of Israel (historical Palestine, renamed such by the Romans after crushing the last Jewish revolt ) but these are manufactured and phony.

The real issue is that Palestinian Arabs, and Arabs in general, (perhaps all Muslims!) don't want a Jewish state or even the presence of any Jews in Arab lands. It is not even clear that they would allow dhimmi status for Jews since 900,000 dhmmi Jews were expelled from Arab lands after the 1948 War ( of course, without their property and after pogroms ). It is strange that it is unremarked that discussions of a Palestinian state ASSUME it would be completely Judenrein. Since the existence of Jews anywhere ( except perhaps in Madegascar or Alaska, as was historically suggested by Arab sources after the Holocaust failed to be total despite Arab endorsement and participation ) is anathema, national suicide is the only option offered to Israel. The "right of return" is a phony joke for several reasons. Land and population swaps have been the world norm for millennia. Not ever before has the status of "refugee" been granted to the third or later generation of people who have actually left a place. How really can one return to a place if she was never there and never personally had a family member who was? It strains credulity and derives only from the fact that other Arab nations had no wish to absorb Palestinian Arabs into their societies both to maintain the issue as a festering sore ( deriving, in all likelihood, from the Islamic animus against Jews mentioned in the chronologically later parts of the Koran ) and because they had no wish to have the Palestinians in their midst since they have the reputation even among Arabs of being pains in the ass. (Note Black September refers to Jordan's need to suppress a Palestinian Arab insurgency and the Gulf state expelled 400,000 Palestinian workers after Arafat endorsed Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait.)

It has been truly said that, If the Palestinians lay down their weapons there will be peace, and no more war and terror in Palestine; if the Israelis lay down their weapons, there will be no more Israeli Jews.****

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