Israel Matzav

Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick

As many of you know, Ramadamadan started this week. Ramadamadan (okay, Ramadan) is the month in which Muslims fast in the daytime and eat at night. The evening meal that breaks the fast is a time when the family gathers around the television and watches special (often anti-Semitic) programming for the occasion. And they watch their 'leaders' on their way to elaborate feasts, while the average Arab in many Arab countries does not even have the money to buy bread. Smadar Perri predicts that after Ramadan this year - at the end of September - the 'Arab street' is headed for an explosion.

Soon we will see Arab world rulers boarding private jets and traveling to their colleagues’ lavish palaces for the Iftar – the evening meal that breaks the daily fast during Ramadan. Mubarak will hop over to Saudi Arabia, Jordan’s King Abdullah will travel to the Emirates, Iraq’s president will also make his way to the Persian Gulf, and the Lebanese leadership will travel to Dubai. This is the source of the money; this is where high politics is being converted to dollars. Interests vis-à-vis charity.

Regular Joes in the Arab world will be able to see the hugs on the red carpet, but the lavish feasts are not to be photographed. This year, more than ever, the sight of tables packed with delicacies and servants wearing white gloves could start a fire among the hundreds of millions of hungry Arabs.

The number of hungry people in the Arab world has reached frightening proportions this year. The month of Ramadan, whose onset coincides with the opening of the school year in Israel and which will end precisely when the Hebrew New Year starts, is standing at the shadow of a deep and dangerous abyss that has emerged between the people on the street and their leaders.

The statistics warn about an overwhelming leap not only in the number of unemployed, but also in the price of food - Bread, rice, legumes, and the nuts and seeds that must be present at the fast-breaking meal. In Turkey, for example, one million “aid packages” will be handed out to struggling families. In Egypt, millionaires and public figures who grew rich via the corrupt ties between capital and government will quiet their conscience by feeding tens of thousands of deprived and unfortunate citizens.

The Ramadan fast aims to cleanse the soul from last year’s sins and present a path that circumvents the rulers and connects the people to Allah. Just like in Israel, the Arabs will be eating and whining about the extra calories and corrupt politicians.

...

The current Ramadan appears to be a time-out ahead of a violent confrontation - A ticking time bomb; who knows where it will explode. It can come from Gaza, from Hizbullah in Lebanon, from the Egyptian street, from sleeper Hamas cells in Jordan, or from al-Qaeda agents waiting for an opportunity. Let this fast end, and then tighten your seatbelts – the explosion is on the way.

When an 'explosion is on the way,' Arab rulers try to distract their people by channeling their anger against the Jews. In Thursday's edition, the New York Times is complicit in this process. The Times warns us that unless Israel surrenders to all 'Palestinian' demands 'soon,' the 'Palestinians' are going to take a different tactic and demand a 'one-state solution' like blacks did in South Africa. The implication - which the Times does not challenge - is that Israel is an apartheid state. (Those of you who need an explanation why Israel is not an apartheid state should go here).

Now, with hopes fading for an agreement on statehood by the end of the year, leading pragmatists in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, last bastions of Palestinian secular nationalism, are calling for a fundamental reassessment of their leaders’ strategies and goals.

A growing number propose dismantling the internationally financed Palestinian Authority as a first step, in order to expose the reach of Israel’s continued occupation of territories it conquered in the 1967 war and to make Israel bear the direct responsibility and cost until a political solution is found.

Prominent mainstream Palestinians are increasingly warning that if they fail soon to achieve the kind of state they want — sovereign and independent, with East Jerusalem as its capital — they will opt instead for a one-state solution based on a long-term fight for equal rights within the state of Israel, a struggle they compare with what took place in South Africa.

The false 'Palestinian' people have been offered a state reichlet in some shape or form at least five times since they came into 'existence' with the creation of the PLO in 1964. That's not counting the Peel Commission which would have given them a state in the 1930's and the UN partition plan that would have given them a state in 1947.

1. After the 1967 War, Israel offered to return all of the territory that was liberated in that war in exchange for a peace agreement piece of paper. The Arabs responded with the three no's of Khartoum.
2. When Israel signed the Camp David accords with Egypt in 1979, a provision was included that would provide 'autonomy' to the 'Palestinian' people. The 'Palestinians' were never interested enough to take up the offer.
3. In 2000, Ehud Barak offered the 'Palestinians' ninety-something percent of what they demanded. Yasser Arafat responded with the second intifadeh.
4. In 2005, Ariel Sharon unilaterally gave the 'Palestinians' Gaza in the hope that they would abandon terror and build a state. Instead, they just increased the terror because they saw it worked.
5. Eventually resigning Prime Minister Ehud K. Olmert has been trying to give the 'Palestinians' a state since the day he came into office. But everything he has offered is not enough for the 'Palestinians.' They want it all - from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. They cannot even bring themselves to sign a 'shelf agreement' that would restrict Israel's maneuvering room in the future (thank God!).

There will never be an agreement between Israel and the 'Palestinians.' The 'Palestinians' don't want to build their own state - they want to destroy the State of Israel. And the Arab 'leaders' don't want a 'Palestinian' state because then their own people would have the time to focus on their economic deprivation in countries like Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, and would turn their anger against those 'leaders.' And the world continues to play along and pamper the 'Palestinians.' This is from the Times again:

The past few days have seen a flurry of statements, articles and reports. One, by the Palestine Strategy Study Group, a collection of personalities from the region and beyond, financed by a European Union grant, laid out possible situations, including the one-state option, concluding: “Palestinian alternatives to a negotiated agreement are difficult but possible. They are preferable to a continuation of the status quo.”

The Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information, a well-established organization long dedicated to promoting the two-state solution, issued a paper on Monday examining possible policy options for the Palestinian Authority — including the one-state solution — should the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations end without a deal.

Mr. Bahour, a participant in the Palestine Strategy Study Group, said it was essential to put a deadline on what he called the “never-ending peace process,” which has sputtered along for the past 15 years.

Deadlines don't work in diplomacy. Diplomacy requires a willingness to compromise, and to keep at negotiations until you reach an agreement. Otherwise, there is no point in 'negotiations.' The 'Palestinians' have yet to show a willingness to compromise on anything. If they had, they would have had their 'state' long ago.

The Times continues to encourage 'Palestinian' intransigence.

That effort has been hampered by bouts of violence that culminated in the Palestinian suicide-bombing campaign in the years after 2000 and Israel’s subsequent military reinvasion of all the Palestinian Authority-controlled cities of the West Bank.

'Bouts of violence' that just seemed to happen, a 'Palestinian' suicide bombing campaign that was orchestrated anonymously and the moral equivalence of Israel's 'reinvasion' that has done nothing but prevent terror all point to the Times' warped sense of 'fairness' when it comes to anything having to do with this country.

But what Palestinians view as the main obstacle to the realization of the two-state solution is Israel’s continued settlement construction in parts of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, strengthening a 40-year-old enterprise that was intended to guarantee a permanent Israeli presence and control.

“Where will the Palestinian state rise up?” asked Qaddurah Fares, a grass-roots Fatah leader in Ramallah, in an interview early this summer. “The Israeli nation is inside us already.”

Life isn't static. Life goes on. Israel envisions a compromise in which (unfortunately) it will give most of Judea and Samaria to the 'Palestinians.' All of the building that is occurring is on vacant land in the small areas that Israel envisions retaining under any deal. Personally, I regard that 'compromise' (which would have given the 'Palestinians' 93% of Judea and Samaria and equivalent land elsewhere in its latest incarnation) as national suicide. But the 'Palestinians' aren't even willing to agree to any deal in which Israel does not commit suicide. The 'Palestinians' don't compromise on anything. And until they do, there won't be any solution. Let them rot with their Gaza sewage.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 3:48 PM