Israel Matzav

For there to be peace, the 'Palestinians' would have to get real

David Horovitz argues that the path to peace between Israel and the 'Palestinians' doesn't require a $4billion injection for the 'Palestinian' economy. It requires that the 'Palestinians' become realistic about their demands.

As the businesspeople who fashioned “Breaking the Impasse” correctly recognized, the path to an accord requires compromise and pragmatism by the politicians. It requires a Palestinian leader like the English-speaking Abbas, who told Channel 2 last year that there would be no third intifada under his leadership, that he had no demands on pre-1967 Israel, and that he felt he had no “right” to return to live in Safed, the town of his birth in today’s northern Israel. It does not require a Palestinian leader like the Arabic-speaking Abbas, who went to the UN last November seeking statehood without the inconvenience of negotiating modalities with Israel, told the watching world Israel was born in fundamental sin through ethnic cleansing, and who, at the Dead Sea on Sunday, delivered a speech made all the more unpalatable and extreme by the plaintive call for peace from the business community that preceded it.

In the Abbas account of the conflict as detailed on Sunday, Israel’s refusal to simply up and leave from the West Bank is plain incomprehensible. After all, he argued, the Palestinians have never and would never harm so much as a hair on an Israeli’s head.

Why on earth, he wondered — this picture of bafflement, this elderly, well-intentioned gentleman, rendered impotent by the stupidity of those aggressors on the other side of that inexplicably constructed wall — would Israelis be wary of what might happen were they to pull out of the West Bank? What harm might possibly befall them? The Second Intifada? Obviously a figment of Israel’s imagination. The no-nonsense ousting of Abbas from Gaza by Hamas, with its acutely worrying implications for a post-IDF West Bank? Presumably, never happened.

Israel in 1999 threw out Netanyahu because it believed there was a peace deal to be made with Arafat, and that the intransigent prime minister was missing the chance. There was no such sentiment when Israelis voted four months ago — no sense that opportunities for peace were going begging because of obdurate, settlement-building Netanyahu. Arafat shattered Israelis’ confidence in their Palestinian negotiating partners. Abbas has signally failed to restore it. And the collapse of stability in the Middle East is working against all those who seek to heal the rift.

Absurd rhetoric about billions in private investment is not going to change any of that. What it does, however, is make a fool of the secretary of state who utters it, and makes plain that salvation from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, rarely more elusive than today, is not going to come from Washington, DC.

It is time that we become realistic. Peace is not going to happen. The 'Palestinians' goal is not to have 'two states living side by side together in peace and security,' it's for 'Palestine' to replace the Jewish state. It is time for us to recognize that goal and to move on.

Labels: Abu Mazen, John Kerry, Palestinian economy, Salam Fayyad

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:56 AM