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.
"It is time for us to recognize that goal and to move on."
ReplyDeleteIt's been time to recognize that for years but it isn't going to happen anytime soon. If G W Bush wouldn't admit it, Hussein Obama certainly won't
One word as a next step: Counties
ReplyDeleteEven Ireland, the chimera of the "peace" processors, has Counties.