Israel Matzav

Why George Mitchell failed

President Obama's Special Middle East envoy George Mitchell resigned on Friday, after making no discernible progress in more than two years of 'peace talks.' What happened? Here's an analysis from someone who gets it. His name is Tawfik Hamid, and when you see his background at the end, you will understand why he gets it.

Approaching the Arab-Israeli conflict from the perspective that it is about land, so that giving more land to the Palestinians will solve the problem, is a failed endeavor.

Israel has already given Egypt the whole of the Sinai, and got nothing in return except a cold peace and rising anti-Semitism in the country. Similarly the disengagement from Gaza did not magically lead to a decline in the wave of anti-Semitism in the Muslim world.

Pro-Palestinian Muslim demonstrators across the world repeatedly use the chant “Khyber Khyber Ya Yahood... Gaish Muhammad Sawfa Yaood,” which reminds the Jews that the army of Muhammad is coming back for a repeat of what was done to the Jewish Khyber tribe.

According to authentic Islamic history books, the Islamic army, led by Muhammad, annihilated the Jewish tribe of Khyber, raping its women and killing all its men.

Such barbaric statements against the Jews have been used by many in the Muslim world, and even inside the US and Europe. Sadly the chant was also used on Friday by thousands of pro-Palestinian demonstrators in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.

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Until US envoys to the Middle East realize that the problem in the eyes of the Palestinians and their supporters is not the borders of Israel but the very existence of the country, all future missions will similarly fail. Solving the Arab-Israeli conflict must be done initially at the theological rather than the political level, as the former is impeding the latter.

It is unfair to ask Israel to trust those who shamefully advocate the killing of Jews, and claim that Islamic annihilation of the Jews by an Islamic army is a model that must be emulated today.

The problem is not only in the existence of violent teachings in historical Islamic texts, but also in the dangerous desire of many Islamists and violent Islamic scholars to revive such violence in modern times. Violent texts exist in other religions as well, but we do not generally see such destructive desire to use the texts to justify killing others, and we rarely hear about modern scholars of other faiths who advocate using such texts literally.

Read the whole thing - he's spot on. And why does he get it?

The writer is an Islamic thinker and reformer, and a one-time Islamic extremist from Egypt. He was a member of the terrorist organization JI with Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, who later became the second-in-command of al-Qaida. He is currently a senior fellow and chairman of the study of Islamic radicalism at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies. www.tawfikhamid.com

Ignoring problems doesn't usually make them go away. And pretending that there's no religious dimension to the Arab-Israeli dispute because religious conflicts aren't solvable isn't going to make the conflict solvable.

Labels: Arab-Jewish relations, George Mitchell, Israel's right to exist, Tawfik Hamid

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 5:41 PM