The talks will be the first face-to-face sessions between the Israelis and Palestinians since December 2008, but the two sides are far apart on all key issues, so major progress in the early going is seen as unlikely.
Pointing up the tensions that will probably test Obama's diplomacy, a Palestinian gunman opened fire Tuesday on an Israeli vehicle traveling near the West Bank city of Hebron, killing four passengers. The militant Hamas movement, which rejects Israel's right to exist and opposes peace talks, claimed responsibility. Israeli officials called the shooting an attempt to sabotage the discussions and the White House weighed in with its own condemnation.
"This brutal attack underscores how far the enemies of peace will go to try to block progress" in the talks, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said in a strongly-worded statement. "It is crucial that the parties persevere, keep moving forward even through difficult times, and continue working to achieve a just and lasting peace in the region that provides security for all peoples."
"a just and lasting peace" eh? one that "that provides security for all peoples"? Let's take a quick trip through MidEast Security Land...
First things first, with whom do the Israelis need an actual peace 'treaty'? And what might it get them? They've been watching their supposed 'peace' partners for years, and don't like what they see.
A profound change, however, is this: Talk about the crisis between Israel and "the Arab world" is anachronistic. Israel has treaties with two Arab nations, Egypt and Jordan, and Israel's most lethal enemy is Iran, which is not an Arab state. It and another non-Arab nation, Turkey, are eclipsing the Arab world, where 60 percent of the population of 300 million is under 25, and 26 percent of that cohort is unemployed. The prerequisites for Arab progress -- freedom, education and the emancipation of women -- are not contemplated.
Israel has changed what it can, its own near neighborhood. Since 1967, faced with unrelenting Palestinian irredentism, Israel has been weaving the West Bank into a common fabric with the coastal plain, the nation's economic and population center of gravity. Withdrawal from the West Bank would bring Tel Aviv's Ben-Gurion Airport within range of short-range rockets fired by persons overlooking the runways. So, the feasibility of such a withdrawal depends on how much has changed since 1974, when Yasser Arafat received a standing ovation at the United Nations when he said Israel had no right to exist.
Thirty-six years later, Israelis can watch West Bank Palestinian television incessantly inculcating anti-Semitism and denial of Israel's right to exist. Across the fence that has substantially reduced terrorism from the West Bank, Israelis see Ramallah, where Mahmoud Abbas, head of the Palestinian Authority, lives and where a square was recently named in honor of Dalal Mughrabi. In 1978, she, together with 11 other terrorists, hijacked an Israeli bus and massacred 37 Israelis and one American. Cigarette lighters sold on the West Bank show, when lit, the World Trade Center burning.
The Israelis have made concessions before, unilaterally withdrawing from Gaza, at much cost to themselves. What, exactly, did that withdrawal gain? Cooperation from the Palestinians on peace talks? Reduction in violence aimed at Israel? Hardly. As a result, it's not hard to imagine the resistance to any internal Israeli decision to give away anything in the West Bank region.
"There is no Israeli leadership that appears either willing or capable of removing 100,000 Israelis from their West Bank homes. . . . The evacuation of a mere 8,100 Israelis from Gaza in 2005 required 55,000 IDF [Israel Defense Forces] troops -- the largest Israeli military operation since the 1973 Yom Kippur War -- and was profoundly traumatic."
Twenty-one Israeli settlements were dismantled; even the bodies of Israelis buried in Gaza were removed. After a deeply flawed 2006 election encouraged by the United States, there was in 2007 essentially a coup in Gaza by the terrorist organization Hamas. So now Israel has on its western border, 44 miles from Tel Aviv, an entity dedicated to Israel's destruction, collaborative with Iran and possessing a huge arsenal of rockets.
Rocket attacks from Gaza increased dramatically after Israel withdrew. The number of U.N. resolutions deploring this? Zero.
The closest precedent for that bombardment was the Nazi rocket attacks on London, which were answered by the destruction of Hamburg, Dresden and other German cities. When Israel struck back at Hamas, the "international community" was theatrically appalled.
It's not like this is news. The "Palestinians" insist on their own country, but they've been offered their own country twice before in proposed partitions of the area that Israel now occupies.
In 1936, when the British administered Palestine, the Peel Commission concluded that there was "an irrepressible conflict" -- a phrase coined by an American historian to describe the U.S. Civil War -- "between two national communities within the narrow bounds of one small country." And: "Neither of the two national ideals permits" a combination "in the service of a single state." The commission recommended "a surgical operation" -- partition. What followed was the Arab Revolt of 1936 to 1939.
On Nov. 29, 1947, the United Nations recommended a partition plan. Israel accepted the recommendation. On Nov. 30, Israel was attacked.
It is also important to remember that "Palestine", as romanticized by worldwide bloviators of supposed social justice, hasn't existed for over 2000 years.
The creation of Israel did not involve the destruction of a Palestinian state, there having been no such state since the Romans arrived. And if the Jewish percentage of the world's population were today what it was when the Romans ruled Palestine, there would be 200 million Jews. After a uniquely hazardous passage through two millennia without a homeland, there are 13 million Jews.
In the meantime, someone might want to point out to President Obama that rhetorical equanimity is rarely as accurate as it is soothing.
Obama's 2009 speech in Cairo, courting the Arab world, may have had measurable benefits, although the metric proving this remains mysterious. The speech -- made during a trip when Obama visited Cairo and Riyadh but not here -- certainly subtracted from his standing in Israel. In it, he acknowledged Israel as, in part, a response to Jewish suffering in the Holocaust. Then, with what many Israelis considered a deeply offensive exercise of moral equivalence, he said: "On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people -- Muslims and Christians -- have suffered in pursuit of a homeland."
"On the other hand"? "I," says Moshe Yaalon, "was shocked by the Cairo speech," which he thinks proved that "this White House is very different." Yaalon, former head of military intelligence and chief of the general staff, currently strategic affairs minister, tartly asks, "If Palestinians are victims, who are the victimizers?"
But back to our original article, which buries this nugget far down in the story.
The Palestinians want a state in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem — territories Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast war.
Let's take a quick trip back to the 1967 war, eh?
In 1967, at the start of the war, the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula belonged to Egypt. The West Bank area and East Jersusalem belonged to Jordan, and the Golan Heights belonged to Syria.
In 1966, where was the movement for an independent Palestine agitating for a "Palestinian homeland" comprised of Gaza and the West Bank, with a capital in East Jerusalem? It didn't exist. Why not? Because the Palestinians only want "their" country if the alternative is to be ruled by the Jews. How do we come to this conclusion? When they were ruled by the Arabs - up until 1966, Gaza belonged to Egypt and the West Bank to Jordan - the idea of a Palestine alongside Israel wasn't even discussed. After the Six-Day War in 1967, suddenly these areas were under Israeli control, and only now does the Palestinian 'independence' movement become a major cause. Oh, and let's not forget the event that put Palestinian independence on the world stage: Munich 1972.
"Peace" talks indeed.
By: Brant
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