By Alan
Caruba
The former Prime Minister of Israel,
Golda Meir, once said, “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We
cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have
peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.” That
day has not yet arrived.
There is a widely quoted Bedouin
saying, “I against my brother and my brother against our cousin, my brother and
our cousin against the neighbors, all of us against the foreigner.” It takes
various forms depending on the source, but it aptly captures the mindset, the
attitude of Arabs and reveals why, neither as individuals nor as nations, they
trust one another or anyone else. The Israelis learned long ago the
impossibility of negotiating an agreement.
As Jonathan Schanzer chronicles in his
new book, “State of Failure”, “In the aftermath of the 1967 war, eight Arab
leaders met in Khartoum, Sudan, and declared that there would be ‘no peace with
Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it.’ It became known as
the ‘Three No’s’”
On September 26, 1947, Britain
announced that it would be withdrawing from the territory that the Versailles
Treaty of 1919 had designated as Palestine. It had been assigned the mandate to
administer it. “Two months later, on November 29, 1947, the United Nations
approved a partition plan, which divided the territory up to into three
contiguous Arab swaths and three contiguous Jewish swaths, with Jerusalem slated
for permanent trusteeship…The Arab states, for their part, rejected the
partition plan outright, which did little to help the Palestinian cause as the
world deliberated.”
“It was not lost on the world that the
Arabs called for outright war against some 400,000 Jews living in Palestine just
three years after six million Jews had been slaughtered in Europe.” Eleven
minutes after David Ben-Gurion’s declaration of Israeli independence in Tel Aviv
on May 14, 1948, President Harry Truman announced the U.S. recognition of the
new state.
There was no Palestinian state then
and there is none today. There has been, however, a constant state of war
against Israel for the last sixty-five years. Israel was immediately attacked by
its Arab neighbors who were defeated then and have been defeated in subsequent
wars. The one in 1967 vastly expanded Israel’s territory to include the Golan
Heights, the West Bank, and Gaza, plus control of the entire city of Jerusalem,
its ancient capitol.
It must be very tiresome to be an Arab
and worse by a factor of ten or more to be a Palestinian.
I was reminded of this in the wake of
Israel’s decision to release 26 Palestinians serving life sentences for
murdering Israelis in what is surely just one more vain effort to secure any
accommodation from the Palestine Liberation Organization, Fatah, the Palestinian
Authority or whatever they are calling themselves these days. It is a matter of
record that a large number of jailed terrorists reverted to violence after being
released in earlier deals.
They are led by Mahmoud Abbas who has
overstayed his term as its president by several years by simply not holding
elections. Moreover, the Palestinians are divided between the PLO and Hamas, an
even more militant group headquartered in Gaza. They are in Gaza because it was
ceded to the Palestinians in another hopeless effort to bring them to the
negotiation table for a permanent peace. Hamas is designated by the U.S. as a
terrorist organization and lives up to that by rocketing and attacking
Israelis.
The Palestinians are said to be
“occupied” by Israel and, indeed, in the wake of two terrorist campaigns,
“intifadas”, the Israelis concluded that only a very big, tall wall between them
plus considerable military oversight was the only way to avoid further
campaigns. Defending one’s citizens is the first duty of any nation.
We are being treated to the absurd
diplomatic efforts of the current Secretary of State, John Kerry, as he flies
about the Middle East trying to maintain or restore any trust they might have in
the United States at this point. Whole books will be written about the way
Barack Hussein Obama has sabotaged U.S. relations with the region and has left
Israel isolated against the very real potential of a nuclear-armed
Iran.
Shanzer’s book provides the answer to
why, decades after Israel’s independence, the Palestinians have refused to take
the road to their own state. “Not only are the Palestinian territories (West
Bank and Gaza Strip) divided between two warring factions (Fatah and Hamas), it
is also undeniable that both cantons have failed to function as governments.”
“The Palestinian Authority and its
antecedents have been beset by bad governance.” That is a major understatement
and the pattern was set by the late, unlamented Yassir Arafat who spurned
then-President Clinton’s offer of a Palestinian state on some 95% of the West
Bank and 100% of Gaza.
In addition to the enemies on its
borders, the other center of opposition to Israel has always been the United
Nations which, to this day, maintains an agency devoted exclusively to the
so-called Palestinian refugees. On November 29, the UN celebrates an annual
International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian
people.
The Palestinians have endured
kleptomaniacs who have plundered the wealth donated to their cause, as literally
billions disappeared into secret bank accounts of Arafat and his cronies, and
now Abbas and his. The PA has been a rat-hole of corruption and still is.
Literally nothing the Israelis offer,
from land to freed murderers, has changed ground for any accommodation with a
Palestinian state because those in charge do not want a state and have
demonstrated no ability to govern one.
What has changed, however, is the loss
of the American government as an ally. Successive American administrations have
tried to broker better relations, only to learn that it is a fool’s errand.
Regrettably, the Obama administration has become so hostile to Israel that it
has altered the diplomatic landscape. It is embracing Israel’s enemies and that
is a very bad thing for Israel, the Middle East, and the world.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
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