The False Premise of Palestine and Peace
The notion that the creation of a state of Palestine will herald everlasting peace is naïve in the extreme.
After 50 years of a two-state failure, the French and other diplomats, in their duplicitously-named "peace initiative," have no other idea for how to settle the Palestinian problem, except to behave like parched men trudging across a burning desert toward a distant mirage that they think is an oasis paradise. It is not, and the same diplomats will take no responsibility for cleaning up the dangerous outcome of such a disaster. The international community is pressuring Israel to make wholesale concessions in territory and security, risking social and political upheaval, to grant the so-called Palestinians a state of their own. The sole criterion for making this happen is for the international community to accept the Palestinian precondition of forcing Israel withdraw to pre-1967 lines, which are the 1949 armistice lines and not a defined border. Whenever I approach a European diplomat with the following questions, none of them can give me an answer: 1) What happens when a new emboldened Palestinian government continues calls for the liberation of the "rest of Palestine"? They call Haifa, Acre, Jaffa and the Galilee -- in fact, all of Israel -- "occupied Palestinian land". Just look at any Palestinian map: it is identical to Israel. It is little known that members of the Palestinian Authority call Israeli Arabs "Palestinians of the Interior." They also call Israeli Arabs the "Palestinians of '48." They have been joined in this by Arab Knesset Members, who also would not object to the eventual displacement of Jews by Arabs in Israel. According to their ambition, these Israeli Arabs will be "liberated" by a new Palestine. 2) What will happen when inevitably -- by the ballot or by the bullet -- this Palestine is taken over by Hamas, designated an Islamic terror organization by the U.S. Department of State? If you think this question is far-fetched, think again. The students of Bir Zeit University voted overwhelming to elect Hamas representatives to head their student body. Bir Zeit is not in the Gaza Strip. It is less than ten kilometers north of Ramallah, literally a stone's throw from the offices of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. These Hamas-supporting students will be the Palestinians' future opinion-makers after graduation. And let us not forget how in the Gaza Strip, in June 2007, Hamas seized power in a bloody coup that left more than a hundred dead and more than five hundred wounded. Hamas will continue its incendiary calls to destroy the Jewish state and to slaughter Jews. 3) Do you really think that we Israelis will call upon our government to make territorial concessions that will bring these terrorists closer to our families and homes? So, what is the answer I get from the diplomats based in Israel to these genuine concerns? Well, nothing really. Just a throwaway line about it being up to the parties to solve their ongoing difficulties. If the international community wants to see Israel make dangerous concessions, then they, and they alone, must ensure that Israel has a united and pragmatic peace partner, not a weak, aging, corrupt, rejectionist and undemocratic leader to our east, who constantly says he will never recognize Israel as the Jewish State, and to our south, in Gaza, a rabid Islamic terror regime bent on our destruction. This should be Israel's basic demand: that a united Palestinian political leadership will recognize the right of all the citizens of the Jewish State of Israel to live in peace and security, alongside the State of Palestine. It is that simple. That is all it takes. Let the diplomatic world spend the next 50 years educating and training the divided Palestinian political leadership to come together as a force for peace. Then Israel will be happy to consider making concessions that might well be life-threatening, as it has done before.
Barry Shaw is a Senior Associate at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies.
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