Unless Israel is willing to give Palestine it's own state, or give real equal rights of citizenship to Palestinians, Israel has a thin case in arguing for "peace". Sounds to me as if it just wants war.
What part of "no" don't you understand? Israel offered the Palestinians their own state including 95% of the territories, and they never even got a counter-offer, just a terrorist campaign. This was Yasser Arafat's bright idea to sweeten the deal. Instead he destroyed the negotiations.
Half the Palestinians and most of the other Arabs don't want Palestine next to Israel; they want Palestine instead of Israel. The expressions of Arab moderation eagerly lapped up by the Western press (especially the Brits!) are just a pose; if you were following what Arafat and all other Arab leaders (with the exception of King Abdullah) have been saying or doing in Arabic, you would understand that. The Israelis listen in both English and Arabic and they understand it very well.
That's why the Israeli peace camp died -- its voters understood that the policies that had promised peace and compromise were leading to national suicide instead. Even the former peaceniks know that to withdraw in the face of terror only assures continued and increasing terror.
If in the summer of 2000 you had predicted that not only would Ariel Sharon be elected Prime Minister, he would win by 25% -- the largest margin in Israeli history -- you would have been derided as a lunatic. It took Arafat to bring Sharon back from the political wilderness when the "Israelis decided to hunker down and go for defense", as President Clinton says.
Summer 2000 will go down in history with 1937, 1947, 1967, 1970, 1974 and 1979 as a time when the Arabs yet again spurned compromise with the "Zionist entity", preferring to pursue their maximalist goals. Abba Eban was right. |
