did not say the Arabs are owed every bit of land back. And for strategic security reasons, some of the land might best stay in Israeli hands. For military uses, not civilian settlements.
In that case, why are the settlements "wrong"? BTW, the settlements along the Jordan clearly serve both military and civilian functions.
Another good article by Gerecht in the Weekly Standard:
Appeasing Arab Dictators
The road to peace in the Middle East runs through Baghdad, not the Arab League.
by Reuel Marc Gerecht
04/08/2002, Volume 007, Issue 29
THE ARAB LEAGUE, like so much else in the Muslim Middle East, has an identity problem. Created in 1944 through British inspiration, the League was supposed to cement a hodgepodge of newly created Arab states into a postwar bulwark of British influence and power. That didn't happen. The organization quickly became a cacophonous expression of the anti-Western, anti-Zionist "Arab nation," its meetings and declarations rhetorical exercises in wishful, often disingenuous thinking. Even Egyptian diplomats, who have long dominated the machinery of the Arab League, and who give the institution an urbanity not present in many of its constituent states, can privately apologize for the juvenility of its proceedings and the enormous gap between the League's version of the Arab world and the way the Middle East really works.
Which of course provokes the question: Why did the Bush administration hitch its prestige to the deliberations of this body? There was no chance whatsoever that the League would produce, as the New York Times surreally put it, an "extraordinary appeal" for peace to the Israeli people. The most fundamental political and cultural mechanics of the Arab Middle East dictated that Saudi crown prince Abdullah's "peace initiative," warmly welcomed and frenetically advanced by the administration, would dead-end in a proposal more retrograde than the one Yasser Arafat demanded at Camp David in July 2000. A quick tour d'horizon of the region should have told the administration that any League declaration would, at best, be just a Saudi pronouncement, that Syria--the only other front-line Arab state besides Saudi Arabia and Iraq without a peace treaty with Israel--would never go along with anything remotely feasible.
continued at
theweeklystandard.com |
