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Politics : GENEVA ACCORD -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Soileau who wrote (128)	12/9/2003 9:51:47 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 190

It's an easy theory to say, to hell with all of them, esp. if you are not closely acquainted with the facts. But it doesn't fit the evidence. If Arafat didn't like Sharon maybe he shouldn't have elected him - when he had Barak to work with, he didn't do any better. To quote myself: Let's take a quick look at the leadership of the Americans, Israelis and Palestinians for the last 30 years. America: Nixon. Ford. Carter. Reagan. Bush. Clinton. Bush II. Israel: Meir. Shamir. Perez. Begin. Rabin. Perez. Netanyahu. Barak. Sharon. (I may be mixing up the order a little) Palestinians: Arafat. Arafat. Arafat. Arafat. Arafat. Arafat. Arafat. Arafat. Arafat. Can you spot the unchanging variable? The thing that makes the conflict so intractable is not that the Israelis won't move, but that they had really extended themselves with the offers of Camp David and Taba in 2000, and got a terror war in return instead of any kind of a counter-offer. So they elected Sharon. Sharon, like most Israelis, is basically very unwilling on principle to reward the terror war with an even better, even more trusting (on Israel's part) offer - which is excatly what the useful idiots of Geneva have offered Arafat. Sharon remains willing to talk, he just wants a week of quiet first. A week of quiet - that's the unachievable stopping block, the Palestinians won't stop the suicide bombers for a week. And here you conclude from that that it's Sharon who doesn't want a Palestinian state. No. The Palestinian State was conceded with Oslo, Sharon has said so. What Sharon doesn't want, is to give the Palestinian State as a pure reward to terror without any peace in return, just more war - which is the only way Arafat will take it. Now, I'm not saying that the Israeli record is spotless - far from it. They bit off more than they could chew. They misjudged that the territories would be a bargaining chip, so they could trade land for peace. That would have worked if any of the Arab states were democracies and cared about the welfare of their citizens. They aren't and they don't. The settler movement fell in love with the land, and anybody who can read a map wants to keep a defensible border, which the Green Line isn't. They lived too long with territories in limbo, their inhabitnats viewing Israeli democracy but not partaking of it, until they got themselves the first intifada. Then the same crowd of imbeciles now strutting their stuff in Geneva rose their mistake to the nth power by handing the territories to Arafat and his thugs, and expecting peace to come of it.