PrintSeptember 3, 2010
The Siren Song of Arab Rejectionism
Another round of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians began yesterday at the White House. Present were the two Arab leaders and autocrats who are putatively at peace with Israel, Egypt's Hosni Mubarak and Jordan's kinglet, Abdullah.
But, as we shall no doubt see, they will exert their Arab bona fides within the Arab-Muslim world by displaying how hard they can lean on the Israeli Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu. Not to do so invites threats from the hostile Arab and Muslim street.
Despite promises by both President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that there will be no preconditions imposed at the talks, Palestinian Chairman Mahmoud Abbas has already made it abundantly clear that he will most certainly demand preconditions and bolt from the peace conference if they are not met. Blackmail?
What he insists on is a permanent freeze on building homes within Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria (aka the West Bank). On September 26, 2010, the self-imposed Israeli building freeze expires.
It was rigorously enforced by Israel, with all the hardships it imposed upon Israeli families, as a goodwill gesture to Abbas to encourage him to attend peace negotiations. Abbas refused up until the very last moment to agree to attend, which underlines the familiar and dreary reluctance by the Palestinian leadership to truly enter into genuine peace talks with the Jewish state.
So, finally, he will attend, but true to type, he could not resist saying that: "if upcoming direct talks between Israel and the PA will fail, Israel would be to blame if it continues to build in Judea and Samaria."
In a televised speech, Abbas said, "Israel alone will bear the responsibility of threatening these negotiations with collapse and failure if it continues settlement expansion in all its forms."
And recently, Saeb Erakat, the wily and disingenuous chief Palestinian negotiator, was reported as stating that Israel must choose "settlements or peace."
The Arab strategy is to make the so-called settlements -- within the territory liberated in 1967 by Israel from Jordanian occupation -- the acid test for peace. But it is a red herring, or perhaps in this case, a red shish-kebab.
If there were no Jewish communities within Judea and Samaria (the biblical ancestral Jewish heartland), it would make no difference to the conflict. The Muslim Arabs would still not accept a Jewish state in any territory previously conquered by Muslim force of arms in the name of Allah.
Before the 1967 Six-Day War, Arab regimes never permitted a single Jew to live in the Jordanian-occupied West Bank or Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip, and not once was there any intention by Jordan, Egypt, Syria, or Lebanon (the Arab states having borders with Israel) to make peace with the Jewish state.
Listen today to sermons in mosques within the Arab world; the desire to destroy Israel has not abated one iota. It is the relentless Arab rejection of Israel that is at the very heart of the conflict, not the so-called settlements.
In one of his clearer-thinking moments, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times wrote, "To think that the Palestinians are only enraged about settlements is also fatuous. Talk to the 15 year olds. Their grievance is not just with Israeli settlements, but with Israel."
In other words, like their elders, they follow the Muslim line that no non-Muslim state must be permitted to exist and must be warred against perpetually until it is no more.
But Arab rejection predates the modern 1948 reconstitution of Israel within its ancient homeland. In 1937, the British occupiers of Mandatory Palestine appointed the Peel Commission, which proposed a partition plan to separate Jews and Arabs.
The Jews were offered a sliver of land, mostly along the coast, representing a mere 10% of historic geographical Palestine. Remember that in 1921-22, Britain had already torn away all of the Palestinian land east of the River Jordan (amounting to nearly 80% of the mandatory territory and three times the size of present-day Israel) and had given it to the Arab Bedouin Hashemite tribe. Jordan subsequently announced its independence in 1946.
The Jewish leadership reluctantly accepted the 1937 partition. The Arabs -- no surprise -- rejected the plan outright. Instead, again no surprise, the Arab leadership fomented and organized violence and terror against the Jewish inhabitants.
The same occurred with the 1947 U.N. partition of geographical Palestine. The Jews accepted; the Arabs rejected. In 1967, the Arab leaders again rejected any agreement to Jewish sovereignty. Just nine days before the June 5, 1967 outbreak of the Six-Day War, Gamal Abdul Nasser, President of Egypt, clearly enunciated what he had in store for the Jewish state. He said, "Our basic objective is the destruction of Israel. The Arab people want to fight."
And the Iraqi president, Abd-al-Rahman, was equally belligerent. He said, "Our goal is clear: to wipe Israel off the map."
But after the resounding and crushing 1967 Israeli victory over a constellation of Arab armies, Israel's Foreign Minister, Abba Eban, offered to give away territories in exchange for peace.
A victor rarely comes to the defeated party and offers to give away the fruits of victory, but Israel, now as then, sought peace above all else. Sadly but predictably, the Arab world meeting in Khartoum responded with the infamous "three nos" to Israel's unheard of offer: "No peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel."
At the peace talks in President Obama's White House, the Egyptian and Jordanian leaders now abide by a peace treaty with Israel, but one upon which both have imposed an Arctic frigidity whereby the normal intercourse between friendly neighboring states is not permitted by them to exist.
Netanyahu will face the same implacable rejection of Israel as always exists, which forms the fundamental reason for the dreary Arab and Muslim strategy of using one excuse after another to render true peace negotiations an exercise in futility.
They will never embrace the Jewish state in the Middle East, but merely use their immense powers of dissimilitude to blame Israel for the absence of peace with one red herring after another. Today it is the so-called settlements. If that fails, there are countless other excuses in their deceptive armory.
To prove the point, even if Israel were foolish enough to commit national suicide by giving to the Arabs the strategic high ground that stretches north and south in Samaria and Judea and which overlooks the Israeli coastal plain, the words of a Fatah Central Committee member, Rafik Natche, are startlingly ominous. He said,
Hamas says all of the territory belongs to us from the sea to the river and we want to take it in one fell swoop. But the Fatah, which is the armed wing of the PLO, thinks it is more efficient to proceed according to the Step by Step plan. The two organizations are in agreement on the final goal. Our discord is only on the method to adopt in order to achieve the goal.
In other words, the Arabs know that to obtain a state -- not living side-by-side with Israel, but in place of Israel -- the first step must be to gain disputed territories.
They already have Gaza, which the Israelis gave to them in 2005 in the hope of a true and lasting peace, even forcing out ten thousand Israeli villagers from their homes and farms. Instead, Israel received for its pains a relentless barrage of thousands of lethal missiles targeting its civilian population.
With Israel's unpleasant experience of concession after concession to the Arabs, including the disastrous Gaza experience and the creation of the Palestinian Authority, the vain hope is that the Arab leadership finally recognizes that peace is a two-way street.
It is tragically apparent, however, that barring a miracle, it will be Israel yet again that is leaned upon to make more concessions imperiling its own security. If Netanyahu remains steadfast that the building freeze ends as agreed, then the ever-present threat of Palestinian aggression will once again erupt.
But if he extends the freeze, it will gain Israel nothing and merely embolden the Arab side to demand ever more. Netanyahu will be told by Presidents Obama and Mubarak, as well as by the Jordanian kinglet Abdullah, that Israel must take "risks for peace," which is code for national suicide.
Then there is the joker in the pack, President Barak Hussein Obama, who is the most extreme, radical left-wing president in America's history, who sympathizes with the Muslim world and is no true friend of Israel.
Meanwhile, the Arab attendees of the peace talks, as always, will give nothing in return.
Victor Sharpe is the author of several books, including Volumes One and Two of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.
