Magic Is Not The Solution…
by Gerald A. Honigman
True justice is…
During the first week in November, a news brief made it into my local paper announcing that Israel’s Netanyahu will be returning to America “in hopes of finding a formula to revive the negotiations.”
Guess what?
While not all formulas are magical ones, there certainly is no rabbit that can be pulled out of any hat which can solve the problem between Arab and Jew in the Middle East.
And yet, the solution is not, in theory, a difficult one.
“Negotiations” broke down a few weeks ago not because of Israeli settlements and building freezes–as has been proclaimed and reported–but because, in the Arabs’ own words, there have not been any real negotiations.
Repeatedly, Mahmoud Abbas and his fellow latter-day Fatah Arafatian “moderates” have stated that in their Trojan Horse, destruction-in-stages (the Arab “moderates'” words, not mine)dealings with Jews, the Arabs’ role will simply be to receive what Jews solely will be forced to give.
That, dear readers, is not what negotiations are all about–regardless of how the Obama Administration and a perpetually Arabist State Department want to whitewash the situation.
Israel has a right to real, somewhat defensible borders–not the 9 to 15-mile wide existence imposed upon it by the 1949 armistice lines. The latter merely marked the points where the Arab armies invading Israel in 1948 were turned back and were never meant to be permanent political borders.
After yet another Arab attempt on Israel’s life in ’67, the final draft (not the French and Russian version) of UNSC Resolution 242 called for a territorial compromise in the disputed territories. Google Search any of 242’s architects on this topic– Great Britain’s Lord Caradon, Undersecretary of State Eugene Rostow, etc.–if you have any doubts about this.
The settlement and building freeze issues, which Washington has increasingly made a stink about, have to do with Jews returning to lands where–until their massacres by Arabs in the 1920s and 1930s–they have thousands of years of history in. Judeans are not foreigners to Judea…
Despite what Arabs claim (and they claim most of the entire region, not only Israel, as “purely Arab patrimony”), the territory in question was non-apportioned land belonging to the original April 25, 1920 Mandate–open to all residents, not just Arabs and not just Arab land. Indeed, Arabs poured into the Mandate from all over the region…Arab settlers setting up Arab settlements in Palestine.
The settlements Jews now build are on land Israel will need to get the territorial buffer promised by 242 at the end of any peace deals with Arabs. Without them, Israel cannot get the secure, defensible borders 242 speaks of.
The real problem plaguing peace has several aspects to it…
First, the current resident in the White House insists–unlike all of his predecessors–that Israel must abandon 242’s promise.
President Obama has fully endorsed the Arab demand for Israel’s forced return to its 9 to 15-mile wide, sub-rump state status (an open invitation to be attacked yet again) and has stated, repeatedly, that Israel would be crazy to reject alleged Arab “peace” (of the grave) offerings which require this.
The other major Arab demand, a part of that same plan the President loves, calls for Israel to be swamped by millions of allegedly returning jihadi Arab refugees–created as a result of the combined Arab attack on a miniscule, reborn Israel in 1948 which resulted, by the way, in more Jews fleeing “Arab”/Muslim lands than Arabs who fled in the opposite direction.
Israel, so far, has refused to totally cave in to enormous American pressure to simply reward repeated Arab aggression and rejectionism, and, in doing so, gets branded as the obstacle to peace.
Many voters who just dealt the President’s Democrat colleagues an enormous defeat in the 2010 elections were sending the White House a message too. And while the economy and jobs are at the forefront of concerns, the latter’s foreign policy–especially President Obama’s manhandling of Israel–has been distasteful to many folks as well.
Lastly, the even more difficult nut to crack in order to solve this impasse is really the easiest to understand.
“Negotiations” will not succeed until Arabs really want to negotiate true peace–not continuously dictate the terms of Israel’s destruction.
The Arab mindset allows no room for anyone’s political rights in the region except their own and perhaps some of those whom they earlier sufficiently Arabized to one extent or another…Pakistani and Afghani jihadis, for example.
Arabs oppose an independent state for Jews for the same reasons they do so for scores of millions of Kurds, Imazighen (“Berbers”), black African Sudanese, Copts, Semitic but pre-Arab Lebanese, etc. and so forth. Millions of these folks have been massacred over the ages–right up to the present–for wanting something beyond just being subjugated, forcibly Arabized populations belonging to Arab masters.
Now, fix that above problem, and peace between Arab and Jew becomes possible.
But, when the predictable, insurmountable hurdle of an Arab refusal to make such a change is encountered, the answer must not simply be to pressure Jews to submit to all that they demand.
Yet, so far, that is the only solution that the Obama White House can come up with to allegedly salvage the sham negotiations that it is now sponsoring.
My new book develops these themes (and many more) lots further. It made its debut in academia in Washington, DC, at the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa Conference (ASMEA) in October 2009 (Professors Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami’s new organization). Personalized copies can be obtained via http://q4j-middle-east.com or Honigman6@msn.com