Obama's "solutions" will endanger Israel.
Irving Kristol said that whomever the Gods want to teach humility they first tempt to resolve the Middle East conflict.
Solving this conflict has been so difficult because it has always been misconstrued. As a result of confusion about the conflict's nature, the solutions that were nevertheless tried, such as the Oslo agreement establishing the Palestinian Authority, or Israel's unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, resulted in costly failures. The suffering of Israelis and Palestinian Arabs increased.
The most common approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict, held by the well-connected Peace Now camp, holds that the conflict is about nationhood and territory. It blames Israel for the conflict, claiming Israel's reluctance to fully withdraw its settlements from the West Bank (it did from Gaza) denies the Palestinian Arabs a contiguous territory and enough living space to assert their sovereignty.
This must be why the Obama administration seems to believe that pressuring Israel to immediately accept a Palestinian Arab state and to withdraw to the 1967 boundaries will bring about peace. Obama seems determined to take serious risks to pursue what he believes is a strategic imperative and a moral duty. Indeed, the two-state solution seems like the decent and rational solution to the conflict. But there are many serious doubts about its feasibility.
Advocates of the two-state solution consider themselves political realists. But they always stress the historical and judicial justification for establishing a Palestinian state. They see it as not only politically necessary but an absolute moral imperative, doing justice to a dispossessed people.
But should not the establishment of such a state--which the Europeans so strongly promote--adhere to the European Union's 1993 Copenhagen Political Criteria for new members, which states, "Membership criteria require that the candidate country must have achieved stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, rule of law, human rights, and respect for and protection of minorities"?
Clearly a Palestinian Authority state will not even remotely meet such criteria. What moral justification is there, then, for forcing a vulnerable Israel, threatened by an irredentist Palestinian state, to help establish it when a powerful European Union refuses to take much smaller risks in the case of Turkey?
The chances that the U.S. will be able to assure that the Palestinian Arab state will live in peace with Israel are very small indeed. For powerful historic, political, social and economic reasons, all Arab states have evolved dictatorial regimes and rapacious elites. They rationalize their oppression by fomenting hatred against other nations, especially against non-Muslims. A Palestinian Arab state will not be an exception. (Pakistan and Turkey, which were supposed to be the exceptions, are regressing to the state of the others.)
But external economic setbacks compounded by increasing Israeli bureaucratic oppression reversed this prosperity. Increasing Arab frustration finally exploded in 1987 in a popular uprising that led to the 1993 Oslo accords. The Palestinian Liberation Organization, a terrorist organization, was invited to set up a Palestinian Authority as a preparation for an independent Palestinian state living in peace beside Israel.
But Arafat's Authority was not interested in living in peace with Israel; it wanted to destroy it. Arafat gladly sacrificed Palestinian welfare, even lives, for this purpose. Ruining the Arab economy and using a totalitarian propaganda campaign to blame Israel for Palestinian misery, Arafat exploited Arab anger to escalate the conflict.
He succeeded because the conflict between the Palestinian Arabs and Israel is only superficially about nationhood and territory. Since the 1948 partition of Palestine, British Mandate Arabs had several opportunities to create an independent state. Jordan and Egypt ruled the area until 1967; recently, they could have done so after Oslo, after the Gaza withdrawal. But they did not, because they were intent on first destroying Israel.
As long as this is so, granting the Palestinian Arabs a state will not result in peace, but in continued war.
As for the historic and legal claims for a Palestinian Arab state, the argument that the Arabs seek the restoration of "stolen Palestinian lands" is sheer fabrication. The area of the former British mandate of Palestine (which included Jordan) was for centuries under the Ottomans an empty, deserted land. Read more,,,,,
Daniel Doron is president of the Israel Center for Social and Economic Progess.
Source: Forbes
H/T: DF
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