When discussing the Middle East, “Everyone knows” what it will take to make peace. Melanie Philips (h/t JoshuaPundit) mocks with this facile assumption.
It is blindingly obvious what, to the Obama administration, ‘everyone knows’ . Everyone knows that everything the Palestinians demand will be given to them; everyone knows that Israel alone will be expected to make yet more ‘painful concessions’ which will jeopardise its security and identity; everyone knows that the Palestinian aggressors will be expected to make no such painful concessions, such as agreeing to allow the State of Israel to exist in peace; everyone knows that aggression will thus be rewarded and its victims further bullied; and everyone now knows that this monstrous injustice will be imposed by Obama upon a sovereign state like an imperialist boot stamped upon its face.
And what everyone in the Palestinian camp knows is that Obama has now given them a green light for further intransigence and violence; and what everyone in the Iranian regime knows is that Obama is delivering the western world to it on a plate.
And of course there is evidence that even if Israel made every single territorial concession demanded of it there still would not be peace. Noah Pollak cites a poll taken by An Najah University of Palestinians:
Do you accept the creation of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders
with some land exchange as a final solution for the Palestinian problem?Yes 28.3
No 66.7
No opinion/I do not know 5.0
And if anyone thought that despite this, at least the PA was fostering an atmosphere encouraging co-existence, well, as the Jerusalem Post observes, he’d be wrong.
During his recent visit, US Vice President Joe Biden secured Abbas’s solemn pledge to desist from such exaltation of terrorist icons. Planned to coincide with Biden’s visit was a ceremony to name a central El Bireh square after Dalal Mughrabi, member of the gang which hijacked a bus on Israel’s Coastal Road in 1978, murdering 37. Under pressure, Abbas cancelled the ceremony.
However, to put it mildly, he was insincere. The ceremony did take place but under Fatah auspices instead of PA sponsorship. With Fatah being the key component of the PA regime, the difference is deceptive.
PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad recently paid condolence visits to family members mourning 2002’s Church of the Nativity invader Abdallah Daud, the three murderers of Avshalom Meir Chai and a terrorist who attempted to stab a soldier. He extolled them all as “martyrs.â€
THIS IS no new twist of the plot but consistent policy. Back in 2008, Abbas handpicked five female recipients for the PLO’s highest medal of heroism. Three had been foiled in their homicidal attempts. Not so the two stars.
Amana Mona lured 16-year-old Ofir Rahum via Internet chats to a cruel death on January 17, 2001. Ahlan Tamimi planned the August 9, 2001 attack on Jerusalem’s Sbarro pizzeria and drove the suicide bomber to the destination where he killed 15 persons, including seven children and five members of a single family.
The inescapable message is that such crimes are the PA’s ideal. Hence it acclaims malevolence instead of denouncing it.
The Post also makes an important point that is largely ignored:
Since the PA derives its very legitimacy from Oslo, one would logically suppose that it would seek to eradicate any vestige of veneration for the terrorists who set out to violently undermine the very foundation of accommodation. That indeed would be the minimum we would expect of peace partners, as the symbolic prelude to a no-holds barred fight against terror and against incitement to terror.
We regularly hear that Israel must do this or do that or it faces the prospect of ceasing to be a Jewish state or a democracy. Yet regarding the PA, which derives its legitimacy from a hollow promise that it had eschewed terrorism, we never hear expressions of horror that it might lose that legitimacy.
At what point will the peace processors show that they are serious about peace by demanding a minimum of compliance by the Palestinians? Or will the process continue to be Israeli land for empty promises?
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
