The time has come to realize that the old habits, the old arguments are irrelevant to the challenges faced by our people.

Conclusions drawn from history and experience are often ignored in favor of the exploration by trial and error of new approaches or even previously tried and rejected ones. The belief that it is the Jews, and specifically the Jewish state, who are intractable in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is exactly such a previously tried and rejected approach. Israel has agreed to final peace agreements at the negotiating table three times, since 1967. Three times!

1. With Egypt
2. With Jordan
3. With the Palestinians at Camp David

The Palestinians have never agreed to peace once, only to interruptions in violence for negotiations through which they might pursue gains that they were unable to obtain through violence. Current attempts to utilize the United Nations to obtain gains are the result of the failure of both violence and negotiations to advance the goal of eventually eradicating the Jewish state, the unrealized goal of the violence.

That reasonable people argue for the creation of a Palestinian state roughly along the 1967 borders has allowed the Palestinian leadership legitimacy in pursuit of a goal not limited to the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, but in fact to pursue the destruction of Israel with the creation of a Palestinian state that substantially weakens Israel’s security and viability being a step in that direction.

This is why it is Israel’s security and not the borders of a future Palestinian state that must be discussed first. For those truly pursuing peace, the coexistence of the two states in peace and security must take precedence over the land which they control and it must be clear that all belligerent claims, much less actions, must end with whatever peace agreement is made.

As I wrote recently for We Are For Israel, American advocacy must support Israel in achieving this goal, in achieving security, opposing efforts in the UN advancing territorial claims by the Palestinians without negotiating a permanent peace.

The demonization of Israel by the global media has greatly harmed the Palestinians†interests for decades and covered up Arab atrocities against them. Furthermore, demonizing Israel has been well-exploited by several Arab dictatorships to direct citizens†rage against Israel instead of their regimes and also to justify any atrocities they commit in the name of protecting their nations from “the evil Zionists.”

This game has served some of the most notorious Arab dictatorships, and still does today, as any opposition is immediately labelled “a Zionist plot.”

This model had served Gamal Abdel Nasser in ruling Egypt with an iron fist until he died, and was the main line for Saddam Hussein, who was promoting that “Iraq and Palestine are one identical case” in his last years in power.

The global media must be fair in addressing the Palestinians†suffering in Arab countries and must stop demonizing Israel. It should start focusing on the broader conditions of the Palestinians in the Middle East region.

(Do you think that Mudar Zahran is someone Thomas Friedman thinks we need to hear more of? My guess is that since Mudar Zahran challenges Friedman’s believe that Israel is mostly at fault for the lack of peace in the Middle East, that the answer is “no.”)

Sol Stern in the City Journal writes about The Naqba Obsession:

In Balata, history has come full circle. During the 1948 war, Palestinian leaders like Haj Amin al-Husseini insisted that the Arab citizens of Haifa and Jaffa had to leave, lest they help legitimize the Jewish state. Now, the descendants of those citizens are locked up in places like Balata and prohibited from resettling in the Palestinian-administered West Bank—again, lest they help legitimize the Jewish state, this time by removing the Palestinians†chief complaint. Yet there is a certain perverse logic at work here. For if Israel and the Palestinians ever managed to hammer out the draft of a peace treaty, Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, would have to go to Balata and explain to its residents that their leaders have been lying to them for 60 years and that they are not going back to Jaffa. Which, to state the obvious again, is one of the main reasons that there has been no peace treaty.

(via the Daily Alert Blog Speaking of Sol Stern, if you haven’t read his Israel without apology; you must.)

I suppose that it’s easier to blame Israel because Israelis are different from Arabs, so it’s intelectually easier to subscribe to the view that Israelis are prejudiced against Palestinians and refuse to give them their due. Such a prejudice is fixable by education and enlightenment. On the other hand the the hatred of the Muslim world for Israel, is not something that is so easily fixed. It also is too alien for most of the enlightened West to comprehend. Better then to address the issue that can be fixed and ignore the one that can’t.

Of course that attitude doesn’t solve the problem, it merely exacerbates it.

Crossposted at Soccer Dad.