Politely Bullying
Israel the country, its government, its citizens, are so predictably prickly. They have this irritating habit of thinking first and foremost of their safety and security at every juncture. Even while the most impressively powerful man of the most importantly powerful country of the world admonishes them, informs their prime minister that he must set such concerns aside for the good of the Middle East, to achieve better relations on the international sphere of political balance.Logic has it that knowing America, the European Union, Russia, China and the United Nations all believe in the goodness of their collective hearts, that Israel should relent and think of the greater good in the Middle East communities - surrender their unreasonable ambition to remain a country of Jewish permanence on the landscape - and accept what they feel to be their death knell. A flood of Palestinians to be absorbed into the country? Don't sweat it.
After all, the moderate PA leader, Mahmud Abbas said it isn't up to him to name Israel as a Jewish state, nor would he. Israel is to take it on trust that the Arab world will jump at the opportunity to 'normalize' relations with it. All Israel has to do is accept the Arab League Peace Plan, the one that Saudi Arabia formulated years ago, and still insists that this represents Israel's sole route to acceptance in the Middle East.
Give up East Jerusalem, welcome the 'right of return' of six million Palestinians, to even out the balance of the Jewish majority, relinquish the Golan Heights, eradicate all Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Then sit back and wait for the Palestinians to establish their state in the West Bank. And wait for Hamas and Hezbollah to attack from Gaza and from Lebanon. And for the new citizenry of the new Palestinian state to join in the fray.
Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu had his own agenda to foist on President Barack Obama; kindly grapple with the existential dilemma of Iranian nuclear warheads, and then a re-assured Israel will be prepared to countenance the establishment of a Palestinian state that will be eager to give up their fixed idea of eventually re-taking all of the area that they still believe belongs to them, sans the State of Israel.
While Iran remains a dire threat, and with it, its terrorist proxies, the Palestinians have no need to bargain in good faith. Time and the tides of men's plans are on their side. Israel has no friends, the Palestinians have the good wishes of the entire world. The Palestinians are asked in this unbalanced act of formulating two states side-by-side, to give up nothing. Not even their vicious anti-Jewish campaigns of violence leading to eradication of the Jewish presence.
Israel must attend to the wishes of the international community that it heed their claims that will inevitably lead to sweetness and light. The Palestinian communities, while receiving sixty years-worth of international aid have been incapable of fashioning anything remotely resembling a civil society that could be pulled into a nascent state. Instead, they preferred their 'refugee' status, dependent on international charity to soothe their eternal grievance.
Israel, which has succeeded in establishing itself as a liberal democracy with a standard of living unmatched by any but the most successful democratic societies, bringing into its fold refugees from around the world, permitting Israeli Arabs to sit as elected Members of the Knesset, receiving accolades for its academic, scientific and social advances, yet disdained for its inconvenient insistence on demonstrating the usual Jewish arrogance of showing up where they're not wanted, remains the world's pariah.
It's as though the global community is insulted by success. As though they're awaiting some kind of come-uppance to devolve, whereupon Israel will be smacked down to the level where Jews should remain. The United Nations, the European Union, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United States, even Russia and China are all aware of Iran's deadly antipathy toward Israel, and its commitment to both nuclear refinement leading to warheads, and Israel's destruction.
The precondition for Israel to drop its self-defence and self-reliance because a powerful nation and a powerful leader insists it must to attain a global end is a betrayal of trust. One man's vanity in believing that by force of personality and goodwill he can achieve a relationship with a belligerent Islamist theocracy that welcomes death as an entry-point to Paradise bespeaks a level of egotistical self-confidence that no experience can justify.
Labels: Israel, Middle East, Terrorism, United States
posted by Pieface @ Monday, May 25, 2009
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