generalspeaking

Statehood and Peace?

The Palestinian Authority insists it is ready to be installed as the latest nation in the United Nations. Mind, it took long enough, since the offer was originally extended to the Palestinians in 1948 from the Security Council. What wasn't good enough back then is good enough now. But the agenda is the same. Back then the idea was that the newly-proclaimed State of Israel would be group-assaulted by the combined Arab armies whose governments felt it a divine insult against Islam to have a Jewish state in their midst.

Back then the idea was that after the combined armies of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia would bring the new nation to heel, destroy its fledgling army, destroy the ambition of a new country, and permit the Palestinians to return to the geography as the sole owner of the territories, the problem would handily resolve itself. History tells us unequivocally that this did not happen. But the Palestinians have never surrendered their dream of recovering all the land.

Their maps to this very day exclude the State of Israel. Their school texts refer to all of the territory as Palestinian-owned, and that Israel is an occupier whose duty it is every Palestinian's to 'resist' the occupier by any means possible. The Palestinian Authority, like its predecessor, the PLO, teachers its young the glories of resistance. Resistance and martyrdom, one and the same. A blessed obligation, a willing duty for a proud and true Palestinian.

The Palestinian Authority, far from preparing itself to become a neighbour should it, once it attains statehood, plans and promotes a culture of slander and incitement to violence against that neighbour, while presenting to the world as a hapless victim of Israeli aggression. The PA oversees an economy that is growing nicely, but it is dependent on international largess, and Israeli co-operation.

The PA honours those who have martyred themselves against the Zionist occupiers in the name of 'resistance'. It names streets and squares and institutions and summer camps for children after the hallowed 'martyrs' who have murdered Israelis, including children, of course. This is a most peculiar way to prepare for peace, to live without enmity beside a neighbouring state.

No problem; the Palestinian plan is to dissolve that existing state. Under the weight of returning Palestinian 'refugees' - roughly five million of them as is their due since they obeyed the injunction to be fruitful and multiply - who will neatly overwhelm in sheer force of numbers the Jewish population of Israel, which already has as Israeli citizens, one million Palestinian Arabs with Israeli citizenship.

As for Jerusalem, that too is non-negotiable, for the PA plans, intransigently to claim it in its entirety as a new capital for a new, expanded state within the community of states that is the United Nations. A campaign of delegitimization of Israel, along with a staged denial of Jewish pre-existence in the Middle East, and denial of claims of the existence of a Temple of Solomon in two incarnations continues apace.

There is little point, as far as Mahmoud Abbas and his cronies are concerned - let alone Hamas - of sitting down at the bargaining table with Israeli counterparts. What will they bargain for? The PA will never utter the agreement that Israel is a Jewish state. All the states in the Middle East are Islamic states, all but one an Arab state, but it is reprehensible, smacking of apartheid to claim Israel for Jews. That sells well in the West.

There can be no concessions between the Palestinian Authority and Israel, for the PA is self-entitled to everything, from Jerusalem to right of return to complete ownership of the West Bank, Gaza - and Israel itself. Israel can only concede that it exists, but that, according to the PA's long-range plans is only temporary. Temporary can only last so long and no longer.

And the PA proudly claims that 140 countries within the United Nations General Assembly are prepared to vote it as the latest country to join the notable assemblage.

Labels: Israel, Palestinian Authority, Political Realities, United Nations

posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, September 13, 2011