By Herb London
Thursday, August 07, 2014
As Israel’s troops withdraw from Gaza, the world should
not be hopeful that the “peace” will be long-lasting. As long as “Nakba” -- the
catastrophic 1948 War and Palestinian dislocation --continues to be the
rallying cry that energizes the Arab street, there is little hope that the
decades-long conflict will come to an end anytime soon. Worse, Hamas’
willingness to put its political goals ahead of its hapless constituents
ensures that future conflicts will be at least as bloody as the current
conflict between Hamas and Israel.
In every negotiation between the two parties, the
Palestinian leadership has displayed a stubborn unwillingness for peace with
Israel or even an accommodation that will allow the conflicting parties to
coexist.
Indeed, it is no longer even clear that the Palestinian
leadership really desires an independent state: after all, should peaceful
coexistence, the so-called “two-state solution,” come to pass, the Palestinians
would lose their trump card of victimhood.
When former Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered to cede 95
percent of the West Bank as a peace offering, PLO leader Yasser Arafat refused
the concession. At the time, some joked that the Palestinians never miss an
opportunity to miss an opportunity, but the truth is that no Palestinian leader
has a mandate to approve an independent state. This is a core geopolitical fact
that has missed the attention of both President Obama and Secretary of State
John Kerry -- with deadly results.
The war in the Middle East is a perpetual one because of
the refusal of Arab leaders to accept the reality of Israel as a Jewish state.
Indeed, the unity government comprised of Hamas and Fatah has declared publicly
that its overarching goal is Israel’s destruction. Peaceful coexistence in the
face of vehement hatred is impossible, and the failure of the Obama
administration, the United Nations -- and even some in Israel -- to recognize
this reality is a morbid commentary on their understanding of the region.
This war is far larger than Israel’s ongoing conflict
with Hamas. It extends to those Arab states that provide the rockets which
Hamas fires indiscriminately at Israeli citizens, and to Fatah, which cynically
talks of peace but wages war with its Hamas brothers. The war extends, as well,
to those who deliberately impede the development of Palestinian civil authority
as a counterweight to the corrupt leadership that lines its pockets with
proceeds from foreign governments.
As long as the Palestinians cling to their rejection of
Israel’s very right to exist, they simply cannot take “yes” as an answer. Their
leaders are on a suicide course of never-ending war against a better-equipped
adversary, a war that is fought on the backs of long suffering civilians.
The rejectionist approach -- renouncing Israel’s very
presence in the region -- gives lie to United Nations deliberations. There can
be no serious negotiations with an adversary who has embraced a lie as its
policy narrative.
As essayist Pierre Ryckmans (aka Simon Leys) reminds us
that it was Saint Augustine who, 1,600 years ago, first observed, “People have
such a love for truth that when they happen to love something else, they want
it to be the truth; and because they do not wish to be proven wrong, they
refuse to be shown their mistake. And so, they end up hating the truth for the
sake of the object which they have come to love instead of the truth.”
In this instance, the truth, sadly, is that the
Palestinian Authority is corrupt and so inattentive to its own people that it
uses them as human shields in effort to convey a twisted message of
victimization.
It is victimhood that is at the root of the Palestinian
strategy, and it is victimization that the Palestinians assert in the United
Nations General Assembly.
Palestinian victimization, the “great lie” of Middle
Eastern politics, has emerged in some circles as the “truth” -- and it is what
perpetuates bloodshed and grief without an apparent end.
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