Jim Wolfensohn, former head of the World Bank, died this week. The New York Times wrote about his life’s work in a long obituary. As is commonplace for the legacy paper, it retold his final acts of generosity to conceal the behavior of its Victims of Preference, Palestinian Arabs.
In the concluding sentences of a 2000-word article, the Times wrote the following:
“His last major undertaking was in the mid-2000s as a special envoy for a diplomatic group known as the Quartet — made up of the United Nations, the United States, the Russian Federation and the European Union — which was seeking an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal in which Israel would disengage from the Gaza Strip. If the deal were struck, he was to help coordinate revitalization efforts once the Palestinian authorities had taken over the area, the U.N. said at the time.
However, the negotiations failed.
“The Middle East,” Mr. Wolfensohn grimly observed, ”turned out to be my mission impossible.”
A casual reader would assume that Wolfensohn was simply one more person who tried to help the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The peace deal described above would have had Israel “disengage from the Gaza Strip” and then his work of coordinating “revitalization efforts” would commence. As “negotiations failed,” Wolfensohn did not actually coordinate any efforts to help the Palestinians.
Not so.
Israel did “disengage from the Gaza Strip” and Wolfensohn coordinated an effort which had Jewish donors around the world buy the Israeli greenhouses and equipment left in Gaza to hand to the Palestinians to jump start their economy. Wolfensohn donated $500,000 of his own money to the purchases.
A Palestinian carries a plastic roll he took Tuesday from a greenhouse, background, at the evacuated Jewish settlement of Neve Dekalim in the Gaza Strip.Emilio Morenatti / AP
Amid al-Masri, head of the Palestine Economic Development Company’s (PEDC) greenhouse project said the looting “will undermine our efforts to privatise the project as we hoped and also it could frighten investors aiming at other projects.” Indeed, the project designed to restart the Gaza economy once again proved the failure to launch at the start.
James Wolfensohn’s generosity towards the Arabs of Gaza went unmentioned by The New York Times, as to have done so would have required showing the theft and ineptitude of the local population and Palestinian Authority. For the pro-Palestinian legacy media, better to whitewash Arabs shooting themselves in the foot with some generic language about the intractable conflict.
The current head of the United Nations, Secretary-General Antonio Gutteres, is a decent man and vast improvement from prior leaders like Ban Ki Moon who all but encouraged Palestinian violence against Israelis. But within that complement is the painful recognition that the United Nations blinds all.
On November 9, 2020, in commemoration of the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the pogrom against the Jews of Germany and Austria which ushered in the Holocaust, the World Jewish Congress bestowed the Theodor Herzl award to Guterres. Upon receiving the award, the Secretary-General delivered a speech about the horrors of the Holocaust and centuries of anti-Semitism including in his home country of Portugal, which had evicted all of its Jews in the Middle Ages. He touched upon the coronavirus which has unleashed new forms of blood libels against the Jews as well as the rise of Neo-Nazis. He implored the following:
We must stand together against hatred in all its forms. Our world today needs a return to reason – and a rejection of the lies and loathing that propelled the Nazis and that fracture societies today.
United Nations Secretary General Antonio Gutteres
Yet the organization he leads fails to reject “lies and loathing.” It is a giant megaphone for the most vile lies and propaganda which are given legitimacy by its brand. This institution created to foster world peace has morphed into a caldron of hate and vehicle to violence.
The UN acknowledges and repeats the mantra but ignores the premise when it comes to the Palestinians.
In the same speech, Gutteres added that “it remains my fervent hope that next year, a dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians can start again towards the goal of two States, living side by side in harmony and peace.” It is a fantasy sparked by a desire to see the Stateless Arabs have self-determination but ignores the systemic anti-Semitism in Palestinian society.
Palestinians are the most anti-Semitic people according to ADL polls
They voted the terrorist group Hamas to a 58% majority of parliament, with the most anti-Semitic foundational charter ever written (a combination of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and the forgery Protocols of the Elders of Zion with vast conspiracy theories)
The PA leadership denies the history of Jews in the holy land
The PA falsely claims that Israel is ethnically cleansing Arabs from Jerusalem even though their growth rate surpasses Jews in Jerusalem and Arabs in other capital cities in the region
The PA falsely claims that Israel is limiting Arab access to the al Aqsa Mosque when in fact it ONLY JEWS with limited access and rights to pray
The Palestinian Authority names schools, public squares and tournaments after terrorists who kill Israeli civilians
PA President Mahmoud Abbas delivering speech to the United Nations in 2011
The United Nations is forever mum on these matters. It is blind to the manic anti-Semitism prevalent in Palestinian society which wishes to either kill or expel every Jew from land it views as pure Muslim holy land. The UN won’t even teach about the Holocaust in its own UNRWA schools in Gaza and the West Bank.
Palestinian attitudes towards Jews is the modern fusion of the expulsions of Jews from Spain and Portugal in the 15th century together with the Nazi Holocaust in the 20th century. The modern Inquisition is being led by Muslim nations at the United Nations with the support of far-left progressives who consider the Jewish State a colonial enterprise, an original sin which can only be exculpated with conversion or destruction.
The obstacle to peace is not Jewish homes, it is Palestinian Arab “lies and loathing” which is given support at the United Nations. Until that fact is acknowledged and addressed there is no chance for peace.
Saeb Erekat died on November 10, 2020 in the Israeli capital of Jerusalem from COVID-19. He had suffered from a series of health ailments before the onset of the coronavirus including a heart attack in 2012 and a lung transplant in 2017. When he was admitted to the Hadassah Medical Center on October 19, he was already in critical condition.
Saeb Erekat was born in Abu Dis in 1955 while it was under Jordanian control. Jordan had expelled all Jews from the region in a war it initiated to destroy Israel in 1948, and later annexed that territory in 1950. All Arabs living in that land were granted Jordanian citizenship in 1954. While the Jordanian annexation of the “West Bank” was not recognized by most of the world, Arabs born in the region were acknowledged to be Jordanian.
Erekat spent much of his young life in Jericho which switched to Israeli-control after Jordan attacked Israel (again) in June 1967 and lost the area it had illegally annexed. As Israel only offered Arab residents of Jerusalem Israeli citizenship after it reunified the city in 1980, Erekat remained a Jordanian.
He moved to the United States for school, obtaining a BA and MA in international relations from San Francisco State University (SFSU). He managed to get US citizenship too.
When he returned to the Middle East he settled in Israeli-administered Nablus and became a professor at An-Najah University where he began his fight as a Palestinian. It is believed that Erekat was a facilitator in creating close ties between his alma mater at SFSU and An-Najah. In later years, the Middle East Forum lobbied SFSU to cut ties with An-Najah due to its involvement in terrorist activities, the most horrific being the 2001 bombing of the Sbarro pizza store in Jerusalem which killed 15, including 7 children and a pregnant woman while injuring 130.
Erekat was arrested by Israeli police during the early days of the First Intifada in 1987 and ultimately became part of the Palestinian negotiating team at the 1991 Madrid Conference. He would play a significant role during the 1993 and 1995 Oslo Accords which resulted in Palestinians having control of land for the first time, as Israel handed the Palestinian Authority (PA) several cities.
The Oslo Accords contemplated a final settlement to be reach by September 2000 but Yasser Arafat refused to accept anything less than his maximalist demands. When Israel only offered 98%, Arafat launched the Second Intifada, a gruesome spectacle of Arab suicide bombers blowing up buses and restaurants, killing and wounding hundreds of Israeli civilians. The death toll only started to come down when Israel constructed a security barrier with checkpoints to limit the flow of West Bank Arabs. By June 2004, the number of bombing attacks was cut to a handful.
With the death of the PA President Yasser Arafat in November 2004 and Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah winning the PA presidency in January 2005, Erekat aligned himself closely with his new boss. Things became complicated when the rival political party Hamas won control of 58% of the Palestinian parliament in January 2006 and then took over Gaza in a mini-Civil War in June 2007. Erekat’s vision for peace had been doomed by Arafat’s intransigence in 2000 and now appeared to be killed again by the rival party which was committed to the destruction of Israel controlling over half of parliament and almost half the Palestinian Arab population.
As revealed in the Palestine Papers, a secret trove of communication released by Al Jazeera, Erekat opted to build his credibility with Israelis while simultaneously removing his political rivals. In exchange for sensitive information about the location of terrorists wanted by Israel, Erekat was able to get US funding and weaponry for his security force. The information he shared with Israel and the weapons received from both the U.S. and Israel were used to kill dangerous Palestinians.
Many Palestinians considered Erekat a traitor for his actions, especially those among the fanatical elements in Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). However, many in the West Bank also hoped that an organized police force and the cessation of violence and terrorism could usher in a Palestinian State.
But Erekat did not factor the incompetence of Abbas or the Obama administration.
While initially very hopeful that U.S. President Barak Obama was taking a harsh stance against Israel forcing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into a ten-month settlement freeze, he could not get Abbas to move forward in any constructive way. In the second Obama administration Erekat was optimistic when he was able to lead U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry by the nose adding new requirements to negotiations which Kerry simply parroted such as Israel releasing terrorists with blood on their hands (not part of the original deal agreed to by the Israelis) and that the exchange of land between Israel and the PA would have to be of “similar quality,” an entirely new concept which Kerry now demanded of the Israelis. Just as the peace talks were getting ready to conclude in the summer of 2014, Fatah and Hamas announced a unity government – yet an additional obstacle which Israel could not accept. A bloody war from Gaza ensued shortly thereafter, just two years after Hamas launched a war in 2012.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, left, listens to Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat In January 2014. (AP Photo/Brendan Smialowski, Pool, File)
The violence would spread and Erekat would take his war on Israel to the global media stage.
In 2015 and 2016, the Arabs of the West Bank rejoined the mayhem in what became known as the “Stabbing Intifada” targeting innocent Israelis. When Israeli forces cracked down on the mayhem Erekat claimed that Israel was trying to “justify the escalating Israeli crimes against the people of Palestine,” inverting victim and perpetrator. Amid the terror, Erekat produced the “KEY POINTS TO REMEMBER WHEN REPORTING ON OCCUPIED PALESTINE,” a rewriting of history and facts that has become the staple of anti-Israel reporting.
Erekat was a consummate politician that was never embarrassed by his inversion of facts or his hypocrisy. He would advocate for BDS (boycott, divest and sanction) of Israel even while he turned to Israel for medical help; he would ask the world for financial assistance while refusing to take tax receipts held by Israel; and would proclaim that Hamas and the PFLP were not terrorist groups even while he gave the coordinates of group members to Israel for assassination.
While born a Jordanian, Erekat played politics like a Palestinian, and died in Israel’s care in the Jewish State’s unified capital city.
Over the past several years, people on the political left-of-center chose to label those right-of-center as ‘Nazis.’ Actual Nazis, not just ‘depolrables‘ the way Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had called them.
Current Democratic President-elect Joe Biden said that President Donald Trump was “sort of like Goebbels,” referring to Adolf Hitler’s propaganda machine’s mastermind. The left-wing media leveled accusations that Trump welcomed Nazis into the Republican Party. There were slurs by lower level Democratic politicians about Republican rivals in local elections that they were Nazis. And so many American citizens – including employees at Google tasked with fact-checking – condemned conservative commentators such as Ben Shapiro (who is an Orthodox Jew), as modern Nazis.
All of this slander despite Trump having an Orthodox Jewish daughter, creating a new position in the State Department to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism, and being the most pro-Israel president in American history.
Meanwhile, these same leftists simultaneously refuse to call out as Nazis the most anti-Semitic people committed to killing Jews and to destroying the Jewish State.
Palestinian Arabs voted the terrorist group Hamas to a majority of Parliament with the most anti-Semitic foundational charter ever written. The bile in its charter and daily calls to murder Israeli Jews are readily available to see, yet the left-wing media writes that Palestinians are “resorting to violence.” On the rare occasion that the left-wing media labels Hamas as a terrorist group, it calls it a “right-wing” one, even though it is nothing of the sort but a devoutly Muslim one.
Cover page of the Philadelphia Daily News in December 2015 essentially calling President-elect Trump a Nazi “fuhrer” for a “Muslim ban,” a fake media charge
We are now at a pivotal time when the Democrats who besmirched those to the right of them as Nazis are about to assume control of the White House. This Biden/Harris ticket said it will reverse many pro-Israel positions taken by the Trump administration. Kamala Harris said the new administration “will take immediate steps to restore economic and humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian people, address the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza, reopen the US consulate in East Jerusalem and work to reopen the PLO mission in Washington.” [note that the US consulate was in WESTERN Jerusalem, not East Jerusalem]. The new administration said it is eager to re-enter the JCPOA which gave Iran, the leading state sponsor of terrorism which has threatened to destroy Israel, a legal pathway to nuclear weapons.
These are all plain and terrifying facts.
If this country truly wants to unify and overcome hate, this administration, the media and every American must finally stop besmirching people with whom they disagree as ‘Nazis’ and simultaneously condemn and punish the terrorists and genocidal maniacs hell-bent on killing Jews and destroying the Jewish State.
The United Nations plans on having a webinar on October 29, 2020 called “Educating against Racism” as part of its series related to societies dealing with painful histories. The goal is to “develop a deeper understanding of the legacies of these painful histories – and through examining the past, consider how best to build a world that is just, where all can live in dignity and peace.” The Holocaust of Europe’s Jews is set to feature prominently alongside other atrocities.
One hopes that Palestinian Arabs will be directed to the site as their leaders have flatly refused to teach about the Holocaust in any manner.
In August 2009 the United Nations said that its would begin to discuss the Holocaust with the hundreds of thousands of children which it educates via UNRWA. The reaction from Palestinian leadership was fast and furious: absolutely not.
Hamas leaders in Gaza said that the Holocaust was “a lie invented by the Zionists.” The group penned a letter to UNRWA stating that they “refuse to let our children study a lie invented by the Zionists.”
UNRWA back-tracked but tried again to advance a review of the Holocaust in 2011. The reaction was the same.
Hamas Education Minister Mohammed Asqoul said “playing with the education of our children in the Gaza Strip is a red line.” Zakaria al-Agha, a member of the PLO’s executive committee said that “teaching the Holocaust to Palestinian students in U.N. schools is unacceptable.” A school teacher at one of the locations added “the agency [UNRWA] will open the gates of hell with this step.“
Holocaust education for Palestinians was stymied again.
Even after the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain announced a normalization of relations with Israel in September 2020, Qatar continues to teach its students that there were valid reasons for the Nazis to hate Jews and that the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust has been grossly exaggerated. It is no coincidence that Qatar is Hamas’s biggest sponsor.
The October 2020 UN program is the second part in the series, the first one having been aired in July with a five person panel. The moderator was scheduled to be Maher Nasser, who served as Chief of the New York liaison office for UNRWA. It is perhaps no surprise that he failed to ultimately moderate the discussion, as he likely came under intense pressure from fellow Palestinians to not discuss the Holocaust.
Palestinians in school in Hebron (photo: Najeh Hashlamoun/Flash 90)
That first webinar ran for one and one-half hours discussing how museums and memorials impact memory and their role in forming a just society today. While it touched upon recent decisions to remove statues of slave traders in Britain and the United States, it did not reflect on the dozens of Palestinian memorials to Arabs who slaughtered Jews.
As the UN prepares to educate people about racism this week, it must finally insist that its own schools educate Palestinian children about the Holocaust and the role Arabs played in the 1930’s and 1940’s which enabled the murder of tens of thousands of Jews. With such action, perhaps the next generation of Palestinians will not elect a leader who wrote his doctoral thesis on Holocaust denial (like Mahmoud Abbas) and establish an enduring peace with their Jewish neighbors.
Saeb Erekat is the Secretary General of the Executive Committee of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and has long held the title of “Negotiator” with Israel in attempting to create a new state of Palestine. He is also a champion of the anti-Zionist Terrorist Lobby.
After pressure from the United States’ Trump Administration, the European Union finally began to investigate the funneling of money to Palestinian groups that directly and indirectly are involved with terrorist attacks against Jewish Israelis. The document which referred to “financial support to third parties, in the lists of EU restrictive measures” was designed to curb the flow of money from members of the EU to some of the Palestinian NGOs (non-Governmental Organizations) which are involved in illegal activities. This includes EU-designated terrorist organizations such as Hamas, Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Saeb Erekat would have none of it.
Erekat declared that “Hamas and the PFLP are not terrorist organizations,” despite such designation by the EU, the United States and many other countries. Hamas’s foundational Charter openly calls for the killing of Jews and destruction of Israel. It has killed hundreds of Israelis in terrorist attacks since its founding.
In December 2019, 130 Palestinian NGOs refused to sign onto the EU restrictions and launched a “Palestinian National Campaign to Reject Conditional Funding.” On September 30, 2020, Palestinian leaders met with Palestinian NGOs in Ramallah met to discuss how to remove Palestinian NGOs from the restrictive list to keep the euros flowing.
Remarkably, Erekat’s role in the Terrorism Lobby to get funds and support for groups that kill Jews did not stop the Jewish State from admitting him to Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem for complications from the coronavirus. It should serve as a further reminder to the EU to monitor those who support life and those with genocidal aspirations.
Saeb Erekat, part of the anti-Zionist Terrorist Lobby, speaking at the left-wing J Street Conference
Articles 34 and 35 of the Hamas Charter further the notion that the land of Israel is inherently Muslim land which has been targeted for expansion throughout history by Christians, Tartars and most recently, Jews.
The Testimony of History
Across History in Confronting the Invaders:
Article Thirty-Four:
Palestine is the navel of the globe and the crossroad of the continents. Since the dawn of history, it has been the target of expansionists. The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, had himself pointed to this fact in the noble Hadith in which he called on his honourable companion, Ma’adh ben-Jabal, saying: O Ma’ath, Allah throw open before you, when I am gone, Syria, from Al-Arish to the Euphrates. Its men, women and slaves will stay firmly there till the Day of Judgement. Whoever of you should choose one of the Syrian shores, or the Holy Land, he will be in constant struggle till the Day of Judgement.”
Expansionists have more than once put their eye on Palestine which they attacked with their armies to fulfill their designs on it. Thus it was that the Crusaders came with their armies, bringing with them their creed and carrying their Cross. They were able to defeat the Moslems for a while, but the Moslems were able to retrieve the land only when they stood under the wing of their religious banner, united their word, hallowed the name of Allah and surged out fighting under the leadership of Salah ed-Din al-Ayyubi. They fought for almost twenty years and at the end the Crusaders were defeated and Palestine was liberated.
“Say unto those who believe not, Ye shall be overcome, and thrown together into hell; an unhappy couch it shall be.” (The Family of Imran – verse 12).
This is the only way to liberate Palestine. There is no doubt about the testimony of history. It is one of the laws of the universe and one of the rules of existence. Nothing can overcome iron except iron. Their false futile creed can only be defeated by the righteous Islamic creed. A creed could not be fought except by a creed, and in the last analysis, victory is for the just, for justice is certainly victorious.
“Our word hath formerly been given unto our servants the apostles; that they should certainly be assisted against the infidels, and that our armies should surely be the conquerors.” (Those Who Rank Themselves – verses 171-172).
Article Thirty-Five:
The Islamic Resistance Movement views seriously the defeat of the Crusaders at the hands of Salah ed-Din al-Ayyubi and the rescuing of Palestine from their hands, as well as the defeat of the Tatars at Ein Galot, breaking their power at the hands of Qataz and Al-Dhaher Bivers and saving the Arab world from the Tatar onslaught which aimed at the destruction of every meaning of human civilization. The Movement draws lessons and examples from all this. The present Zionist onslaught has also been preceded by Crusading raids from the West and other Tatar raids from the East. Just as the Moslems faced those raids and planned fighting and defeating them, they should be able to confront the Zionist invasion and defeat it. This is indeed no problem for the Almighty Allah, provided that the intentions are pure, the determination is true and that Moslems have benefited from past experiences, rid themselves of the effects of ideological invasion and followed the customs of their ancestors.
Backers of Hamas believe that Jews and Christians are newcomers to the holy land, as if history in the region only began with the Muslim invasions of the 7th and 8th century. Christians and Tartars are “expansionists” without history or ties to the land, while the “Zionists” are simply the most recent incarnation of invaders seeking to control Muslim land.
Hamas is very clear how to turn back “the present Zionist onslaught:” A religious war. “Nothing can overcome iron except iron…under the wing of their religious banner.“
And the Palestinian Arabs elected Hamas to 58% of the parliament with this charter while the media talks of “Islamic resistance” as a peaceful and natural endeavor.
There are many parallel and conflicting narratives in the Middle East. The impossibility that items can be both parallel and perpendicular at the same time in geometry is de rigueur in matters revolving Israel. Anti-Israel lies are crafted by the liberal media while anti-Arab facts cannot be uttered.
The New York Times ran a lead editorial on September 17, 2020 about the Israeli-Arab Abraham Accords titled “A Welcome Middle East Development.” However, the contents of the article would have better deserved the title “You’re Not Worthy, You’re Not Worthy” stating that neither Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor U.S. President Donald Trump deserve a Nobel Peace Prize for the remarkable milestone.
The New York Times lead editorial September 17, 2020
A common lie repeated in the Times opinion piece was captured as it attempted to summarize its thoughts belittling the agreements:
“But a true Middle East peace deal will require an accommodation with the 4.75 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, a people who have been denied a homeland for more than seven decades.”
The lies and inversion in the phrase “a people who have been denied a homeland” are so noxious, I imagine the entire Times editorial board has it as screen savers on their computers and phones.
The Palestinians have homes; they don’t have a country. The notion that Palestinians are refugees running from country to country similar to Syrians fleeing their country set on fire by a genocidal maniac, or like the Rohingya Muslims tossed and unwanted in Southeast Asia is outrageous. The Arabs in Jericho have lived there for decades. Even those Palestinians whose grandparents were from Jaffa who now live in Jericho – considered “refugees” by the United Nations – are in their “homeland” living among their cousins.
The Palestinians haven’t been denied, they have refused. The Arabs in Palestine were welcomed to live as equal citizens by Israel in 1948. The Jordanians annexed the West Bank and offered the local Arabs Jordanian citizenship in 1954. The Arabs in eastern Jerusalem have been offered Israeli citizenship since 1980. But it is the Palestinian Arabs themselves who have refused both citizenship in another country and every peace agreement offered by Israel for the past seven decades.
It is the Jews who have been denied. For centuries, Jews were denied their homeland in Israel, living as unwanted and abused guests who suffered from pogroms, libels, expulsions and a Holocaust. They finally were able to return, only to be denied any rights or welcome by the Arabs who fought to expel them. The Palestinian and surrounding Arabs fought wars and intifadas for seven decades in efforts to rid the land of Jews, while the Arabs simultaneously used the United Nations and global media – like The New York Times – to deny Jews their history and rights in their homeland.
The time for denial is over.
The Jews have reclaimed their homeland.
The U.A.E., Bahrain and hopefully many more Arab states will no longer deny Jews their history and rights in that homeland nor will they deny the Jewish State’s existence as they normalize relations.
And the world will no longer swallow the lies that Palestinians are homeless, living in foreign unknown lands and denied the ability to become citizens. The Palestinians’ refusal to make peace with Israel is of their own making, not as portrayed by The New York Times, as passive victims who are being “denied a homeland.”
The Abraham Accords are a time to celebrate the termination of the hateful and stale thinking that denied peace in the region.
The template for forging peace between Israelis and Arabs for the last many years was based on the notion of trading one item for another. The idea was for Israel to give land to Arabs and would get peace or normalization in return. The formula worked in the 1979 peace treaty between Israel and Egypt and to a lesser extent in the 1994 treaty between Israel and Jordan. During the period of the Oslo Accords, the same idea was advanced between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
After signing of the Oslo II Accords in September 1995, the Palestinian Authority received several towns and cities from Israel. This was the first time that local Palestinian Arabs got to rule themselves in their history. It was orchestrated as a test to see if the PA could build a functional government and establish controls to enable and enforce a peace agreement with Israel. The five year period ending September 2000 was designed to test the thesis and then hand considerable more territory to the PA.
The Oslo effort proved a complete failure.
The five year period between 1995 and 2000 was marked by intense violence and terrorism. It was capped when Yasser Arafat launched the Second Intifada in September 2000 when the negotiations did not yield 100% of his stated demands. Years of bloodshed began to slow to a trickle when Israel constructed a security barrier separating many of the towns in the “West Bank” from which the Palestinian terrorists emerged.
As the violence ebbed, Israel sought to implement a long-term solution, even without a peace partner. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon opted to unilaterally withdraw all Israeli troops and civilians from Gaza in 2005, with the assurances from U.S. President George Bush in 2004 that Israel’s borders would not follow the 1949 Armistice Lines and account for current realities. Israel took the action and asked for nothing from the Palestinians.
This first naked trade in the Arab-Israeli conflict was a failure. Within two years of withdrawing from Gaza, the terrorist group Hamas seized control and used the area as a launching pad for terrorism against Israel including three full wars in 2008, 2012 and 2014.
Israel pulled civilians from their homes in Gaza in 2005. It asked for nothing from the Palestinians in return.
It took many years for another one-way trade to take place.
In 2017, U.S. President Donald Trump announced that the United States officially recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and would relocated its embassy to the city. While the U.S. Congress had approved such measure in 1995, every president deferred such recognition and move, hoping to couple such actions with something for the Palestinians. However, in light of the acting-President of the PA’s refusal to engage with the U.S. administration, Trump moved forward with the one-party deal.
The politicians and pundits who worked the region for years derided the move. Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said the move was “ill-advised” and former Secretary of State John Kerry said that Trump wouldn’t survive a year in office. Yousef Munayyer, executive director of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights said that the move would fuel the “narrative of extremists who want to paint the Western world in terms of a religious war.”
Those predictions proved incorrect. There was no outbreak of violence throughout the Muslim world in reaction to the announcement or the relocation of the embassy. The naked trade rectified a historic wrong and did not lead to mayhem. It led to additional positive actions like Guatemala, Serbia and Kosovo recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
The success of the 2017 Trump action has enabled the quick adoption of additional one-way trades: the 2020 normalization of relationships of both the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain with the Jewish State, to be signed in Washington, D.C. on September 15.
Palestinians were apoplectic that fellow Arab countries would recognize Israel before a peace agreement with the PA was signed. While the Palestinians were angered by the Israeli peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, each Arab country at least got tangible benefits from their respective agreements. Such treaties were therefore viewed as not only understandable, but clever. Egypt and Jordan essentially gave away nothing – just a “hudna,” a ceasefire which could be over-turned at any time – while they obtained real immediate benefits. Palestinians were therefore able to convince themselves that they were still a priority for the broader Arab nation.
But these naked trades by the UAE and Bahrain have laid that lie bare. The two gulf emirates are receiving nothing in the near-term but the prospects of gaining access to Israeli and American technology and military capabilities. The trade was for a long-term situational benefit, much like Israel had assumed leaving Gaza in 2005 would yield.
It would appear that we have entered a new stage of diplomacy in the Middle East which is not based on near-term raw cost-benefit analyses but rather on long-term situational positioning. Goodbye land-for-peace. Hello aspirations for the future.
Let’s all hope that this evolution to naked trades will produce an enduring peace for the region.
Many people have their taste in music locked in by their mid-20’s. They typically find it hard to add new artists to their song lists and revert to their old favorites each day.
Similarly, people see their spouses and old friends through old lenses. They don’t really age in their minds who remain as youthful and energetic as their memories allow, not as they truly exist today.
We see this dynamic playing out in politics today as well.
The Palestinian Arabs call for a new state to be established on lands ruled by Jordan and Egypt way back in 1967. The fact that over fifty years have passed since those illegal occupiers were routed by Israel does not seem to faze the leadership of the Palestinian Authority. Many Palestinian Arabs are even more ambitious with seemingly older memories when they chant “we don’t want two states; we want ’48,” in a call to recreate a reality from 1948 before the Jewish State was reborn.
American voters are doing it as well. They have deluded themselves into believing they are voting for Joe Biden as he was in 1988 and not the man as he exists today in 2020. They ignore his clearly compromised facilities and pretend he is up to the task of running the country.
I do not fault people for seeing the world as they want it to be or as they really visualize it. But it is madness to pretend that others share their time-warped perceptions. It is delusional, off-putting and not constructive.
When a fellow American says they cannot vote for a 2020-Joe Biden or an Israeli says that he is not going back in time to set borders from 1948 or 1967, it doesn’t mean that they do not share some common desires like peace in the Middle East or a president that is not Donald Trump. It means that they see the world as it truly exists today and will act accordingly.
Looking at the world through vintage glasses is wonderful when engaging with close friends and family members but is dangerous when negotiating or entering the voting booth. Democrats are doing both when they dismiss the Trump peace plan which considers reality in Israel and its territories, and when they delude themselves into talking about 2020-Joe Biden as if he’s still 1988-Joe Biden.
First One Through 