Posted on 05/02/2003 8:56:19 AM PDT by knighthawk
The U.S. has made public still another plan for an Israeli-Palestinian settlement. It won't work. For one thing, it is too vague, or tricky, about the problem that bedevils the Israelis. Once again, they will carry out irreversible concessions about land while the Palestinians keep talking about their promises - most often, to dampen terrorism. They forgot to carry through with those promises after each of seven previous negotiations.
This new plan, mostly American-made, is called the road map. But in addition to Israelis, Palestinians, Americans and Britons, a bunch of others will be at the talks reaching for the driver's wheel - Russia, the European Union and the UN, all of which spend much of their time slanging away at Israel and making its life as hard as they can.
Even though a new Palestinian state is taken as a given, the road map gives Palestinians three years to create the government and social and political frameworks to make it democratic. One might think the Palestinian movement would have to prove its ability to govern itself before it's brought into the UN.
If the Israelis have any memory, they'll recall the fiasco of Oslo and other talks that wound up with land for Palestinians and promises for them. Like earlier negotiations, this one will end without tested machinery to make peace a permanent reality.
The road map does create a lot more meetings whose accomplishments, if any, cannot be enforced. Before the talks start is the time for every Jew, Christian and Muslim to think through past Israeli-Muslim negotiations and their failure to reach peace and to ask whether the upcoming talks will succeed or merely set the scene for another round of talks in a few years.
While Arabs are given independence, Israelis must scrap their settlements - whether decades old or recently built - for Jewish families who dared to expand. Where the Jewish babies will be put, the road map does not say.
The plan instructs Palestinians to end violence, terrorism and incitements and to confiscate illegal weapons and arrest terrorists. Presumably, this time they'll keep them locked up instead of rushing so many out of prison, as in the past. Then, to show its even hand, the road map tells Israelis to do the same against its own terrorism. The authors, whatever bureaucrats or specialists they may be, are among the most unashamed practitioners of the sin of moral equivalency I have encountered.
The decades since the beginning of Israel's fight for survival show that when it came to military matters, the Israelis came out on top. But when both sides went to negotiations, Israel lost land and consequent military maneuverability. What it gained from these negotiations I cannot see, except that it may have helped destroy the snarling myth that Jews are such shrewd bargainers.
Fairy tales aside, the creation of an independent Palestine will hardly make Israel more secure. The Palestinian Authority will have another army and police force to add to its strength, and it was enormously skillful at integrating its forces with Yasser Arafat's terrorists. Young Arabs who may fight Israel in the future have grown up immersed in vicious anti-Israeli propaganda. Saddam Hussein was their hero before, during and after the war on Iraq.
Western journalists have been singing joyous ditties over the appointment by the Palestinian parliament of Mahmoud Abbas as prime minister. They may be premature. In a 1983 book, Abbas wrote that Zionist leaders gave permission to the Nazis to drive Jews out of Europe as long as they fled to Palestine. And like a good Arab leader, he mocked the idea that 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust. The Zionists, he wrote, invented the figure - it was really just a few hundred thousand. The book's title was "The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and the Zionist Movement."
Is he now a different man? Maybe. But he told an Arab paper that the intifadeh must continue and Palestinians must resist Israelis with all means, including arms. That was March 3, 2003.
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