“Living backwards!” Alice repeated in great astonishment. “I never heard of such a thing!”
“-- but there's one great advantage in it,” said the Queen, “that one's memory works both ways.”
“I'm sure mine only works one way,” Alice remarked. “I can't remember things before they happen.”
“It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,” the Queen remarked.
“What sort of things do you remember best?” Alice ventured to ask.
“Oh, things that happened the week after next,” the Queen replied in a careless tone.
One of the benefits of studying history is that it equips one to “live backwards” and thus to “remember” in both directions. Students of history see in unfolding events the seeds of events that have already happened. History recycles itself because mankind is, well, still mankind.
This month, with much hoopla, Obama kicked off another attempt to negotiate peace between Israel and the Palestinians apparently ignorant of (or choosing to ignore) all of the previous attempts and why they foundered. As has happened in past repetitions of this charade, Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, will be pushed by the US to make unreasonable concessions, vilified when he doesn’t, and asked to risk Israel’s national security by swapping the tangible reality of a land buffer for the intangible promise that its Palestinian neighbor will behave. The border that now resides along Jordan on the far side of the West Bank will move to the near side along Israel. The Russians understood how valuable land buffers were when first Napoleon and then Hitler exhausted themselves trying to cross it.
Students of history will also recall Hitler’s threat in 1938 to invade Czechoslovakia if it did not give its Sudetenland territory to the Reich. The great appeasers, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French President Edouard Daladier, pressured Czech President Eduard Beneš to agree to the German annexation. In return, Hitler promised not to make any further territorial demands in Europe. The Czechs balked but under pressure from its allies ultimately conceded. Back home Chamberlain waved the Munich Agreement and made his famous “peace in our time” speech. Six months later, Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia. Six months after that, Hitler invaded Poland.
Is there a lesson here? Certainly there is. No agreement can succeed if the parties to it don’t have intersecting interests. Beneš wanted peaceful co-existence with an enemy. Hitler wanted to expand the borders and terrorism of Germany. There was no intersection of interests. Today, Israel wants peace with its neighbors. Palestine, in the person of Mahmoud Abbas, wants the state of Israel to cease and the Jews to be scattered. Once again, no intersecting interests.
Nevertheless, Obama exhorts Netanyahu to take “the risks for peace.” Easy for an ex-community organizer to say to an Israeli war hero. Anwar Sadat took the risks for peace by signing the Camp David Accords with Menachem Begin and was assassinated for it. Itzak Rabin signed the Oslo Peace Accords with Yasser Arafat and he was assassinated. Like the chicken that invited the pig to a breakfast of ham and eggs and was reminded that a chicken made a contribution but a pig made a commitment to that breakfast, the world that Netanyahu and Abbas live in settles disagreements with guns and bombs, not words like Obama’s world.
Did Obama consider on whom Israel would rely to make and enforce the binding agreements contemplated in these “peace” talks? Palestine, unlike Israel, is not a political state nor has it been one since the days of the Romans. Mahmoud Abbas is the President of the Palestinian Authority (PA), which is an interim government. Abbas may want peace with Israel, but he lacks the political support of the Palestinians to negotiate a peace deal. Moreover, officials of the PA don’t represent Hamas, a terrorist organization that controls the Gaza Strip and whose purpose is to destroy Israel.
Hamas sent its sentiments to the leaders in the peace talks by killing four Israelis, two men and two women, one of them nine months pregnant, near the West Bank city of Hebron. Seven orphans were created in this heinous act. News of it caused 3,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip to take to the streets in celebration. While the PA issued a muted condemnation of the killings because it “went against Palestinian interests,” keep in mind that the predecessor of the PA was the PLO – which invented Palestinian mayhem and murder. In recent months the PA named a square and a children’s summer camp after a terrorist who murdered 37 Israelis on a bus, and the PA gave a hero’s funeral to one of the thugs who killed the eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Abbas attended the funeral.
Before leaving for his meeting with Netanyahu and Obama to start peace talks, Abbas told a reporter for the leading Palestinian newspaper, al-Quds, “We won’t recognize Israel as a Jewish state.” Well, that’s one way to get the negotiations started.
Negotiations with the Palestinians have been going on for 17 years. Twice the Palestinians have been offered an independent state and twice they have turned it down – in 1947 and in 2000. In 1947 the UN offered the Palestinian leaders a partition of Palestine by which they could achieve statehood. This was a remarkable offer considering the fact that Palestinian leaders actively collaborated with the Nazis during World War II. Usually the losing side gets nothing, let alone the offer of its own state.
Again in 2000, then President Clinton called for a peace summit between Palestinian President Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Negotiations were secret but Barak reportedly offered Arafat approximately 95% of the West Bank and the entire Gaza Strip, as well as Palestinian sovereignty over East Jerusalem, if 69 Jewish settlements (which comprise 85% of the West Bank's Jewish settlers) were ceded to Israel. Arafat rejected the offer and did not make a counter-offer. Two months later he launched the terror war known as the Second Intifada.
In the current talks, the so-called two-state solution would require the return of the West Bank in order to make up most of the independent Palestinian state. The exact borders would be drawn at the peace table. Israeli and Palestinian negotiators in past peace talks have agreed to land swaps, allowing the borders of Israel to include certain settlement blocs around the city of Jerusalem where most of Israel's 300,000 West Bank settlers live. Getting to that point again will be the easy part.
But the Gaza Strip, which is a non-contiguous part of the Palestinian territory, remains the wild card. After it won Palestinian legislative elections in 2006, Hamas joined with the PLO’s Fatah party to form the Palestinian Authority National Unity government in 2007 – i.e. the PA. Hamas is the local franchisee for The Muslim Brotherhood, a really bad boy organization throughout the world. In June 2007 Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip after Israel pulled its army and settlers out and threw out Fatah officials in a coup against the Abbas government. It’s hard to understand, therefore, how Hamas’ interests will be represented in these peace talks. They won’t abide by any agreement that Abbas makes because he doesn’t speak for them, and they don’t want peace with Israel. It’s questionable that they even want statehood with all of its implied responsibilities for the welfare of its citizens.
There are four issues to negotiate: (i) who controls what territory independently, (ii) how Israel will be assured security from attacks from Palestinian territory, (iii) how Jerusalem is to be partitioned between the claims of the Israelis and Palestinians, and (iv) the right of the Palestinians and/or their descendents who were displaced in the 1947-1948 war and the 1967 war to return to their homes. Any one of these issues faces almost impossible odds for successful resolution. To achieve success in all four seems hopeless.
Take the last one, for example, the so-called “right of return” provision. Many Palestinian refugee families have kept keys to their 1947 homes in what is now Israel, even though the homes no longer exist. Return of Palestinian refugees and their descendants, including all those who claim the status of Palestinian refugee, would create an Arab majority in Israel. This would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state, because Israel is a democracy in which Jews and Arabs can be elected to Parliament and sit on its Supreme Court.
Why the urgency for peace talks now since the last serious attempt at face-to-face discussions was ten years ago? One reason, admittedly a cynical one, is that Obama, having achieved his pièce de résistance on the domestic front with Obamacare, which eluded previous Democrat presidents, wants to keep his streak going on the international front by achieving the Middle East peace which eluded Clinton in 2000. After 17 years of wrestling with this issue, Obama wants Israel and the Palestinians to reach a peace agreement within a year. Yeah, sure. “These talks aren't quite ready for prime time yet,” former U.S. Middle East peace negotiator Aaron David Miller said in a recent interview, “and everyone should be slow-walking the process.”
A more likely reason for the current urgency is that Israel agreed to a 10-month partial moratorium on building new settlement construction in the West Bank and that moratorium ends on September 26. Therefore, look for Obama to press Israel to extend the moratorium, which for Netanyahu would be politically difficult, if not political suicide. The coalition of political seats in the Knesset that put him in power wants the moratorium to end and could topple the Netanyahu government if the coalition implodes.
Abbas, on the other hand, has said he will walk out if the moratorium isn’t extended. Israeli concessions on West Bank construction is a subject for negotiations, not a precondition of negotiations. Either Obama is so far over his head in this arena that he doesn’t understand this, or else Abbas, realizing that he doesn’t have the support of the Palestinian people or Hamas in negotiating a peace agreement, has found a way to justify walking out and blaming it on Israel.
Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk observed in an op-ed piece this week that "The Palestinians are the weak player in this negotiation. Since Israel controls the territory – including Jerusalem – on which a deal will have to be made, it necessarily holds all the high cards. The only real card Abbas wields is his ability to refuse a deal that does not serve the interests of his people."
It’s worse than that. The Palestinians are unable to stand on their own feet. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) provides a half billion dollars annually to the support of the Palestinians. Financial support is also provided by the US, the EU, and even the hated Israelis. The Abbas security forces, formerly thugs and gangs during the Yasser Arafat regime, are being trained as a legitimate police force by the US in Jordan. Still, Abbas cannot fully provide security for his country, as the murders of the four settlers last week demonstrated, and he has to rely on the Israeli army to help provide security. The fact that the murders were committed by Hamas in the West Bank – not Gaza – show how perilous security is.
It would make sense to delay peace talks until Abbas, a 75-year old man, is able to legitimize his government, if that’s possible. Otherwise, both Abbas and Netanyahu have to worry about Hamas sensing a weak Abbas government if/when it took over full control of the West Bank. Hamas would likely send Abbas and his team packing, literally running for their lives – probably into exile – while a blood bath breaks out on the West Bank. With Hamas in control of the West Bank, the Israeli capital of Tel Aviv and all of central Israel is within range of the tens of thousands of missiles in the Hamas arsenal, and Iran would have a forward base to add to the havoc.
A peace at any price rarely produces peace, as Hitler demonstrated in 1938. Israel pulled out of Lebanon and today gets rocket attacks as thanks. It pulled out of the Gaza Strip and gets more rocket attacks. The tools for violence are smuggled in through tunnels from Egypt, from Iran through Syria, and from Turkey by sea, which Israel intercepted. It’s amazing that this tiny nation – which can be traversed in 30 minutes by car and which represents one-sixth of 1% of the land mass of the so-called “Arab world” – can draw so much venom.
The Jews have been under siege since their Spanish expulsion the month Columbus set sail to discover the New World. While he was in Jerusalem this summer, George Will posted his column noting that if the Jewish percentage of the world's population were today what it was when the Romans ruled Palestine, there would be 200 million Jews. “After a uniquely hazardous passage through two millennia without a homeland,” Will wrote, “there are 13 million Jews.”
Given the lack of intersecting interests, it is difficult to expect the current resumption of peace talks will produce anything more than another failed attempt to do what may be impossible. History predicts the outcome. In forcing these two parties back to the bargaining table after 10 years, Obama’s bush league diplomacy fails to recognize the devil is not in the details; it’s in Palestinian society itself which reaffirmed in its general congress last year: “This struggle will not stop until the Zionist entity is eliminated and Palestine is liberated.”
Let the negotiations begin.
Place your bets.
“-- but there's one great advantage in it,” said the Queen, “that one's memory works both ways.”
“I'm sure mine only works one way,” Alice remarked. “I can't remember things before they happen.”
“It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,” the Queen remarked.
“What sort of things do you remember best?” Alice ventured to ask.
“Oh, things that happened the week after next,” the Queen replied in a careless tone.
One of the benefits of studying history is that it equips one to “live backwards” and thus to “remember” in both directions. Students of history see in unfolding events the seeds of events that have already happened. History recycles itself because mankind is, well, still mankind.
This month, with much hoopla, Obama kicked off another attempt to negotiate peace between Israel and the Palestinians apparently ignorant of (or choosing to ignore) all of the previous attempts and why they foundered. As has happened in past repetitions of this charade, Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, will be pushed by the US to make unreasonable concessions, vilified when he doesn’t, and asked to risk Israel’s national security by swapping the tangible reality of a land buffer for the intangible promise that its Palestinian neighbor will behave. The border that now resides along Jordan on the far side of the West Bank will move to the near side along Israel. The Russians understood how valuable land buffers were when first Napoleon and then Hitler exhausted themselves trying to cross it.
Students of history will also recall Hitler’s threat in 1938 to invade Czechoslovakia if it did not give its Sudetenland territory to the Reich. The great appeasers, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French President Edouard Daladier, pressured Czech President Eduard Beneš to agree to the German annexation. In return, Hitler promised not to make any further territorial demands in Europe. The Czechs balked but under pressure from its allies ultimately conceded. Back home Chamberlain waved the Munich Agreement and made his famous “peace in our time” speech. Six months later, Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia. Six months after that, Hitler invaded Poland.
Is there a lesson here? Certainly there is. No agreement can succeed if the parties to it don’t have intersecting interests. Beneš wanted peaceful co-existence with an enemy. Hitler wanted to expand the borders and terrorism of Germany. There was no intersection of interests. Today, Israel wants peace with its neighbors. Palestine, in the person of Mahmoud Abbas, wants the state of Israel to cease and the Jews to be scattered. Once again, no intersecting interests.
Nevertheless, Obama exhorts Netanyahu to take “the risks for peace.” Easy for an ex-community organizer to say to an Israeli war hero. Anwar Sadat took the risks for peace by signing the Camp David Accords with Menachem Begin and was assassinated for it. Itzak Rabin signed the Oslo Peace Accords with Yasser Arafat and he was assassinated. Like the chicken that invited the pig to a breakfast of ham and eggs and was reminded that a chicken made a contribution but a pig made a commitment to that breakfast, the world that Netanyahu and Abbas live in settles disagreements with guns and bombs, not words like Obama’s world.
Did Obama consider on whom Israel would rely to make and enforce the binding agreements contemplated in these “peace” talks? Palestine, unlike Israel, is not a political state nor has it been one since the days of the Romans. Mahmoud Abbas is the President of the Palestinian Authority (PA), which is an interim government. Abbas may want peace with Israel, but he lacks the political support of the Palestinians to negotiate a peace deal. Moreover, officials of the PA don’t represent Hamas, a terrorist organization that controls the Gaza Strip and whose purpose is to destroy Israel.
Hamas sent its sentiments to the leaders in the peace talks by killing four Israelis, two men and two women, one of them nine months pregnant, near the West Bank city of Hebron. Seven orphans were created in this heinous act. News of it caused 3,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip to take to the streets in celebration. While the PA issued a muted condemnation of the killings because it “went against Palestinian interests,” keep in mind that the predecessor of the PA was the PLO – which invented Palestinian mayhem and murder. In recent months the PA named a square and a children’s summer camp after a terrorist who murdered 37 Israelis on a bus, and the PA gave a hero’s funeral to one of the thugs who killed the eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Abbas attended the funeral.
Before leaving for his meeting with Netanyahu and Obama to start peace talks, Abbas told a reporter for the leading Palestinian newspaper, al-Quds, “We won’t recognize Israel as a Jewish state.” Well, that’s one way to get the negotiations started.
Negotiations with the Palestinians have been going on for 17 years. Twice the Palestinians have been offered an independent state and twice they have turned it down – in 1947 and in 2000. In 1947 the UN offered the Palestinian leaders a partition of Palestine by which they could achieve statehood. This was a remarkable offer considering the fact that Palestinian leaders actively collaborated with the Nazis during World War II. Usually the losing side gets nothing, let alone the offer of its own state.
Again in 2000, then President Clinton called for a peace summit between Palestinian President Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Negotiations were secret but Barak reportedly offered Arafat approximately 95% of the West Bank and the entire Gaza Strip, as well as Palestinian sovereignty over East Jerusalem, if 69 Jewish settlements (which comprise 85% of the West Bank's Jewish settlers) were ceded to Israel. Arafat rejected the offer and did not make a counter-offer. Two months later he launched the terror war known as the Second Intifada.
In the current talks, the so-called two-state solution would require the return of the West Bank in order to make up most of the independent Palestinian state. The exact borders would be drawn at the peace table. Israeli and Palestinian negotiators in past peace talks have agreed to land swaps, allowing the borders of Israel to include certain settlement blocs around the city of Jerusalem where most of Israel's 300,000 West Bank settlers live. Getting to that point again will be the easy part.
But the Gaza Strip, which is a non-contiguous part of the Palestinian territory, remains the wild card. After it won Palestinian legislative elections in 2006, Hamas joined with the PLO’s Fatah party to form the Palestinian Authority National Unity government in 2007 – i.e. the PA. Hamas is the local franchisee for The Muslim Brotherhood, a really bad boy organization throughout the world. In June 2007 Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip after Israel pulled its army and settlers out and threw out Fatah officials in a coup against the Abbas government. It’s hard to understand, therefore, how Hamas’ interests will be represented in these peace talks. They won’t abide by any agreement that Abbas makes because he doesn’t speak for them, and they don’t want peace with Israel. It’s questionable that they even want statehood with all of its implied responsibilities for the welfare of its citizens.
There are four issues to negotiate: (i) who controls what territory independently, (ii) how Israel will be assured security from attacks from Palestinian territory, (iii) how Jerusalem is to be partitioned between the claims of the Israelis and Palestinians, and (iv) the right of the Palestinians and/or their descendents who were displaced in the 1947-1948 war and the 1967 war to return to their homes. Any one of these issues faces almost impossible odds for successful resolution. To achieve success in all four seems hopeless.
Take the last one, for example, the so-called “right of return” provision. Many Palestinian refugee families have kept keys to their 1947 homes in what is now Israel, even though the homes no longer exist. Return of Palestinian refugees and their descendants, including all those who claim the status of Palestinian refugee, would create an Arab majority in Israel. This would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state, because Israel is a democracy in which Jews and Arabs can be elected to Parliament and sit on its Supreme Court.
Why the urgency for peace talks now since the last serious attempt at face-to-face discussions was ten years ago? One reason, admittedly a cynical one, is that Obama, having achieved his pièce de résistance on the domestic front with Obamacare, which eluded previous Democrat presidents, wants to keep his streak going on the international front by achieving the Middle East peace which eluded Clinton in 2000. After 17 years of wrestling with this issue, Obama wants Israel and the Palestinians to reach a peace agreement within a year. Yeah, sure. “These talks aren't quite ready for prime time yet,” former U.S. Middle East peace negotiator Aaron David Miller said in a recent interview, “and everyone should be slow-walking the process.”
A more likely reason for the current urgency is that Israel agreed to a 10-month partial moratorium on building new settlement construction in the West Bank and that moratorium ends on September 26. Therefore, look for Obama to press Israel to extend the moratorium, which for Netanyahu would be politically difficult, if not political suicide. The coalition of political seats in the Knesset that put him in power wants the moratorium to end and could topple the Netanyahu government if the coalition implodes.
Abbas, on the other hand, has said he will walk out if the moratorium isn’t extended. Israeli concessions on West Bank construction is a subject for negotiations, not a precondition of negotiations. Either Obama is so far over his head in this arena that he doesn’t understand this, or else Abbas, realizing that he doesn’t have the support of the Palestinian people or Hamas in negotiating a peace agreement, has found a way to justify walking out and blaming it on Israel.
Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk observed in an op-ed piece this week that "The Palestinians are the weak player in this negotiation. Since Israel controls the territory – including Jerusalem – on which a deal will have to be made, it necessarily holds all the high cards. The only real card Abbas wields is his ability to refuse a deal that does not serve the interests of his people."
It’s worse than that. The Palestinians are unable to stand on their own feet. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) provides a half billion dollars annually to the support of the Palestinians. Financial support is also provided by the US, the EU, and even the hated Israelis. The Abbas security forces, formerly thugs and gangs during the Yasser Arafat regime, are being trained as a legitimate police force by the US in Jordan. Still, Abbas cannot fully provide security for his country, as the murders of the four settlers last week demonstrated, and he has to rely on the Israeli army to help provide security. The fact that the murders were committed by Hamas in the West Bank – not Gaza – show how perilous security is.
It would make sense to delay peace talks until Abbas, a 75-year old man, is able to legitimize his government, if that’s possible. Otherwise, both Abbas and Netanyahu have to worry about Hamas sensing a weak Abbas government if/when it took over full control of the West Bank. Hamas would likely send Abbas and his team packing, literally running for their lives – probably into exile – while a blood bath breaks out on the West Bank. With Hamas in control of the West Bank, the Israeli capital of Tel Aviv and all of central Israel is within range of the tens of thousands of missiles in the Hamas arsenal, and Iran would have a forward base to add to the havoc.
A peace at any price rarely produces peace, as Hitler demonstrated in 1938. Israel pulled out of Lebanon and today gets rocket attacks as thanks. It pulled out of the Gaza Strip and gets more rocket attacks. The tools for violence are smuggled in through tunnels from Egypt, from Iran through Syria, and from Turkey by sea, which Israel intercepted. It’s amazing that this tiny nation – which can be traversed in 30 minutes by car and which represents one-sixth of 1% of the land mass of the so-called “Arab world” – can draw so much venom.
The Jews have been under siege since their Spanish expulsion the month Columbus set sail to discover the New World. While he was in Jerusalem this summer, George Will posted his column noting that if the Jewish percentage of the world's population were today what it was when the Romans ruled Palestine, there would be 200 million Jews. “After a uniquely hazardous passage through two millennia without a homeland,” Will wrote, “there are 13 million Jews.”
Given the lack of intersecting interests, it is difficult to expect the current resumption of peace talks will produce anything more than another failed attempt to do what may be impossible. History predicts the outcome. In forcing these two parties back to the bargaining table after 10 years, Obama’s bush league diplomacy fails to recognize the devil is not in the details; it’s in Palestinian society itself which reaffirmed in its general congress last year: “This struggle will not stop until the Zionist entity is eliminated and Palestine is liberated.”
Let the negotiations begin.
Place your bets.
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