[New Republic] Marty Peretz - How many times have I heard this refrain? "This president is the best friend Israel has ever had." Hundreds of times. About Ronald Reagan. About Bill Clinton. And now about George Bush. I suppose, it is true in a certain abstract sense about each of them. They probably also understood that the prime impediment to a peace between the Israelis and those who now call themselves Palestinians (this nomenclature is relatively new to the Arabs of Palestine) is fanatic resistance to the non-negotiable reality of a Jewish state in the Holy Land. America is the only country with the power to induce Israel to make perilous concessions and, therefore, it is the only country whose government Arabs - both in Palestine and in the surrounding countries - are motivated to influence. Yet there are some realities that neither the American president nor the best laid plans of other mice and men can influence or affect. You can force this bloc of settlements to close down and draw the border here rather than there and even color code Jerusalem to allow the Arabs to control the Temple Mount (which would be a terrible affront to Jewish history that the Muslims want especially to affront) and to hand sovereignty over Palestinian neighborhoods in the city to the Palestinians and contrive some cynical and unprecedented formula for allowing some "refugees" (they are almost all dead actually) to "return" and creating a fund for compensation of zillions of dollars (to which Israel should not contribute because it has absorbed since 1948 a larger number of true Jewish refugees from the Islamic world) - yet not even all of this would end the jihad against Zion. The fact is that the great impediment to peace with Israel is the fanatic obstinacy of the Palestinians. Does anyone have a strategy for negotiating with that?
2008-01-11 01:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive