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Mideast Rules for the New U.S. Administration
(Wall Street Journal) Bret Stephens - On Israeli-Arab issues, sometimes the best advice is to "do nothing." Had John Kerry adopted this advice, he might have been spared his fruitless yearlong foray into Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, which led to the 2014 Gaza War. Had Condoleezza Rice adopted it, she might not have advocated Palestinian elections that led to victory for Hamas in 2006. Had Bill Clinton taken it, he might have been spared the diplomatic humiliation of being spurned by Yasser Arafat at Camp David in 2000. The State Department has been rolling the boulders of "land for peace" and the "two-state solution" up the hill for 50 years, and still thinks one last push will do the trick. The goal of any new diplomacy should not be to "solve" the Palestinian problem but to anesthetize it through a studied combination of economic help and diplomatic neglect. The real prize lies in further cultivating Jerusalem's ties to Cairo, Riyadh, Amman and Abu Dhabi, as part of an Alliance of Moderates and Modernizers that can defeat Sunni and Shiite radicals. It is time to dispose with the flimflam that the Mideast's contrived borders are sacred. The U.S. should offer to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, captured in 1967 from Syria. U.S. recognition would put the Assad regime and its Iranian and Russian backers on notice that there's a price for barbaric behavior.