(Jewish News-UK) Dr. Shany Mor - The U.S. peace plan is an opportunity for Palestinians and their supporters to ask themselves difficult questions. The Palestinians - and the broader pro-Palestinian community of diplomats, activists, and academics - owe themselves and the beleaguered people whose cause they claim to champion a firm reckoning with two decades of rejectionism. There's nothing special about an Israeli like me pointing out what a terrible mistake it was to turn down Ehud Barak's offer in 2000 or Ehud Olmert's in 2008. What is maddening is how few Palestinian voices seem to want to say the same. Is it even a question that an independent Palestinian state comprising all of Gaza and 95% of the West Bank with a position in Jerusalem and no separation fence would be better than what the Palestinians have today? The Trump plan is much worse than what the Palestinians could have had only six years ago with the Kerry proposal from 2014. Surely, there must be a lesson here. The former administration officials clogging the pipes with tweets about decades of international consensus being upended don't like to be reminded of the past. Autonomy was supposed to moderate the Palestinians ("give them something to lose"); it led to an unprecedented wave of suicide terrorism. Elections were supposed to weaken Hamas; they took power. Settlement freezes were supposed to make negotiations easier. Military force to crush the second intifada was supposed to be doomed to fail. The West Bank separation barrier could never work. Assassination of Hamas leaders was supposed to increase suicide bombing rather than eliminate it for nearly a decade so far. Erdogan was supposed to be a model of democratic Islamism that Israel should support as an example. The Jerusalem recognition was supposed to cause the Middle East to erupt. The writer, who previously served on Israel's National Security Council, is a research fellow at the Chaikin Institute for Geostrategy at the University of Haifa.
2020-01-30 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive