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Trump's Peacemaking

(Times of Israel) David Horovitz - Allow me to offer some insights from the perspective of an Israeli who has unhappily watched well-intentioned efforts at peacemaking fail time and again over the years. Why did Israel so frustrate Trump's predecessors in the Obama Administration, spurning their entreaties to take territorial risks for peace, deriding their talk of multilayered security fences and other arrangements that would ostensibly keep us safe after a withdrawal to a slightly amended version of the pre-1967 borders? Because we don't trust the Palestinians. We think we would be vulnerable to aggression they might initiate. And even if we were to put aside our doubts about the current regime of Mahmoud Abbas, we know he could be easily swept aside by Hamas or other extremists were the Israel Defense Forces no longer deployed in the West Bank. Were Hamas or other extremists to take over there, everywhere in Israel is within short rocket range of everywhere in the West Bank. We would not be able to function for a single day with Hamas in control of the West Bank. We have also watched Abbas preside over a hierarchy that relentlessly demonized Israel, that incited his Palestinian people against us, and that did encourage terrorism. We saw him personally escalate the tensions surrounding the Temple Mount by hailing the "pure blood of Palestinian martyrs" spilled in defense of Al-Aqsa - directly contributing to the hysteria and thus to the car-rammings and stabbings and shootings. There is grassroots Israeli support in principle for an agreement, but there is no parallel on the Palestinian side. There is woefully inadequate grassroots Palestinian support for an accord because the widespread Palestinian conviction remains that the Jews have no right to be here. Change what Palestinians are taught and told about Israel in their schools and mosques, by their political leaders and via social media, and you begin to create a climate in which, one day, genuine progress toward an accommodation becomes possible.
2017-03-16 00:00:00
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