"Palestinians officials rejected a recent US proposal for a trilateral peace summit with Israel, a Palestinian official said on Sunday, amid reports that efforts for possible talks hosted by Moscow were pushing forward.Senior PLO official Wasel Abu Yousef told the Jordanian daily al-Ghad that the US had been informed of the PLO’s “firm stance” for two requirements to be met before any meeting with the Israelis: a freeze of construction in the settlements and the release of the fourth batch of prisoners promised to the Palestinians during negotiations in 2014."
I have absolutely had it with this painful and pointless and entirely unjust charade.
Have you ever heard of an allegedly oppressed people who insist upon "painful concessions" from their oppressors before they would deign to accept sovereignty?
The Desperate and the Persecuted
One would think that a desperate and persecuted people would take any way out of that desperation and persecution. Generally one would not think that the desperate and persecuted tend to make arbitrary demands on their persecutors as a precondition for their release from that persecution.
This is because Abbas and Fatah and the PA are playing the Americans, the Russians, and the Israelis for fools. Furthermore, it gives away the lie of Palestinian-Arab oppression at the hands of Jewish Israelis. The Palestinian-Arabs may be oppressed, but they are oppressed by their fellow Arabs who honestly do not care if they live or die. They are not oppressed by their Jewish neighbors who actually treat them considerably better than do their brothers and sisters throughout the rest of the Arab-Muslim world.
Throughout the regions, adjacent to Israel, the Palestinian-Arabs are kept in refugee camps to be used as diplomatic and, eventually, demographic weapons against the Jews of the Middle East.
Meanwhile, by law, Palestinian-Arabs are kept out of the best professions - or even the mediocre ones - in Lebanon. Jordan, not so long ago, deprived the franchise from any number of Palestinian-Arabs living in that country. The Kuwaitis, of course, kicked the Palestinian-Arabs out of their country almost entirely following the First Gulf War, but since the Palestinian-Arabs were rooting for Saddam Hussein over the Kuwaitis, the Kuwaitis had very good reason to give them the boot.
And, needless to say, the Palestinian Authority has stated that any Palestinian-Arabs who emigrate into the Palestinian-Arab state - if any such entity would ever arrive in the universe - then even the newly formed state of "Palestine" would keep those Palestinian-Arab refugees in detention camps for the purpose of eventually releasing them into Israel as a demographic club.
If Israel actually goes along with the freeze on building within certain sections of Israel that both Mahmoud Abbas and Barack Obama hope to remain Judenrein, then it will have earned my considerable contempt. The Palestinian-Arabs have turned down offer after offer for statehood since the British Peel Commission of 1937 and they should need no additional inducements to accept a state for themselves.
If Netanyahu releases the murderers of Jews from Israeli state prisons in order please the murderers of Jews then the man is no longer mentally fit for office.
The Palestinian Emirates
Given the fact that the Palestinian-Arabs absolutely refuse to accept a state for themselves in peace next to Israel it means that Ted Belman is correct, "There is no diplomatic solution." This being the case it is incumbent upon Israel to come up with unilateral measures to ease the situation. I will not say that it is up to Israel to come up with a unilateral solution because, in truth, there is precious little that any Jewish people can do to ease Arab-Muslim Koranically-based hatred of us children of orangutans and swine short of submitting to the Pact of Omar and thereby submitting to dhimmi status.
Lest we forget what living under the boot of Arab-Muslim imperial rule as dhimmis for thirteen long centuries was like, recently deceased historian Martin Gilbert reminded us:
There could be no building of new synagogues or churches. Dhimmis could not ride horses, but only donkeys; they could not employ a Muslim. Jews and Christians alike had to wear special hats, cloaks and shoes to mark them out from Muslims... A dhimmi could not - and cannot to this day - serve in a Muslim court as witness in a legal case involving a Muslim... men could enter public bathhouses only when they wore a special sign around their neck distinguishing them from Muslims... Sexual relations with a Muslim woman were forbidden, as was cursing the Prophet in public - an offense punishable by death.
(Martin Gilbert, In Ishmael’s House: A History of Jews in Muslim Lands, Yale University Press, 31 – 33.)
It is true, of course, that what we call dhimmitude was in some times and places better and in some times and places worse, but it was never better than black people had it under the very worst of Jim Crow in the American South.
What I have been arguing for quite some time, now, is that Israel should simply declare its final borders, remove the IDF to behind those borders, and then toss the keys over the shoulder.
Good-bye and good-luck.
However, another idea that is gaining traction - in part due to the work of Dr. Mordechai Kedar, professor of Arabic Literature at Bar-Ilan University in Israel - is that of Palestinian-Arab emirates.
The basic idea is that the European nation-state model has failed in the Middle East among Arabs because it is simply not part of their cultural-political traditions and it rubs their religious sensibilities the wrong way. For at least fourteen hundred years, and probably much longer, the fundamental Arab political loyalties were centered around family, clan, and tribe ruled over by a powerful sheik under the universal umbrella of imperial Islam.
The imposition of the European nation-state model onto a part of the world where it did not develop organically has not changed the fundamental political-social structures of the Arab-Muslim world.
The primary loyalties, not surprisingly, are still toward family, clan, tribe, sheik, and Allah.
We certainly cannot change this and although the West has not really tried to interfere with that essential social structure, we certainly tried to impose a hard reality on top of it.
What Kedar and others are suggesting is that we dissolve relations with the Palestinian Authority and Fatah and empower six or seven of the local sheiks with a degree of autonomy and deal directly with them. It is they, after all, not Mahmoud Abbas, that have organic relationships with the young, blood-thirsty, Koranically-inspired, knife-wielding potential Jew-Killers in the streets.
In any case, whatever major step Israel takes next vis-à-vis the Long Arab War Against the Jews, the "two-state solution" is dead, dead, dead.
At this point it is nothing more than a club that the Arabs, and their western allies - particularly the United States - use to ring concessions out of the Jews of the Middle East and that the Palestinian-Arabs always use as an excuse for more violence against little old ladies in the streets of Haifa or Jerusalem.
It is time to move on.
Michael Lumish is a blogger at the Israel Thrives blog as well as a regular contributor/blogger at Times of Israel and Jews Down Under.
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