Wednesday, December 19, 2018
Elder of Ziyon
From The Jerusalem Post:
Any Israeli-Palestinian peace plan not based on the pre-1967 lines will fail, eight European Union member states warned US President Donald Trump on Tuesday evening.Let's understand this.
“We, the European Union members of the Council, would like to reiterate once more and emphasize the EU’s strong continued commitment to the internationally agreed parameters for a just and lasting peace in the Middle East, based on international law, relevant UN resolutions and previous agreements,” ambassadors from the eight nations said in a joint statement they read to the media.
“Any peace plan that fails to recognize these internationally agreed parameters would risk being condemned to failure,” they said.
If anything can be considered a failure, it is the "everybody knows what peace will look like" formulas of all the previous peace plans from Camp David through John Kerry.
Every single one of those plans were rejected out of hand by the Palestinians.
The EU's faith in peace being realized by a tweak of those failed plans (one that pressures only Israel) is not rational.
It borders on religious fanaticism.
Or perhaps it more closely resembles someone who already spent her fortune on a bad investment and wants to throw good money after bad, convinced that eventually things will turn around.
The still not yet released US peace plan is clearly a threat to these EU states - such a threat that they are trying to sabotage it before it is released.
Why are they so frightened?
Here are some possibilities, and I suspect it is a combination of these factors.
1) They have not moved past the mentality of the 1970s when the Arab world was unified enough to use the oil weapon combined with the threat of terror in Europe in support of Palestinians. That fear, more than anything else, caused these weak-willed nations to desire to sacrifice Israel to avoid their own citizens being victimized by Islamist terror. (Look how well that worked.)
2) They have adopted the Arab model of an honor/shame society. They have put so much political capital into these failed UN resolutions and their own peace initiatives (i.e., The Quartet) that they don't want to be told that they have utterly failed. It makes them look bad, and appearances are more important than peace.
3) The idea that a boor like Trump could be more successful than they have been in reaching Middle East peace is too much to bear.
4) They really don't want peace. They want Israel to disappear under the slow drip-drip of "peace plan" after "peace plan" where Israel slowly loses land and its Jewish character and eventually gets converted into yet another Arab state.
5) The central idea of the plan, that the Arab world should be involved as part of the solution, is scary - because they want the Arab world to remain a bogeyman. The ever present and bogus threat of the "Arab street" plays into their (quite bigoted) view of the world, and if the Arab world embraces the plan it ends their ability to push their policies out of fear rather than out of doing what's right.
No matter what the reason, these major EU states have made clear that they want to sabotage the peace plan - more than Hamas does.
Which makes them even more irrelevant than they already have been.
Nikki Haley, in her final speech to the UN yesterday, specifically warned the EU against doing exactly what they just did:
My friends at the United Nations – in particular my Arab and European brothers and sisters – will also play a very important part. You will face the same choice. The choice between a hopeful future that sheds the tired, old, and unrealistic demands of the past or a darker future that sticks with the proven failed talking points of the past. The world will be watching. More importantly, the Palestinians and the Israelis will be watching. Their response will be affected by your response.
These EU nations have already consciously chosen to be against the most comprehensive peace plan ever devised by any nation. They need to explain why they are against even trying.
