Elliot Abrams is a senior fellow for Middle East Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This piece is reprinted with permission and can be found on Abrams’ blog “Pressure Points” here.
U.S. Secretary of State Kerry continues his energetic efforts to get the Israelis and Palestinians to sign a comprehensive peace agreement. In a new Policy Innovation Memo for the Council on Foreign Relations, I argue that such an agreement is not possible right now and that there’s a better way forward.
The memo begins this way:
“The Obama administration is fostering Israeli-Palestinian negotiations aimed at a full and final peace agreement. While the talks last they help calm the regional political situation, but they do nothing to improve Palestinian daily life or help build the institutions of a future Palestinian state. If they fail, as all past efforts have, they may leave behind frustration and bitterness. Even so, negotiations should not be abandoned, but should be buttressed by a simultaneous effort to undertake pragmatic steps that support Palestinian institutions, improve life in the West Bank, and strengthen the Palestinian Authority (PA) against Hamas.”
Abrams is no better than all the other monkeys. Of what value is it to do these things when the Palestinians prefer the “resistance” to economic betterment.
Doing this will in no way make a agreement more likely.
Assuming all these things were done, how does that change anything.
Why dot stop supporting the Palestinians and let them sink or swim. No one else has the luxury to be on the dole all their lives.
Abrams certainly does NOT get it. He writes:
In fact quite the opposite is true. There is only a cosmetic difference between PA and the Hamas their enmity towards Israel and their declared commitment to its destruction as the nation-state of the Jewish people.
Contrary to his prescription, Israel should break off all contact with the Judeophobic, indeed Judeocidal, Palestinian leadership, desist from any support of the dysfunctional PA and let it, and the unsustainable economy is has fostered, collapse while simultaneously offering generous relocation grants to individual Palestinian, providing with an opportunity to avoid the consequences of that collapse and chance to build a better life for themselves and their families elsewhere.
Elliot Abrams knows full well for the Arabs a better life takes a back seat to hating the Jews and seeking to destroy Israel.
The Arabs will never give up their revanchiste dream in exchange for an improved quality of life.
Peace talks with them will never lead anywhere! Some people, unfortunately, do not want to face up to the real truth about the Middle East.
The Fakestinians receive more aid money per capita than any other group of truly needy people in the world, ever and by far. They attract the devoted attention of the entire planet. They worship death and send their children to be blown up. Such a death is cherished by their entire society as the highest pinnacle of honor. They fabricate history with breathtaking audacity. The “Fakestinians” are the darling of the world. They can do no wrong.
How can any rational human being explain this?
Call me irrational, but to my reckoning, if their conflict had been with any people other than the Jews of the Jewish state, this anomalous situation would not be.
In fact, had the Jews not reconstituted their homeland and state, I posit that the world would never have heard of a Arab “Palestinian People” at all and no such pseudo entity would have come into existence.