Beating a dead horse

By Ted Belman

Secretary Rice continues to beat a dead horse, the “peace process” that is. All that remains is to bury the carcass but she soldiers on. She is about to participate in a Tri-Party Summit including the three losers, Olmert, Abbas and Rice.

In advance of this meeting Olmert has declared he won’t discuss final status issues, Abbas has declared he won’t consider the sop of a state with provisional borders, and the best Rice can offer is to suggest that the “Palestinians” would be more likely to support Abbas if he were to be offer a political “horizon”. Rice comes to the meeting with a knife in her back put there by her “allies” Saudi Arabia and Abbas. The Mecca Accords totally gutted American plans for creating a Palestinian state. The most the US can do now is to give an appearance of a process. They are all dead men walking.

There is a fatal flaw in US policy namely its goal of creating a Palestinian state. Such a state has been rejected by all the Arabs beginning with their rejection of the UN Partition Plan in 1947. In pursuance of this goal of achieving political rights for the Arabs in Judea and Samaria, the humanitarian solutions have been held hostage. This is to the liking of all the Arab countries that prefer to use the refugees as pawns in their battle against Israel.

The US won’t succeed because no one wants it to succeed and the idea of a Palestinian state cannot be viable.

Many commentators understand this.

At the Hezliya 2007 Conference, Boogie Ya’alon recognized this and said

“There are some who believe that the resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict will bring stability to the Middle East. Many believe that the problem is “the occupation” -the holding of the territories conquered in 1967- and that leaving these territories will bring an end to the conflict. These two mistaken assumptions prevent the emergence of a new paradigm for the resolution of the conflict.”

James Woolsey said

“Negotiating with Syria over the Golan Heights or Hamas and the Palestinian authority over some political solution, which someday will be possible with the Palestinians, is today, in my judgment, fanciful.”.

Subsequently Mort Klein of ZOA said

“More and more people are coming to realize that a Palestinian state would not be a solution to anything — it would simply be another Middle Eastern terrorist state”.

In time the US will come to realize this and will look for alternatives.

Secretary Rice in a recent interview when she was restating the need for the “Palestinians” to recognize Israel, foreswear violence and accept all agreements, preferaced her demands, which the Mecca Accords had ignored, by saying “If you are going to have a two-state solution,..”

Could it be that she was getting the message.

So what is the alternative? Obviously, a One-State Solution.

Now the Arabs have been favouring a Bi-National State which would not be accepted by Israel and certainly wouldn’t be workable. Look at Europe. The Arabs don’t believe in equality, they believe in dominance. But that didn’t stop Tony Judt from adopting the idea.

A 2006 demographic study done by the American-Israel Demographic Research Group (AIDRG) proved that if Israel were to annex Judea and Samaria, Jews would outnumber the Arabs 2:1 for the foreseeable future. As a result they proposed a One-State Plan based on democratic principles with constitutional changes that would ensure that Israel would remain a Jewish state. Shmuel Neumann, Ph.D. and Professor Ya’akov Peretz Golbert, J.D proposed an Oslo Alternative which is a variant of the One-State Plan. I, myself, explored this in Israel, from the Mediterranean to the Jordan.

The Arabs would be far better off than they are today as they are being held hostage to the diplomatic process. The Jerusalem Summit proposes what they call the Humanitarian Solution. In it, Arabs would be paid to voluntarily emigrate.

Obviously this solution requires the abrogation of Oslo and the end of the PA as we know it. This is a bitter pill for the US to swallow but sooner or latter it must take its medicine.

Such a solution which would require the detoxification of the “Palestinians” who have been taught to hate Israel and Jews for decades and particularly after the Oslo Accords were signed. But it has the best chance to bring peace to the region. Even if the parties were to be forced to agree to the creation of Palestine, it would not bring peace. One destabilizing thing would be the immigration of millions of Arab refugees into Palestine after it was created. This is described in Looming Demographic Catastrophe.

The US must decide whether it will continue to do the bidding of Saudi Arabia in supporting the two-state solution which is a prescription for continued instability or to go its own way with Israel and support the One-State Plan. It may help it decide if it comes to the realization that what Saudi Arabia is against is the presence of a Jewish state in lands which were formally part of the caliphate no matter how big it is or even if a 23rd Arab State is created. It is Israel’s existence that rankles, not its size.