By Melanie Phillips
I have written in my Spectator article today that the best way of solving the Israel/Palestinian impasse is for Jordan and Egypt to take control again “this time, legally” of the West Bank and Gaza. The Wall Street Journal today (subscription only) is saying much the same thing:
The U.S. might be better served if, instead of taking sides between unsavory factions in a Palestinian civil war, it began to call on its allies in the Arab world to show some leadership. Israel has more or less managed to contain the threat from Gaza for the time being. But Egypt, Gaza�s other neighbor, also has much to fear from a terrorist movement with historic links to the Muslim Brotherhood and current links to Iran. At a minimum, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak must finally get serious about stopping the flow of arms from the Sinai to Gaza, something he has so far done half-heartedly at best.
Jordan, which has done a creditable job of policing its border against the infiltration of terrorists, might, with Israeli cooperation, establish a security presence within the West Bank, possibly with a view to reasserting its sovereignty over most of its former domain. The Lebanese government of Fuad Siniora could also help by dropping economic restrictions it imposes on Palestinian residents, which have contributed to the radicalism and violence of its refugee camps. Above all, the flow of Saudi money to violent Palestinian factions needs to be addressed and stopped.
All of this runs contrary to the State Department’s efforts to make yet another big push toward establishing a Palestinian state. If events of the last week demonstrate nothing else, that idea has been laid to rest by the Palestinians themselves. What’s needed here is another solution; an Arab solution.
This is exactly the point. People think Israel can bring about the solution to this problem. It cannot, for the simple reason that it did not create it. The Arabs created it and only the Arabs can solve it. Instead of propping up corrupt, terrorist Fatah, pursuing the chimera of the “two-state solution” and pressuring Israel to continue to feed the beast that has torn at its throat for the past sixty years, America would do better to pressure the Arabs to take responsibility for the tragedy they have created and exploited.
Jordan and Egypt are now threatened on their own doorsteps by Hamas/the Muslim Brotherhood/al Qaeda as a direct result of the fantasy politics of the past six decades. There has never been a better time to put their feet to the fire and end this whole manipulative charade.
Note: In the Spectator article above Melanie concludes,
Abbas is patently incapable of stopping Hamas. So a new dynamic is being created. Long-term, the solution lies in Jordan and Egypt exercising their own self-interest. A Jordan-West Bank confederation is now being floated; the same logic would mean Egypt re-occupying Gaza.
Despite the fact that this idea would take us back 40 years, it has certain attractions. Order would be restored by Jordan and Egypt which, unlike Israel, would tackle Hamas with a vigour from which our own principled multiculturalists would not dream of demurring.
The Palestinians would be in the state they were given in 1922. The Arab world would finally take responsibility for a tragedy they themselves created. The Iranian pincer would be broken.
One thing threatens to scupper this. It is the US/UK axis of appeasement, the fateful union of British cynicism with America’s catastrophic loss of nerve. No wonder Iran is on a roll. With such serial strategic stupidity and cravenness by the west, how can it lose?
This is what Michael Oren suggested in the WSJ yesterday. Israpundit posted it and commented on it.
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I simply do not like the idea of shared authority with Gaza and the West Bank. If for example Egypt chooses to play the game it has been in Gaza by failing to keep radicals and their guns and munitions from getting in, with the legitimacy of authority in Gaza, Egypt might just be able to carry on in the same vein but exercise more control to ensure that any radicalization of the Palesitnians there is directed only against Israel.
While Israel may have control of security, that control will obviously be limited by whatever authority controls are given the Egyptians.
In the end, Israel exposes herself to censure either because the Palestinians continue to suffer or because Israel is forced to used allegedly disproportionate force to contain the radicals.
The peace agreement between Egypt and Israel is holding, but it has been eviscerated by the Egyptians to be only an agreement to end hostilities. The Egyptian government not only tolerates daily Jew and Israel hatred in Egyptian rhetoric by leaders and imams and in the daily media, Egyptian leaders contribute to that.
Israel has little if any reason to trust Egypt’s word or good intentions. As for Jordan, even if King Abullah is a good and decent man, he is under great pressure from more powerul Arab states to conform to the anti-Israel thinking within their nations and must appear to go along or else he is at risk.
Bill
I think her ideas are more complex than you conclude. What is intended is autonomy only for the Arabs with perhaps Jordanian or Egyptian Passports. Israel would remain in control for security reasons. Attorney E. Haetzni has a major paper spelling it out. I will send it to you and anyone else that asks.
I agree with Phillips that the Arab world must be the one to take responsiblity for their own disastrous mess and that the West should force them to do so. They simply will not be accountable on their lonesome.
That said, I disagree with Phillips in advocating that Egypt taking Gaza and Jordan taking the West Bank solves the mistakes made made back in 1947 with the UN Partition Resolution which sought to create yet one more Arab state to co-exist along side Israel. It was not a Resolution to increase the size of Egypt and Jordan. That Resolution countenanced a Judenrein new Arab state, but required Jews to accept Arabs within their borders.
Historically there has been population transfer to either solve or prevent a real or potential ethnic issue amongst the population of a region or country. For the Jews an exception. Transfer of Arabs to Arab land free of Jews and allowing the state of Israel to be free of Arabs was perfectly acceptable. Jews had no choice but to take what the world allowed them.
Egypt created the PLO and the Arabs together created the Arab society denoted as Palestinian which society has beome unstable, unruly, radical, extreme and a danger to all in the region.
It is for the Arabs to step up to the plate, cease using the Arabs now known as Palestinians as their proxies in their ongoing war against Israel, put an end to the lie that Palestinians are different in any way from Arabs, take back their Arab brethren into their fold where they should have been in the first place and leave the land that should have been for the Jews, to the Jews.
Egypt and Jordan have every reason to be concerned about the Palestinians, especially if they are allowed to govern themselves. That concern must be turned to real fear for their themselves.
A larger, stronger, thriving and peaceful Israel incorporating the West Bank and Gaza would be a far better neighbor that brought both Egypt and Jordan obvious benefits, then a dysfunctional, unstable and dangerously radical Palestinian state.
Turn Egypt and Jordan to see and advocate that saving and strengthening Israel is to save and help themselves and that will begin to sap the will of other Arab nations to dream of the death of Israel.
Felix, you misunderstood Melanie. When she refers to the state they were given in 1922 she is referring to Jordan.
I have no idea what I said here that makes no sense to you. In fact I said nothing.
It is you who are not making sense here.
Ted, makes no sense. Melanie makes no sense to me whatsoever. It was the Arabs who set up the PLO in order to destroy Israel on the 60s. So what has changed fundamentally? Nasser was an antisemite and a Fascist so what fundamentally is the difference of all of these Arab states in relation to Israel. None. So why hand Jewish land over like this. The other reference makes no sense either, the Arabs were not given Judea and Samaria in 1922, nor Gaza, nor the Golan.