Cause and Effect? Not Likely!

Mahmoud Abbas pulled out all the stops in his meeting with President Barack Obama, insisting that for peace talks to continue, to prevail toward a mutually beneficial outcome between the Palestinians and Israel, Jewish settlements in the West Bank must be apprehended. In the week previous, when President Obama met with Israel's Benyamin Netanyahu, that issue was made abundantly clear, and the Israeli president promised to eradicate all unauthorized settlements.

Why Palestinian Authority President Abbas feels he has the upper hand in the negotiations to enable him to set down pre-conditions before he will agree to resuming peace talks isn't entirely clear. After all, Israel is the settled state, the internationally and legally-approved national entity, while the Palestinians are bargaining to achieve a like position for themselves. And critical to the peace talks were some fairly elemental issues; first among them that the PA halt terror attacks against Israel.

This critical precondition has never been accomplished, simply because the PA does not see it in their interests to do so. They have, rather, encouraged ongoing attacks against Israel through implicit and devious means. Their 'map' of the region excludes Israel, their children are taught to hate Jews and discredit the existence of the Jewish state. These are critical issues that are never quite addressed by Western negotiating interests.

Instead the focus remains on Israel's 'intransigence' on refusing to dismantle West Bank settlements that resulted from a 1967 aggression against Israel by a determined Arab combined military attack. Israel's resulting victory against its aggressors left it with an expanded territory. Throughout the annals of human history in such events it is seldom that land acquired through such an onslaught of collective determination to extirpate a nation has been returned.

Yet Israel returned every centimeter of land it took from Egypt, when Anwar Sadat travelled to Jerusalem to address the Knesset and make peace with Israel thirty years ago. In those thirty years no other country but Jordan made a like treaty with Israel, and the country has lived with unbridled hostility since then. The Palestinians had ample opportunity time after time to make peace and begin to work toward a nascent state; they declined.

To argue now as Mahmoud Abbas has done that the entire unsettled state of the Middle East owes to the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is arguably disingenuous. Conflicts in Afghanistan with the Taliban, and now in Pakistan, owe nothing to Israel's presence in the Middle East. The hostility between Shia and Sunni in all Arab countries, including Iran and Iraq is a deadly one, and has nothing whatever to do with Israel.

Islamists devoted to jihad direct their fury at their Muslim religious cohorts in vicious sectarian violence more frequently than they do toward the West, the hated and despised Israel and by extension the United States. This will not change one iota if Israel and the Palestinians by some miracle, found common ground for peaceful co-existence.

The stumbling block here is what it has always been; insurmountable hatred of the Arab majority for the Jewish minority. This is a matter that the Palestinians in particular and the Arab population in general, must itself come to grips with before any meaningful and useful change can take place.

Israel is not the problem; it is merely the symbol of symptoms beyond her control.