Israel Alone

Is it remotely possible that Israel and the Palestinian Authority can ever meet one another across a bargaining table with full intentions to deal frankly with one another? Before we know it a century will have passed and nothing will have been accomplished. But before then the sizzling antagonism will have surpassed anything in mutual violence that has been seen hitherto.

And there's a certain poignant inequality in all of this. Israel has found itself immensely beleaguered in the past with the combined armies of the surrounding Arab countries confronting it. And it has survived. A miracle in and of itself.

Surely the God of Abraham - not the one claimed by Islam, perforce, an interloper, a late-comer, a religion with so little imaginative creation behind it that it found itself adeptly insisting that it too benefited from its predecessors' signal deliverers unto the mysteries of the faith - intervened to save Jews from yet another breach in the trust between God and His chosen. For if the chosen were completely annihilated, who then to be a light unto the world?

After we pick ourselves off the floor, hysterical with insane laughter, we look at the advances made thus far in the intractable discussions and demands between the adversaries, the two solitudes whom geography and the dissonances of fate has thrown together. Two previous prime ministers have related that they were prepared to literally 'give away the shop' for the achievement of peace. A peace that could not be guaranteed, furthermore.

Given the demonstrated propensity in a nod to tradition, of the Arab populations to cling to their detestation of the very thought of a non-Muslim demographic within a geography dedicated to Islam. And that demographic speaking hugely of an ungrateful religious cohort whom the Prophet had compassionately offered to include in Islam, only to have his offer curtly rejected. Which is precisely why Jews are likened to viral agents, monkeys, pigs.

What a bargain. Submit to Palestinian demands - and by extension, needless to say, the demands of the greater Arab community in the Middle East, and extend a little further and include the Muslim entirety - for the surrender of Jerusalem for a Palestinian-state capital. Include the 'right of return', and a diminution of Israel's border, and what have you?

Well, most certainly the demise of a Jewish state. Israel, inundated by Palestinian returnees, representing generations of those in exile, and sans its own eternal capital. This is the greater purpose of the demands, of course. Eventually the very notion that there once existed a quaint "Jewish State" would become dim history, an anomaly of the geography never to be repeated.

The greater Arab collective has been deftly able to exert their influence - thank you, petroleum products - to enterprisingly influence all other countries dependent on their goodwill, assenting to have their UN representatives rubber-stamp condemnations of one sole, smallish country. This is the United Nations, need we repeat, whose purpose is to defend relations between countries, repair what's broken and aid human rights...?

And Israel's great defender in the West, the powerful United States of America, upon whom the tiny Middle East democracy could always depend, is torn with indecision. On the scale of weightiness there are all the countries of the Middle East who resent Israel's presence, along with the weight of the Muslim ummah, and then there is that perennial, bloody-minded, ever-assertive, right royal pain in the arse, Israel.

Truly a conundrum for this new American administration. Delivering a rebuke to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, having him wait, like a lackey, for a word of assent from the White House. Friends, enemies, who can tell which is which these days?