Negotiating for Peace

Good news is always welcome on the world scene.  Particularly from areas of the world that have so long been mired in bad news.  When neighbours cannot seem to recognize one another as neighbours, and see one another through rage-coloured lenses of suspicion, fear and hatred.  The situation of a cold war that exists between the State of Israel and its neighbours descends on occasion to active acts of offensive conflict.  On a more casual level, those acts are continuous along a contiguous border.

One small state, one large geographic area with more than ample room for all to live in a state of peace, but complicated by the fact that custom, culture, religion and tribalism mitigate against acceptance of one group all others perceive as a foreign interloper.  That the 'foreign interloper's' own heritage far predates the current residents of the geography is simply an inconvenient fact of interest to few.

"Peace talks", between the Arab residents of what is now called the West Bank, but which was once an integral, historical part of greater Israel, and the current State of Israel, have been on an on-again, off-again state of non-being for an awfully long time.  Peace was originally sacrificed to war on a repeated number of occasions.  The Arab Palestinians initially rejected the very thought of living alongside Jewish Palestinians in separate states of their own.

Not because they could not conceive of two separate states, each to his own, but because they could not conceive of one of those states representing a nation consisting of a majority Jewish population, governed by Jews; the very thought was anathema, one whose currency was felt as a dread inoperable insult by the entire Arab community across the Middle East.

To the international community, the situation is one where the origins of Israel remains suspect, where the Arab population is seen as entitled and ill done by, with the existence of a Jewish state.  Sympathy is most decidedly not with Jews, on any front.  The traditional scapegoating of all that is wrong with the world will not change any time soon.  It has not for thousands of years, and shows no signs of ever doing so.

The Palestinian Authority claims it wishes peace with Israel, and a country of its own, finally.  But it negotiates a treaty with no obligation to make any concessions, while claiming the necessity that Israel make a series of concessions to mollify the hate of the Palestinian Arabs for the Israeli Jews to the point where some accommodation may be feasible, to allow Israel to remain as a state infiltrated by non-Jews, alongside a Palestinian state.

Israel becomes, in their minds, a supplicant, not an equal partner in negotiations, where each side must be prepared to offer sacrifices or concessions. The Palestinians will not accept that Jordan is their state, and Jordan is loath, to say the least, to accept that the Palestinians represent the majority-population of their state.  No concessions there, though initially that entire area encompassing Jordan was to have been divided among Jews and Arabs.

Now, PA President Mahmoud Abbas insists once again that Israel should be prepared to offer 'goodwill' gestures.  None have ever been proffered by the PA, whose militant offshoots continue to bombard Israel with rockets, with attempts at suicide-bombing and other violent acts meant to assure Jews that settlement on the Moon might be more to their advantage.

Israel, according to Mahmoud Abbas, should once again release a considerable number of Palestinian prisoners who languish in prison because of those very violent acts.  When, in the past, other goodwill gestures were undertaken with the release of prisoners, many of them have simply returned to the acts of violence that landed them in jail to begin with.

Oh, and along with the release of prisoners, the release of arms to the PA would also be accepted as a gesture of goodwill.  President Abbas would expect Israel to heed him as a matter of goodwill, but there is none to be had, it is claimed, between Fatah and Hamas.  A concrete gesture would be useful to President Abbas among the Palestinians, gracing their opinion of him with admiration for his skills in negotiations with Israel.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu repeats, interminably, that he is prepared to come to the negotiating table any time, without preconditions, that a peace agreement could be hammered out to the benefit of both, and goodwill can be exhibited by both parties right there, at the peace table.  Instead, new prerequisites keep cropping up, before Mahmoud Abbas can seriously consider meeting face-to-face with Benjamin Netanyahu.

Right of return.  Division of Jerusalem.  Destruction of West Bank settlements.  Release of Palestinian Prisoners.  Handing over weapons and ammunition to the PA.  Ad nauseum.