Survival in a Hostile Landscape

Today, ladies and gentlemen, we have conducted a good and useful round of talks with His Excellency President Obama.  It was an opportunity to focus, on our side, on the risks and the results that exists that a continuation of settlement activity represent on the two-state solution, and over the need to release prisoners.
I asserted to His Excellency the President that Palestine has taken long and additional steps for the sake of making peace. I hereby assert again that we are ready to implement all our commitments and obligations, and to respect the signed agreements and international legitimacy resolutions in order to provide for the requirements of launching the peace process and achieving the two-state solution — Palestine and Israel.
We are also serious in ending the division and achieve the Palestinian reconciliation, which constitutes an additional source of power for us to continue our march towards making peace, security and stability in the region.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas

That would be a quite glum President Mahmoud Abbas. But in fact, President Obama gently chided the Palestinian Authority, leading them in a most avuncular manner to the hoped-for point of departure from their sturdy intransigence on meeting face to face with Israeli peace negotiators. It was the same Obama who urged university students in Israel to demand of their leaders that risks be taken. "You must create the change that you want to see", he urged them.

In Israel, this hugely respected man, who while held in high regard is also held in suspicion with respect to his motives and his reliability as a political-social partner, urged young Israelis who represent the future of the country to indulge in behaviours that sound fairly close to civil disobedience. In Ramallah, this man held with equal suspicion and no little awe urged instead that the government indulge in behaviours that would contrast sharply with its incitement to violence and respect held for suicide bombers.

American President Barack Obama has great powers of persuasion, his lofty oratory inspires people to believe in him, and his own obvious belief in the healing properties in overlooking past difficulties in preference of looking forward to a future of possibilities reflects his personality, belief and character. Some of that trusting optimism invariably rubs off on those to whom he speaks in authority, whose own view is more inclined toward pessimistic anticipation that what went before will continue to prevail.

At one point, while relations between President Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the early days of both their first mandates (second for PM Netanyahu) the president prevailed upon the prime minister to consider the potential efficacy that existed in stopping further West Bank settlement construction, to convince the Palestinian Authority to come to the bargaining table. For the ten months that West Bank construction on the settlements projects was suspended, not once would the PA agree to come to the table to bargain for peace and sovereignty.

And then, when, in disgust at the lack of movement, Israel re-commenced its West Bank construction, giving employment to the great numbers of Palestinians without employment in the process, the Palestinian Authority leaped with indignation over the situation, clamouring that it was impossible to meet with the Israelis to bargain for peace under such circumstances. This time around, the charming President Obama, addressing a joint news conference in Ramallah, pointed out how pleased the U.S. was to increase its funding to the PA.

And he also, pointedly, spoke to the issue of the Authority's ongoing reluctance to meet with Israel across a bargaining table. Disagreements over the West Bank settlements issue, with which the U.S. itself finds fault, is not sufficient reason to be used as an "excuse" not to talk. Thereby taking aback his listeners who were far more accustomed to hearing sympathetic denunciations emanating from that source than mild condemnation of their ongoing and continuous refusals to meet with Israeli negotiators, preferring to go directly to the United Nations to be declared a state.

In Israel, the President of the U.S. and the Prime Minister of Israel made rare conciliatory statements toward one another. Despite President Obama's rejection to address the people of Israel through a formal declaration expected by all such visitors to the state of his executive calibre, to be made at the Knesset, as per invitation. Instead the President insisted on addressing university students directly, and through them, the Israeli public, and not through the formality of Israel's parliament.

There, President Obama spoke of the need for Israel to make peace with the Palestinians as a critical measure to ensure its own long-term viability in a region well known to harbour a majority of social, religious and political opinion allied in a universal desire to destroy the Jewish state. "Just as Israelis built a state in their homeland, Palestinians have a right to be a free people in their own land. The Palestinian people's right to self-determination and their justice must also be recognized. Put yourself in their shoes, look at the world through their eyes. It is not fair that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of her own, living their entire lives with the presence of a foreign army ... every single day."

The trouble here being, of course, that President Obama looks at the Palestinian situation through his own eyes, not through the eyes of the Palestinians, for he is incapable of doing that. The Palestinian mind-set, its clasping of its victimhood status as the world's longest-reigning refugees wholly dependent upon the support and financing of the United Nations and the Western world community, is a farce of their very own making. Their own and their Arab brethren who, with the exception of Jordan, steadfastly refuse citizenship to Palestinian 'refugees'.

Far preferring that they remain 'refugees' until such time as Allah responds and works his will to remove Jews from Islam's sacramental soil.