Seriously, Now!

"The Tango in the Middle East needs at least three. For years there have been two -- Israel and the United States. Now it needs to be seen if the Palestinians are also present."
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

"If Palestinians come to believe that the possibility of a contiguous sovereign Palestinian state is no longer within reach, then our ability to manage the international fallout is going to be limited."
"For him [Netanyahu] to seize this moment is perhaps the greatest gift he could give to future generations of Israelis."
American President Barack Obama

Page by Megan Slack - President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel hold a bilateral meeting in the Oval Office, Sept. 30, 2013.

So, as far as Barack Obama -- the peacemaker with the Nobel Prize to prove it -- is concerned it is up to Israel to make the next move, to break the stalemate that exists between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. As if. When square one cannot succeed in the President of the PA Mahmoud Abbas assenting to recognizing the reality of Israel as a Jewish state, a state established and meant specifically as a homeland for the world's Jews, why can it be construed that it is Israel that must move?

To agree with Mahmoud Abbas, and appease his declaration that the millions of Palestinians that now consider themselves entitled to return to the homes they fled in the belief their absence would be minimally temporary while their Arab brethren from Syria, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia would wipe the geography clear of a Jewish presence on their behalf? If Israel could not be defeated militarily it could be defeated by sheer force of numbers.

Then all would be solved by the default to a one-state solution of a state controlled by Arab Palestinians who may or may not choose to permit Jews to live among them. In short, the future becoming the past. The thing of it is, Palestinians are very reproductive. Israel has given citizenship and full rights to almost a million Palestinians; what the 1948 760,000 fleeing Palestinians accomplished in succeeding years, those living in Israel will also accomplish.

There is an estimated 550,000 Israeli Jews living in West Bank settlements. A number hardly to be compared with the number of Palestinians living in Israel. But while Palestinians living in Israel are assured safety, security and advancement into the future, Israelis living in the West Bank represent an affront in their grotesque presence; Jews living among Arabs. Mahmoud Abbas has stated categorically that no Jews will blemish a new Palestinian state by their presence.

In the international community he is permitted to make such an outrageous statement. Just as he is supported by stating Israel is not a Jewish state, for to agree that it is is to name it also an Apartheid state, defying logic, but satisfying the malicious slander that Palestinians have become so adept at. While at the same time, the Palestinian state will be an Arab state, reflecting the status of all the other Arab states proud of their ethnic monopoly.

As far as the international community and the United States is concerned, the presence, the growing presence of the West Bank settlements represents the single most egregious assault on the possibility of Israel and the Palestinians reaching a peace agreement. The practical advantage of carving out territory where the growing Arab section of Israel can be deeded to a new Palestinian state and a reciprocal exchange take place with the settlement areas being absorbed by Israel is dunned.

"If not now, when? And if not you, Mr. Prime Minister, then who?" prodded Mr. Obama, hugging himself with pleasure at his clever wit.