Israeli/Palestinian Peace Beyond Elusive

"Everyone sees the difficulty of relations between Jews and Arabs but not everyone sees that there is no solution to that question. There is no solution."
"There is an abyss and nothing can fill that abyss . . . We want Palestine to be ours as a nation. The Arabs want it to be theirs, as a nation."
David Ben-Gurion, 1919

Famously, the woman who twenty years later followed David Ben-Gurion, the first and founding prime minister of Israel 29 years after he made that lugubrious statement of fact, Golda Meier gave her own opinion of the logjam of interaction for acceptance and peace between Jews and Arabs, when she gave her famous appraisal of the chances that accommodation could be reached between the two antagonists: "Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us."

That achieving of a state of peace between Israel and the Palestinian Authority is as  remote at the present time as it was back in 1948 is due in large part to the Palestinian Arabs and their authority tenaciously grooming Palestinian children to hate Israeli Jews. Arab children are fed a steady diet of propaganda characterizing the Jewish presence on 'Arab land' as theft, and that their heritage will only be restored when they and their peers succeed in routing Jews from 'Palestine'.

So it is unlikely that peace will come anytime soon.

UNRWA, the UN agency that has nurtured the Palestinian sense of grievance and victimization has given limitless support to the psychological violence imposed on Palestinian children. It has also encouraged the Palestinians to believe that they are entitled to 'return' to land now 'occupied' by Israel. Of the estimated 700,000 Palestinians who fled the land when Israel declared itself a nation returned to its Biblical-era heritage, UNRWA has given refugee recognition to an estimated six million descendants of the original 700,000.

"Refugee camps" are in fact well-established cities in the West Bank and Gaza, where Fatah (PLO) and Hamas respectively, urge and incite their citizens to acts of violence against Israel and its population, drawing in those Palestinians with Israeli citizenship to join the common cause of 'resistance' against the 'occupiers'. From the physical violence extended toward Jews in Israel and abroad, to the public relations programs embarked upon globally for sympathy with the 'underdog' in efforts to delegitimize and slander Israel, the appetite for peace appears remote indeed.

The global propaganda identified with boycotting Israel through unions, academia, business, investment hides behind a more recognizable and ancient pathology of anti-Semitism where sanctimonious perpetrators state that BDS doesn't equate with hatred or discrimination but with justice for Palestinians, citing Israel as the aggressor and Arabs as victims. As though the combined armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon attacking Israel repeatedly hadn't really occurred.

Now that Israel has declared groups engaging in boycotts against Israel persona non grata to enter the country, those groups are aghast and disbelieving that they would be outlawed entry to the Jewish state. "The boycott organizations must know that the state of Israel will act against them", Strategic Affairs Minister Gilad Erdan stated, as though any explanation was in the least way required to explain Israel's fed-up position, refusing to accommodate BDS interests.

Peace talks were never seriously undertaken by the Palestinians, goaded by the Arab states, irate at the very idea that a Jewish state would have the audacity to appear among them in the Middle East whose territory was completely consecrated to Islam by conquest; a Jewish presence that in fact presented as an intolerable insult to Islam. Having learned their historical lesson that joint military attacks against Israel would gain them nothing, the Arab League is turning to a refurbishment of an alternative tack.

Egypt, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan and the Palestinians have formed a committee following an Arab League emergency meeting in Cairo in the wake of U.S. President Donald Trump's support of Jerusalem as Israel's capital. "We will confront the decision by seeking a (U.N.) resolution, an international one, to recognize a Palestinian state on 1967 borders with Jerusalem as its capital", confirmed Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi.

Palestinians react during a protest against Donald Trump's decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip     Reuters