PEACE=COMPROMISE

With the opening of proximity negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians let’s take a step back, a deep breath and look with a magnifying glass at how the Palestinians will ruin any chance of Peace.

History is a key component to making a better future. This is a bit of knowledge the Palestinians lack. These negotiations will probably fail because the Palestinians have never wanted to look back on their history with an ounce of truth. They have never wanted to look at their past mistakes in an attempt to correct them.

From the beginning of this conflict the Arabs of Eretz Israel ( I call them this because the name Palestinian is nothing more than a twentieth century invention) have done all they can to deny the Jews their rightful home.

Jews were a majority population in the major cities of Eretz Israel until the Arab riots of the early twentieth century. The Jews were the majority in Hebron, Safed and Jerusalem.

When the opportunity of returning European Jews to their native homeland in Israel was approved by the British with the Balfour declaration, the Arabs of the mandate revolted and murdered hundreds of Jews. In 1929 the Arabs committed the Hebron massacre, killing 67 Jews and pushing the rest out of Hebron. Hebron, a majority Jewish City since antiquity was, in one fell swoop, de-Judaized.

On November 29th, 1947, the United Nations voted 33 to 13 in favor of the partition of the Palestine Mandate into two states, one Jewish one Arab. The Jewish population of Palestine accepted this, the Palestinian Arab Higher Committee rejected it with the backing of the Arab League. What this means is from the beginning of this conflict the Palestinian Arabs and the Arab world in general have never accepted the concept or the right of a Jewish State.

Because of the Arab refusal to accept Israel’s right to exist, the war of Israeli Independence was fought and won by the Jews. Israel fought and won this war against
the combined armies of Egypt, Trans-Jordan (under British military leadership), Lebanon, Syria, plus contingents from Morocco, Libya, Algeria and Iraq.

From this point on the Jews created and maintained the state of Israel.

In addition to creating a homeland for the battered remnants of Europe’s Jewry, Israel brought in all the Jewish refugees, some 900,000, who were subsequently expelled from the Arab and Muslim states where they had been living since exile from ancient Israel thousands of years ago.

The Arabs, on the other hand, forced their supposed brethren into refugee camps WHERE THEY STILL EXIST TODAY! Refugees camps still exist both in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, both areas ostensibly run by the Palestinians since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993.

While Israel has built itself up into a pluralistic, democratic country while simultaneously constantly fighting for its survival, the Palestinian Leadership and the Arab world have let the Palestinians squander in refugee camps ... as a bargaining chip.

On numerous occasions the state of Israel has gone the extra mile to give land back for peace. On almost every occasion the Arabs have rejected these offers, opting for war -- in the hopes of finally destroying Israel.

After the Six Day War (1967), the Eshkol government offered to return all of the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights and the West Bank for peace. The Arabs counter-offered with the once famous Three No’s of the Khartoum Conference: No Peace with Israel, No Recognition of Israel and No negotiations with Israel.

The facts of history point out again and again the refusal of the Arab world to recognize the Jewish nation’s right to exist, with their own self-determination, on land that had been theirs for thousands of years and long before Arabs had come out of Arabia.

The greatest folly committed by the Palestinians, which the world has seemingly forgotten was the rejection of peace by Yassar Arafat. After seven years of painstaking negotiations Ehud Barak decided to put the Palestinian leadership to the ultimate test. American President Bill Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered the Palestinian leadership 97% of the West Bank, all of Gaza, East Jerusalem, the Muslim and Christian quarters of the old city, sovereignty of the Temple Mount and the return of Palestinian refugees, to the new state of Palestine.

Arafat rejected what was -- and always will be -- the best offer any losing nation will receive in any peace negotiations. In fact one could even claim that what was offered to the Palestinians that day was what a winning nation should receive out of peace negotiations! Once again, compromise -- the heart of making peace -- was a foreign concept to the Palestinian. Arafat rejected this offer because it would mean that Israel would have to be recognized and accepted as the Jewish State.

To this day, I believe that Prime Minister Barak knew that Arafat would reject even the finest offer. He knew this because he knew Yassar Arafat would never give up the hope of destroying Israel and replacing it with yet another Arab State. However, Barak also naively believed the world would finally recognize all that Israel had done to create a Palestinian State, exposing Arafat and the Palestinian leadership as still intent on wiping Israel off the world map. While Barak did an amazing job of exposing the Palestinians true intent, he forgot that the world was still as anti-Semitic as it has always been.

It made no difference that everyone from Bill Clinton, Madeline Albright, the heads of Europe to the King of Saudi Arabia condemned Arafat. Months later, thanks to the war he started in response to PM Barak’s more than generous offer, the world was condemning Israel for responding to suicide attacks that were mass-murdering her citizens.

Today there is ridiculous talk about the settlements being the main obstacle to peace. This deluded concept is built totally by complete ignorance of the historical facts (or by simply choosing to ignore those facts). There shouldn’t be settlements today, but not for the reasons given by the Palestinian leadership, the EU, the Obama administration, the people suffering from amnesia at Haaretz or the Israeli left.

There shouldn’t be settlements today because Yassar Arafat should have put his people before his ego and his hatred of a Jewish state’s existence at Camp David and Taba. There should be a Palestinian State today and there would have been, if not for the Palestinian leadership who rejected peace in 2000. The only reason why there are still Jewish settlements and why there is no Palestinian State rests in the hands of those who rejected the greatest compromise a state could give while seeking peace.

Today Mahmoud Abbas is not interested in peace or compromise with Israel. What he is interested in is making Israel out to be the bad guy for mistakes the previous Palestinian leadership made. He hopes to blame Israel when talks breakdown because of his Palestinians’ inability to compromise.

An instant clue to the ultimate failure of the current so-called peace effort is the type of negotiations Abbas agreed to. Israel and the Palestinians have been negotiating face to face since before the actual signing of the Oslo Accords. It was face to face (but behind-the-scenes)negotiations that made the Oslo Accords possible. Abbas rejecting face to face negotiations shows how frivolous and infantile the Palestinians still are.

Most mature of all is Hamas’ (the leaders of Gaza) “welcome” to even this inane pretense of negotiations: firing a Qassam rocket into Israel, near Ashkelon!

More insidious, the world has chosen to ignore the Palestinians’ cunning maneuvering of the sympathies of the extreme left into helping delegitimize Israel. The current array of monstrous acts allegedly perpetrated by Israel -- apartheid, occupation, oppression, repression, genocide, a plethora of other so-called human rights abuses -- could make Rudolf Hess blanch. “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” will look like children’s literature before the Palestinophiles get through with their slander about Israel.

I hope for peace. I hope Israel will finally get the chance to be at peace with her neighbors. I hope for the Palestinians there will be peace. I hope they get their state.

I doubt it will happen, though, since they are still so determined to destroy Israel before building their own nation on her ashes.