{UAH} PALESTINIANS MUST WAKE UP TO NEW REALITY IN MIDEAST

Palestinians must wake up to new reality in Mideast

By John Podhoretz

January 28, 2020 | 10:23pm

On Tuesday, at the White House, President Trump formally enshrined his administration’s full-scale tilt toward Israel vis-à-vis the Palestinians with the release of his “vision to improve the lives of the Palestinian and Israeli people.”

This document views the conflict through new eyes in a new century in a new millennium. It takes serious account of the efforts Israel has made, beginning in the early 1990s, to do what Bill Clinton once called “taking risks for peace.” It recognizes the rueful lessons those efforts have taught us and builds on them.

Three times — twice in 2000 and once in 2008 — Israel offered Palestinians a state in exchange for a declaration of peace. What’s more, in 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew from the Palestinian territory of Gaza and left it to the Gazans to rule themselves.

The Palestinians met both the offers and the withdrawal with multiple wars, thus giving the lie to the ­comforting Hollywood fantasy that all you need to achieve peace is an outstretched hand and a reasonable ­posture.

The Palestinians saw things differently. They had a feckless and fantastical conviction that the world beyond Israel would somehow intervene to give them what they really wanted: A state not alongside Israel but a state that took the place of ­Israel.

No country commits suicide. Israelis responded to these aggressions by reaffirming not only their nation’s right to exist but their right to live in peace the only way possible: By defeating their foes militarily. All its efforts to do so were condemned by the cognoscenti of the West.

Those fools. The bold and necessary moves the Israelis made done to contain Palestinian rage and blood ­furor have saved literally thousands of lives, including Palestinian lives that were not lost in direct martial ­conflict.

So now the United States proposes a full-scale plan, the first of its kind, that takes account of Israel’s security needs and Palestinian aspirations for sovereignty and statehood.

As the plan says, the land it reserves for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza pretty much equals the amount of land on which Palestinians lived before the armistice of 1949 brought the War of Independence to an end. The parts of the West Bank that would be Palestinian are contiguous, and a tunnel would connect the West Bank to Gaza.

What’s different here is that the United States is no longer demanding that Israel place itself in existential jeopardy by giving up vital security territory alongside the Jordan River — or that it redefine its own Zionist cause by unilaterally surrendering part of Jerusalem, you know, just to be nice and a good citizen of the world.

Nor does it make the preposterous demand, implicit in the elite understanding of what the Palestinians would require to accept a deal with Israel, that the Jewish state cede the towns and neighborhoods they have built over the past 53 years to help the Palestinians make the West Bank ­effectively Jew-free.

What it says is that no Palestinians and no Israelis will be uprooted from their homes.

That sentence is a defining truth. It is what peace would truly mean.

If the Palestinian radicals — the sort who have made peace with Israel impossible for more than seven decades — want to know whom to blame for a plan they deem an infamy, the actual answer is simple: Iran.

The Islamic Republic’s behavior in the 21st century is the key change agent that led to Trump’s ­announcement.

Iran’s rising nuclear ambitions began to be a matter of regional concern in the first years of the new millennium, just as the Palestinians were conducting the terror war against Israel known as the Second Intifada. Iran was a major backer of the ­intifada.

Its hostility to Israel was one of the few things Iran had in common with other countries in the Middle East. But as Iran continued its march to ­enriched uranium, something extraordinary happened.

Implacable Arab foes of Israel (the ones that follow the Sunni tendency in Islam rather than Iran’s Shia denomination) grew terrified by the prospect of a nuclear Iran. That was especially true of Saudi Arabia —which has Mecca, the holiest site in Islam, within its borders, a city Iran would love to have under its ­control.

The Saudis, long thought to be Israel’s most dangerous geostrategic foe, suddenly discovered they had common ground with the Jewish state.

This new connection, navigated mostly in secret, meant that the importance of the Palestinian cause to Arab countries other than Iran began to recede rapidly.

A strong Israel was suddenly not such a terrible thing to them, and there was a reason for them to lose interest in weakening Israel.

The idea that the fate of the Palestinians is central to peace in the Middle East was axiomatic 25 years ago. It’s simply laughable today. That is the reality the Trump plan grasps, and grasping the same reality is the only hope the Palestinians have of getting past their wretched status quo.

EM         -> { Trump for 2020 }

On the 49^th Parallel          

                 Thé Mulindwas Communication Group
"With Yoweri Museveni, Ssabassajja and Dr. Kiiza Besigye, Uganda is in anarchy"
                    Kuungana Mulindwa Mawasiliano Kikundi
"Pamoja na Yoweri Museveni, Ssabassajja na Dk. Kiiza Besigye, Uganda ni katika machafuko"