Love of the Land: The ‘Nakba’ Day Protests and the Impossibility of Peace

The ‘Nakba’ Day Protests and the Impossibility of Peace

Eldad Tzioni
www.newsrealblog.com
16 May '11

The events of “Naqba Day” are just one, very small proof that real peace is impossible.

Not “difficult.” Not “painful.” Truly, 100% impossible.

What were the thousands of protesters from Syria, Lebanon and Gaza demanding? Their demands are simple: the “right to return.” They want Israel to allow millions of Arabs of Palestinian descent to flood the country and turn it into another Arab state.

This demand has been absolute and unyielding for 63 years. Never has any Arab leader publicly renounced this demand. Never have the Palestinian Arabs accepted any compromise on the matter. Today, right now, the PLO demands this so-called” right” in unambiguous terms.

There is no need here to mention that there is no such right enshrined in international law, or how easy it is to prove that Arab leaders have used this “demand” as a smokescreen to their real desire to destroy Israel, or the hypocrisy of Palestinian Arab leaders, today, who do not want even those who used to live on land they now control to “return.” All those points are true and can be proven at another time.

The point here is that this demand is completely at odds with Israel’s continued existence. One cannot have it both ways: either the Arabs come and destroy Israel, or Israel is allowed to exist and they never “return.” There is no possible compromise.

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Love of the Land: The ‘Nakba’ Day Protests and the Impossibility of Peace

Love of the Land: The Only Feasible Basis for Arab-Israeli Peace

The Only Feasible Basis for Arab-Israeli Peace

Daniel Mandel

FrontPageMagazine.com

24 September 09

One of the responses I sometimes receive after publishing articles and delivering speeches pouring cold water on the prospects of current diplomatic efforts to achieve an Arab-Israeli peace is: ‘What should Israel/the West be doing instead?’

As it happens, there is an alternative, but it will convince no one unless the prohibitive costs of the present policy of diplomatic engagement with and funding of the Palestinian Authority (PA) are understood – which, largely, they are not. For even among those not deluded about peace prospects, there are some who believe that diplomatic shadow-boxing brings benefits.

Accordingly, what are these alleged benefits?

· Politicians buy time claiming to be working for peace, even if it never arrives. Yet deception via dissemination of spurious good news simply lulls the public to sleep. That might suit incumbents, who often manage to leave office before the consequences of their temporizing boomerang on their countrymen: Britain’s Stanley Baldwin, retiring in 1937, two years before the consequences of his appeasement policy and lack of rearmament helped to produce a long and bitter World War Two; or Bill Clinton’s inertia in dealing with Al Qaeda, leading to 9/11 early on his successor’s watch, come to mind.

· Negotiations defuse tensions and prevent full-scale hostilities. The absence of hostilities is often meaningless if aggressors patiently utilize truces to prepare for war. Just consider Yasser Arafat’s resort to war in 2000, after seven years of diplomatic “progress”; or Hizballah using the illusory calm of 2000-06 to dig in and plot further aggressions from southern Lebanon, leading to a costly, inconclusive war for Israel.

· Negotiations benefit Israel by warding off even stronger pressures. The Oslo negotiations tell otherwise: where Palestinians prove unwilling, the only remaining room for maneuver lies in pressuring Israel, which Bill Clinton duly did. He even threatened Israel with negative UN votes if Israel didn’t deliver concessions. Under both Clinton and Bush, the State Department refused declaring Palestinian violations by promoting terrorism and incitement to hatred. Chief U.S. negotiator Dennis Ross told me personally that “we … became so preoccupied with this process that the process took on a life of its own …Every time there was a [Palestinian] behavior, or an incident or an event that was inconsistent with the process … the impulse was to rationalize it, finesse it, find a way around it and not allow it to break the process.”

Is anything different today?

Fatah, which controls the PA, can hold a conference reasserting its refusal to accept Israel’s existence as a Jewish state while glorifying terrorists and rejecting an end of claims in any future peace agreement with Israel and yet the Obama Administration acts as though the key to the problem is to stop Jews moving into eastern Jerusalem and the West Bank. This is how shadow-boxing and process takes on a life of its own.

(Full Article)

Love of the Land: The Only Feasible Basis for Arab-Israeli Peace