Remember: in 1948, the UN did not vote to create Israel. It voted to create Israel and a Palestinian state. In a word: share the land. Compromise. Live together.
All Arab states rejected that concept 63 years ago.
Hamas and many other Arabs still reject it. Sharing is not in their vocabulary. Which puts quite a different twist on the Arab spring. When it comes to Israel, the idea is not to bring down oppressive leaders. It is to bring down the whole country of Israel.
It is not to build democracy, but to tear it down.
Not to create solidarity among the masses, but to divide Jew from Arab.
Whether the young Arab protesters who massed on Israels border with Syria and Lebanon on May 15, 2011 were sent there by Syrian leaders intent on diverting attention from their recent brutality, or whether the protesters came in misguided solidarity with Arab youth in other countries, the key is not these protesters. The key is what happened elsewhere in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. There, there was no pretense of peaceful protest. There, the same rock-throwing, the same terrorism (this time, the weapon was a truck), the same equation of Israel with catastrophe, told the story.
Examine that word, catastrophe, which Palestinian Arabs like to use to describe what happened on May 15, 1948. Think about it: It was a catastrophe only that Israel came into being, not that the adjoining, UN-envisioned Palestinian state did not come into being. The rejection of sharing, of compromise, of Palestinian independence, was not a catastrophe. Only the creation of a Jewish state qualified for the stigma.
It makes little difference, then, that virtually all Israelis have come around to the idea of another Palestinian state, this one to be created not by the UN, but by negotiation between Israel and the Palestinians. It makes little difference that the once impassable gulf between the liberal and conservative parties in Israel is now bridged, since there is no Palestinian entity to negotiate with.
The radical entity, Hamas, calls for an end to the Zionist project in Palestine. Negotiations over Israels suicide will not take place.
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Then there is the moderate entity, the Palestinian Authority. It has steadfastly refused to come to the negotiating table since Obama became president without its demands agreed to in advance of the negotiations.
Among those demands of the moderate PA are an end to Jewish sovereignty in Jerusalem, the admittance of five million supposed refugees into Israel, the end of every Jewish settlement, the end of every Jewish neighborhood built in Jerusalem since 1967 and if all that were not enough the refusal to acknowledge Israel as a Jewish state and the refusal to end all claims against Israel.
Focus on that last piece. The moderate PA is willing to sign an agreement with Israel that creates a Palestinian state only if the agreement, and the creation of the Palestinian state, does not put an end to further Palestinian claims on Israel.
Repeat: All this has to be agreed to by Israel in advance of the negotiations.
These are the moderates speaking.
We ask you: Is there a shred of difference, other than rhetorical, between the radical and the moderate Palestinians?
Think about that the next time you hear the term Arab spring applied to Palestinians marches or riots against the creation of Israel. Bottom line: On the Palestinian front, nothing has changed in 63 years.
Copyright © 2011 by the Intermountain Jewish News
