NON-NEGOTIABLE

'Road map' for Mideast peace leads nowhere (Max Boot, 7/01/03, USA Today)

The new peace process, just like its predecessors, is premised on the notion that Israelis and Palestinians need to make mutual concessions to end their war: The Israelis need to give up the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and the Palestinians need to stop terrorism. The problem is that most Israelis are willing to meet their obligations, but most Palestinians aren't.

Polls show that more than 60% of Israelis are willing to give up the West Bank and recognize a Palestinian state. Even Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon, a longtime supporter of the settler movement, now says he is willing to end Israel's "occupation." This will require overcoming opposition from a hard-core minority, but democracies have a long history of doing just that, as we saw during our own civil rights movement. Neither Sharon nor any other Israeli leader, however, will accede to a "right of return" for millions of Palestinian refugees, which would effectively end Israel's existence as a Jewish state.

The continued harping of Palestinian leaders on this point suggests they still are not reconciled to Israel's existence. Indeed, a recent survey by the Pew Global Attitudes Project found that 80% of Palestinians don't believe "that a way can be found for the state of Israel to exist so that the rights and needs of the Palestinian people are met." Another poll found only 25% of Palestinians support "cutting off funding for groups engaged in terror and violence against Israelis."

Successful negotiations are impossible when one side won't recognize the other's right to exist. No wonder the peace talks ended in frustration two and a half years ago: Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat rejected Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak's offer of more than 95% of the West Bank, because he couldn't reconcile himself to living alongside a Jewish state. [...]

However well intentioned, the latest peace process is likely to backfire as badly as its predecessor did. The only long-term hope for peace
is that the Palestinians will weary of this war--as the Israelis already did when a majority came to support the creation of a Palestinian state--and give real power to leaders intent on stopping the suicide bombers. Bush recognized this necessity in his June 24, 2002, speech, which made regime change in the Palestinian Authority a pre-condition for progress. Abbas' appointment is a step in the right direction, but the process is a long way from being complete. Until it is, the road map is unlikely to lead anywhere.

This is sort of the archetypal hawkish position: Israel has already decided to give the Palestinians a state but the Palestinian terrorists won't take it so we should all just accept the murderous status quo. This, it would seem obvious, cedes control over the future of the Israel-Palestine war to the least reasonable parties involved.

Meanwhile, as if having won the concesssion of statehood weren't enough to keep them going, here's why the terrorists won't tire of the war: The demographic clock is ticking for Israel (Uri Dromi, July 2, 2003, The International Herald Tribune) 

The Middle East road map is yet another testimony to the traditional, bipartisan and, may I add, admirable commitment of all U.S. administrations to bring peace to the region. However, with the complex nature of the conflict, it is not totally absurd to assume that for all the American good will, unrest may still continue, maybe as far as the year 2015.

What's so special about 2015? Well, according to a recently published survey by the Jewish Policy Planning Institute, in that year there will be more Arabs than Jews between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Arabs here just happen to have more kids than Jews do.

This dry statistic has only one meaning. If Israel keeps the West Bank and Gaza under its control, it will have to choose between two painful options: either losing its Jewish character or ceasing to be a democratic state. In other words, if Israel wants to remain both Jewish and democratic, it has to pull out of the territories.

With more pressing threats like suicide bombing and other terror attacks, Israelis tend to ignore the ticking of the demographic clock. Fighting terror come first. Yet others, including Palestinians, listen carefully to the ticking.

The Palestinian poet-in-exile, Mahmoud Darwish, in a recent interview with Yediot Ahronot, wondered about what Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was actually doing: "If you don't want a Palestinian state on 22 percent of the land today, in 20 years there will be a Palestinian state on the whole land."

It sometimes seems as if nothing in the Middle East makes any sense, but nothing makes less than this: time is on the side of the Palestinians, yet the pro-Israel hawks are fighting a delaying action. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 2, 2003 9:57 AM