The Annapolis Folly

Ariel Cohen

In analyzing political processes, we cannot look only at one day, one week or one year. The timelines and track records of governments, movements and peoples do matter.
Israel has a track record of seeking peace. At Camp David 1979, Israel gave up 100 percent of the Sinai. Egypt promised a warm peace: tourism, trade, art and science contacts. Nothing of the kind has happened. There is cold peace, and today the Egyptian-Israeli border leaches terrorists and explosives, while Egypt is doing nothing.

If the Muslim Brothers, the spiritual kinsmen of Hamas, take over Egypt, the remnants of President Anwar Sadat’s peace legacy will evaporate overnight. How do I know? Because the Broherhood said so.

One may criticize Anwar Sadat, but two things cannot be denied: he had a vision of peace and he was martyred for it.

In 1993, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres convinced themselves that bringing Yasir Arafat out of his Tunisian semi-retirement would advance peace. They offered Arafat everything: control of Gaza and the West Bank, international recognition, visits with President Clinton, photo ops on the White House lawn, room and board in Camp David.

But when the push came to shove, Arafat walked away from the peace negotiations and started a bloody terror war, what they called an “intifadah”. As a result, 1,000 Israelis and 4,000 Palestinians were killed. Many Israeli civilians were brutally murdered and maimed by suicide bombers, on buses and in restaurants, during Passover Seder celebrations or in schools and kindergartens.

What was accomplished by the terror war? The GDP in the West bank is 3 times lower than it was in the year 2000. It is 4 times lower in Gaza. And both sides are further from peace than they were before the terror war started.

Israel also signed a peace treaty with Jordan in 1994. The peace was achieved because of the vision of King Houssein of Jordan. His grandfather, King Abdullah, was killed by a Palestinian religious fanatic in the Al Aqsa mosque, in 1952. The grandson upheld his grandfather’s vision.

Great men have visions of peace -- and work to accomplish their dreams. Terrorists have visions of bloodshed—and work to accomplish theirs.

In the year 2000, then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak ordered Israeli troops from South Lebanon. That midnight retreat signaled to Arafat that Israelis were weak, that they no longer had the stamina to fight. This what triggered Arafat’s intransigence in Camp David that year.

Israeli retreat precipitated Arafat’s rule of terror.

Ariel Sharon, one of Israel greatest battlefield generals, succeeded where Barak failed. He put down Arafat’s terror assault. But by 2005, Sharon, embattled by allegations of corruption, needed a distraction. As early as 2003, he announced plans to withdraw from Gaza and uproot the Jewish villages there.

For the first time, Israel destroyed the homes of its citizens without a peace treaty, without any reciprocity – with nothing in return. And once the jubilant mobs had burned and destroyed the synagogues and hothouses and homes in Gaza in the fall of 2005, Hamas coasted to victory in the January 2006 Parliamentary elections. The corrupt Fatah, led by Abu Mazen, was defeated.

As you see, these timelines matter.

What also matters is that the voters in Gaza preferred the intransigent position of Hamas – no recognition of Israel’s right to exist – to the somewhat more wishy-washy position of Fatah.

Now, the US State Department was warned by both Israel and the Abu Mazen that pressing for these elections could bring Hamas to power. But the warnings were not heeded.

Since 2001, the Road Map plan, produced by the Quartet, has been gathering dust. But there is no other plan. According to the Road Map, the Palestinian Authority had to fight terrorism; terrorist organizations, like Hamas, were to be dismantled, members of terrorist organizations were to be disarmed or incorporated into a single Palestinian military and police force under single command. Palestinians undertook to stop incitement to murder of Jews: men, women and children. None of this has happened.

The vision of President Bush, articulated in the June 2002 speech, talked about two democratic states living side by side. When Hamas rounds up and shoots Fatah supporters in Gaza, is this practicing democracy? When Hamas pushes Fatah members off the roofs? When they ban music?

Is this the democracy that the US is promoting throughout the Middle East?

So, what do the Palestinians get for violating the Road Map? For their inability to live together as a community which includes secular and religious people? For refusing to recognize Israel’s right to exist?

The Annapolis conference!

And who are Palestinians today? Who speaks for them? Who represents them?

Is it Abu Mazen and his cronies from Tunis who were voted out by their own people? Is it Prime Minister Salam Fayad, the pragmatic former World Bank official? How much legitimacy does he have, when he admits that he cannot appear in the West Bank cities of Jenin and Nablus because he could be killed?

Are Palestinians capable of delivering any commitments they undertake, when President Abbas’s own bodyguards were planning to assassinate Prime Minister Olmert – and then arrested and released as if this was a minor traffic violation?

Is it Hamas? If so, which one – the leadership in Gaza or in Damascus? The Saudi-supported or Iran-supported? Is it the Palestinian spokesmen in Damascus, like Faruk Qaddumi, who opposes any talks with Israel?

The ultimate aim of all competing Palestinian leaderships is not to create a viable state. It is to perpetrate the narrative of hatred and victimhood which prevents both peace and statehood from taking root.

Even the Palestinian Authority’s Saeb Erekat refuses to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. The PA refuses to give up its demands that the refugees and the descendants of the refugees of 1948 go back to what is today Israel, whereas ALL of the World War Two and decolonization era refugees have been resettled: in Germany and Poland, in India and Pakistan, in Russia and Ukraine. 200 million refugees have been resettled, and so are refugees no more.

Included in that are 800 thousands Jewish refugees forced to flee from Arab lands when Egypt, Syria, Iraq and others turned on their Jewish minorities, stripped them of their property, and threatened their lives in anger at the creation of the State of Israel.

But the Arab states have refused refused to give their refugee brothers citizenship or basic rights. They too are intent on perpetuating the problem – and the United States, Europe, the UN and Russia have not lifted a finger to demand that these oil-rich countries, which do not know what to do with their dollar glut, resettle the Palestinians just as Israel resettled 800,000 Jews from Arab lands. So, who is more cruel to the Palestinians – Israel or their Arab brethren?

The Palestinians refuse to recognize the continuity of Jewish presence in the Land of Israel and the existence of two Jewish Temples on the Temple Mount. In other words, they refuse to recognize the basic notion of “the other” – and without that, there can be no peace.

Until such recognition and reconciliation takes place, all the photo ops are a waste of time. Until such time as the rulers and the people of Gaza and the West Bank stop their incitement in kindergartens, schools, mosques and on radio and TV, the peace process has no meaning, as millions are being brainwashed to become the next generation of “shahids” – suicide murderers.

Until such mutual respect, recognition and reconciliation are in place, territorial concessions, “taking risks for peace,” dismantling Jewish villages, calls to loosen security in the West Bank and Gaza, or provide electricity, food and water to Hamas death factories are themselves counterproductive and deadly, no matter how humanitarian they may sound.

The rationale of pushing Israel to make more concessions in order to placate the Arab countries to help the US in Iraq, or to build the coalition against Iran will simply not work. These issues are barely connected.

The Iranian and Shi’a threat to the Sunni regimes is real, and the Arab rulers in Riyadh and Cairo know it. Iran is more of a threat to them than Israel ever was. Iran with nuclear weapons is a threat to the world, as it may try to dominate the Persian Gulf – the world’s gas station.

Creating a Palestinian terror state in Gaza and the West Bank today will precipitate a new terror war led by Hamas. In such a state, hell-bent on the destruction of Israel, Hamas may quickly overthrow what remains of Abu Mazen’s authority. A terror in Gaza and the West Bank will threaten not only Israel, but also Jordan.

Iran will use any post-Annapolis pretext to re-launch Hezbollah attacks against Israel and in order to take over Lebanon, together with their Syrian allies.

It is myopic to concentrate on the Arab-Israeli conflict, that cemetery of diplomacy, while ignoring the threats from Iran, from Hezbollah, and from Al Qaeda. These challenges are geographically spread from Gaza to Lebanon, from Iraq to Qatar, from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Kashmir and beyond.

The resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is unlikely, but even if it was resolved tomorrow, it would not eliminate the deep divisions in the Muslim world. They are between the radicals and the moderates, between the Sunni and the Shia, between democrats and authoritarians, between socialists and Islamists. Even if, God forbid, Israel disappeared today, America’s problem in the Middle East would not disappear with it.

The US recently suffered diplomatic setbacks in Pakistan and Georgia, and may do so in again Lebanon.

Adding to this list the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is against US interests and is the equivalent of giving oneself a black eye. Or shooting oneself in the foot.
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