Palestine: peace impossible without will

The Israelis do not aim at civilians and would stop all military action tomorrow if the terrorism stopped.

Greg Sheridan is back from Israel.

AND so international donors have pledged $8.6 billion in aid to the Palestinian Authority. This eye-popping amount of money will continue the Palestinians’ status as the highest per capita aid recipients in the world. Not that I’m suggesting Palestinians don’t have it tough, even if most of their suffering is caused by the appalling decisions of their corrupt, incompetent and extremist leadership.

The aid pledged in Paris may nonetheless do some good. It may stabilise living standards on the West Bank. And by exacerbating the contrast between a more prosperous West Bank, controlled by the secular Fatah, and an increasingly poverty-stricken Gaza Strip, controlled by the religious extremists, Hamas, it may strengthen Fatah against Hamas.

Assuming all this works out perfectly, at the very best we might get a slightly improved status quo. The chances of a long-term peace agreement, I would say, are almost nil.

I have just returned from three weeks in Israel. I spent quite a bit of time on the West Bank. I would say the situation is on a hair trigger and we are as far from peace as ever.

…It seems that every two-term American president feels a desperate need in his last year to solve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Bill Clinton was at it in his last 24 hours in office. Ronald Reagan had a plan in his last year. By trying so hard to get an agreement to bolster the legacy of a presidency in its dying days, the Americans often scramble and improvise, take foolish risks and by their own political desperation convince all parties that maximum results are possible. The result is frequently disastrous.

There are two short-term factors that will tend to keep a lid on the conflict, and one that will tend to make it explode, but all the long-term trends are unhelpful.

…Remove the Israelis and the estimates of how long Fatah would remain in power range from two weeks to two hours.

…The short-term trend that could cause a blow-up any day is the Qassam rockets being fired daily from Gaza at Israeli civilians in Sderot and increasingly near the sizeable Israeli city of Ashkelon, with its vital and vulnerable power station. Every day half a dozen of these rockets are fired. On one day when I was there recently 20 were fired. These are not fired at military targets. Their intent is to murder civilians.

Luckily, these rockets are crude, short-range and inaccurate. But they are becoming longer-range as outsiders, especially Iran, provide weaponry. Eventually one of these rockets will hit a school bus or a classroom and kill 20 Israeli children. When that happens the Israeli political process will demand a huge operation in Gaza to clean out the rocket factories. No Israeli wants to go back to Gaza. But they will if necessary and such an operation would be bloody and terrible. Many people would die. Amid all the criticism Israel would face, one question would be unanswerable: which democratic country would not respond if its civilians were being daily fired upon by rockets? There is no moral equivalence between Palestinian terrorism and Israeli military action. The Israelis do not aim at civilians and would stop all military action tomorrow if the terrorism stopped.

…The question is whether the PA can ever get to a stage where it can govern Palestinian society, and whether the PA has any genuine interest in peace. Until very recently PA school text books contained traditional anti-Semitic propaganda against the Jews. Due to international pressure that has largely been removed. But still the text books, and the Palestinian media, are full of incitement to terrorism and no suggestion that Israel will be a peace partner, or even a state Palestinians will have to live with. Instead maps of Palestine are routinely printed which simply erase Israel altogether.

This means the peace talks, and the media commentary around it, are rigged against Israel because they don’t discuss the one real obstacle to peace: the refusal of the Palestinian leadership, and much of the Middle East Islamic leadership, to genuinely accept Israel’s right to exist.

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