Here Comes Trouble

When he was sliding his iron fist into his velvet glove, Clausewitz characterized negotiation as war by other means. At the moment, the US is making war on Israel. Israel made her concessions and offered more with the Palestinians who would not take yes for an answer refusing 97% of the West Bank in exchange for peace when Bill Clinton was President. Palestinian leadership has been responsible for elevating terror to a high art (which paved the way for al Qaeda setting its sights higher) and has been marked by corruption and intransigence. Palestinian heritage is a dubious admixture, comprised largely of Arabs brought from other parts of the Ottoman Empire to serve as laborers in Ottoman Palestine in the last few centuries. Wandering Bedouin, Jews, Christians of various sects, a small band of Samaritans, who it could be argued, had the longest continuous presence, and Druse, were all on the land ruled by the Turks, but it must be stressed that most of today's Palestinian Muslims had far shorter ties to the land than the enduring claims of their neighbors. But now the Palestinians convey to the world that their durable (dubious) claim supersedes everyone else's. And where the Palestinian diaspora has flowed, misery has followed. Lebanon was peaceful and prosperous until the Palestinians initiated a bloody civil war. Before that, Palestinians had tried to rebel in Jordan and topple Hashemite King Hussein, and the bloodbath they initiated there, not some outrage in Israel, became the basis of Black September and the eponymous terror organization that slew the Israeli Olympians in Munich in 1972. Palestinians who have never recognized Israel as a Jewish state, who have never eschewed violence, who refuse to abandon incitement, are about to be rewarded with much of Israel's land. The Palestinians in Kuwait turned on their generous Gulf benefactors when Saddam invaded. They were rightly then turned out. In Iraq, Palestinians were turned on Iraqis by Saddam Hussein and when he was deposed, his Palestinian henchmen were dispossessed by Iraqi neighbors who had come to fear them as they served as Bathist thugs under Saddam's protection. Where Palestinians have journeyed, they have taken simmering hostility and viciousness with them. When there is no exterior enemy they can focus their violent energies on, Palestinians fight among themselves as was evinced in Gaza with Hamas turning on the Palestinian Authority and Abbas' forces of order (at least as much order as Palestinians had ever enjoyed under internationally recognized leadership). So Israel is supposed to rely on US assurances that America will vouchsafe the Jewish state if she makes substantive territorial concessions to a people who shed blood everywhere Palestinians are or have been. The US made similar declarations of support to South Vietnam and I can no longer seem to find that polity on my world atlas. So should Israel bend to the pressure of her former best friend the US and return to pre-1967 suicide borders or should Israel point out that Palestinians already enjoy autonomy in Gaza from which Israel has received for her good faith, thousands of missiles, rockets, and mortars, terror sniping, bombs, a sneak attack involving murder and the unresolved abduction of Israeli military conscript Gilad Shalit? Israel should declare to the world Gaza is Palestine and until Palestinians cease attacks and incitement, Gaza is all the state Palestinians will have. They can have the Palestinian law of return there and crowd in like cord wood or sardines, they can call from the minarets there for death to the Jews, but they will not be doing so from East Jerusalem. Israel accepts the two state solution and so far as I am concerned, both states already exist in permanent borders.