No, It's not (And probably never has been)

Submitted by Ron Thompson (United States), Jan 18, 2007 at 10:44

In reading all the Burning Issues #21 comments, the one that most struck me was this:

"There is something deeply troubling about the ongoing obsession with the 'road map' among diplomats and decision-makers."

For I think it remains a huge positive danger to Israel, the US, and the West to even pretend, whether for reasons of cynicism, convenience, a misguided peace ideology, deference to Arab 'sensibilities', or whatever, that there is ANY prospect that the 'road map' will ever lead to an Israeli/Palestinian peace.

Consider the following analogy.

It is pretty widely recognized that it was a colossal mistake for the United States to have gotten itself into a position in Iraq where anything like success is not in its own hands, but depends on the incompetent, unreliable, or even outrightly hostile Maliki (so-called) government. Allowing this to happen was an elemental and needless violation of any statecraft worthy of the name.

And yet for decades, and especially over the last 15 years, the US, Israel, and their friends (to the extent they have any real ones) have willingly, or witlessly, left the initiative on the Palestinian issue in the hands of the ....... Palestinians. No amount of equivocation, wily cunning by Arafat, or escalating violence and now genocidal shouting-from-the-rooftops by Hamas (now joined in full cry by Iran) has caused any apparent serious questioning of this veto power in the hands of a leadership which has been raised since infancy on Hate. And which is continually empowered and reinforced by the ... what, denial, wishful thinking, refusal .... to consider that the Palestinians, in all their various 'leadership' hues, DO NOT WANT a State, if the price of that State is a genuine acknowledgment of Israel's right to exist, and in peace.

Now granted, if this obvious reality should become conscious and part of public thinking in concluding that there is never going to be a Palestinian State in the West bank and Gaza, there is a major problem of timing - how and when to SAY this. Perhaps after another round of Hamas, Hezbollah, or Iran-sponsored violence. But somehow, somewhere, I hope somebody, ideally a broad combination of voices in Israel, the US, and maybe even Europe (perhaps after another shocking attack there which is carried out in the name of the "injustice" of the Palestinian situation), the whole idea of any Palestinian sovereign State will be expressly rejected, and talk will shift to how to 'compensate' the removal of the populace. (Such compensation to be perhaps paired with compensation due the hundreds of thousands of Jews disinherited of their possessions and ethnically cleansed from various Arab and Moslem countries in the 1950's).

Ron Thompson

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