The World's Most Pointless Negotiations

By Alan Caruba

With yet another meeting between the Prime Minister of Israel and the President of the United States, we are witnessing the world’s oldest and most pointless negotiations, the call for a Palestinian State.

As Dan Greenfield, a freelance commentator, recently pointed out, “For 17 years, Israel, America, and just about every interested party has tried to build a Palestinian state”, noting quite accurately that such a state has existed since the founding of Jordan.

Israel was supposed to be much larger when its borders were originally planned, but Winston Churchill insisted that the Hashemites, a Saudi breakaway clan, be given a big chunk of the land from Great Britain’s Palestine Mandate, a result of the Versailles Treaty after World War I.

It was this treaty that literally divided up the former Ottoman Empire into various colonies of England and France. Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and modern day Lebanon are literally geographic inventions of this treaty. Jordan exists due to the protection and support provided by both Israel and America.

The British who, via the Balfour Letter asserted that a homeland for the Jews was their policy, betrayed the early Zionists seeking a modern homeland in Israel, their ancient homeland, when it carved out a large section of their Palestinian Mandate to be ceded to Jordan.

Following the initial war in 1947 when Arab nations attacked Israel and again in 1967, a vast “refugee” problem occurred following promises by those same Arab nations that local Arabs could return to claim all of Israel.

A permanent refugee population was created by United Nations intervention that set up UNRWA, a unique and separate agency devoted entirely to maintaining the so-called Palestinians. In place since 1950, these permanently displaced people have been funded by UNRWA and through the “charity” provided by Arab nations that have used them as pawns.

The Palestinians are now the world’s oldest “refugees.” Even when Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza, they have never been able to create anything resembling a nation state capable of establishing a viable economy. Instead, they turned the territory into a platform for constant attacks on Israel.

There never was a Palestinian state or anything even approximating a state. It was and is a fiction. There is no historic Palestinian people, no Arab king of the Palestinians, nothing that defines them as anything other than Arabs who, in the years leading up to Israel’s founding regarded themselves largely as residents of southern Syria or Jordan.

At no time since have the alleged representatives, Yassir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Authority and subsequently the warring factions of Fatah and Hamas, has any offer of land for peace been accepted, despite major efforts by the United States to mediate a solution.

If the United Nations was to close UNRWA, the so-called Palestinians would have to be absorbed into the existing Arab states of the Middle East, but the United Nations has proven the most hostile global institution to such a solution and to the existence of Israel.

As the years have passed, Iran’s Islamic Revolution has metastasized into a threat to Israel and the entire Middle East in its quest for nuclear weapons and regional hegemony. The Arab states fear Iran more than they do Israel and with good reason.

Israel, of course, must determine when it will destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities and no amount of pressure from the United States will deter that decision. It either takes action or will be subjected to a nuclear attack. Recent polls indicate that slightly more than half of all Israelis now favor an immediate attack.

The Obama administration’s outreach to Iran is either naïve or a deliberate effort to accede to Iran’s intentions.

All negotiations regarding a Palestinian state are a farce played out on the world stage because the parties to them know full well the Palestinians, led by two warring factions, never had and never will agree to anything other than the destruction of Israel.

The Israelis know this. It’s time for the rest of the world to acknowledge it and to abandon the United Nations program in order to force the Palestinians to integrate themselves into the many Middle Eastern nations that exist to absorb them.