Home Israel Palestinians Peace Doesn't Exist. Neither Do the Palestinians
Home Israel Palestinians Peace Doesn't Exist. Neither Do the Palestinians

Peace Doesn't Exist. Neither Do the Palestinians

Salah Abu Miala, a Hebron businessman, traveled to Bahrain to attend the Bahrain peace conference. When he returned home, he was arrested by the Palestinian Authority.

A security official for the Islamic terror group admitted that there was no actual charge.

"It was a warning," he said. "He must understand the implications of this sort of collaboration."

Collaboration with the United States. The country that set up the PA and lavished billions in aid on it.


Another businessman managed to evade the crackdown on peace conference attendees.

The Palestinian Authority had not only boycotted the peace conference, but it arrested participants in the peace conference, and warned that participating in the peace conference was collaboration.

Collaboration, under Palestinian Authority law, can be punishable by death.

The message is that the Palestinian Authority really doesn’t want peace. It has sabotaged peace conferences under Clinton, Bush, Obama, and now Trump. Every approach running the same narrow gamut from pressuring Israel to bribing the Palestinian Authority has been tried. They all end the same.

Just ask Salah who was locked up for attending a peace conference.

The pattern here is so obvious that it would take a diplomat or a politician to miss it. That’s why we’ve been mired in it for so long. And the billions of dollars wasted and thousands of lives lost could have been saved if only our leaders had questioned their premises by asking three simple questions.

1. What if the Palestinians don’t want peace?

2. What if there are no Palestinians?

3. What if there’s no such thing as peace?

The three assumptions, that the Palestinians exist, that they want peace, and that enduring peace is an attainable condition in the region, are at the root of the senselessly Sisyphean peace process.

The peace process was launched under the assumption that the PLO really wanted peace. Or at least a deal. Surely, our best and brightest agreed, they couldn’t possibly want an endless war.

And so, the truth was dismissed out of hand. It was too horrible to believe.

Decades of failed negotiations, rafts of Israel concessions, personal involvement by five presidential administrations, billions of dollars, with nothing to show for it, and the truth is still dismissed.

Instead, the official story is that Israel doesn’t want peace. The media echo chamber resounds with a narrative in which Israel has moved sharply to the right and is run by ultra-orthodox religious fanatics.

And Netanyahu, who is hardly anyone’s idea of an ultra-religious fanatic.

Also, the most right-wing party in the last Israeli election ran on a platform of marijuana legalization.

But it’s easier to claim that Israel doesn’t want peace than that the Palestinian Authority doesn’t. If Israel doesn’t want peace, that just goes to show that it’s a bad actor and must forced for its own good. If the Palestinian Authority doesn’t want peace, then the whole political premise of the process dies.

Israeli misbehavior can always be met with economic and political pressure. If the PA doesn’t want peace on any terms, that means it was never really a government, just a front for a terror group.

And that terror group became vastly more powerful and dangerous because of the peace process.

Before the peace process, the idea that the PLO might not want peace seemed implausible. In the post-peace process, the idea is an explosive scandal whose culpability extends through the political establishments of dozens of countries, including America and Israel. And so, it can’t be talked about.

Why did so many experts come to believe, against all evidence, that the PLO wanted peace? The error came about because the establishment had accepted the PLO’s propaganda that it was leading a national struggle to set up a state on behalf of a population of displaced and oppressed people.

The truth was that Palestine, as an Arab cultural minority as opposed to a defunct Roman colony, was as much of a mythical invention as the Islamic State with its Caliph. Like ISIS, Hezbollah and countless Islamic terror groups around the region, the terror group tapped into grievances among a local minority, invented an identity for them, and, backed by foreign donors, launched a campaign to “liberate” them.

There are dozens of similar enterprises going on in the region at any given time. They don’t enjoy the same level of support and recognition as the PLO does. None of them can actually run a state. Or want to. But neither does anyone else in the region. That’s why it’s always on the verge of exploding.

That brings us to the third assumption.

Peace as the natural state of the world is an exciting European delusion from just after one war and then another war that devastated the continent. There is as little evidence for this idea in human history as there is for the existence of a Palestinian kingdom, empire or anthill. And even less evidence for either the existence of peace or the Palestinians in its own region which has never experienced either one.

Even in Europe, the inevitability of peace keeps being interrupted by wars every generation. There are soldiers in the streets of Paris, where the first League of Nations meeting was held, fighting the war that France failed to fight in Algeria. After reviling the Pied-Noirs, the French are two generations away from becoming a nation of Pied-Noirs themselves, fleeing to Montreal to escape the Battle of Paris.

Peace is not the natural condition of mankind. It is a lovely thing that sometimes happens.

Generations of western diplomats keep stumbling into disasters because they believe that peace is inevitable. Therefore, the other side is bound to want it, because it wants the same things they do.

They never ask the terrible question, what if the other side wants something else?

Our foreign policy keeps falling apart because we never ask that question. We take the other side’s claims at face value and view them through the flawed lens of our own wants and needs. We want peace; therefore, they must want it too. We want the killing to stop, how could they not?

No matter how many times peace fails, the fundamental assumptions are never questioned.

What if instead of negotiating with a national minority that wants land for its own state, we’ve been funding an Islamic terror group that was set up by the USSR to destabilize the region?

Which of these two possibilities better explains the history of failures in the peace process?

If the Palestinian Authority were a terror group set up by the USSR to destabilize the region, undermine Israel’s existence, and drag America into a messy conflict, what would it be doing differently?

Nothing.

There’s no solution here. There never was. The region is never at peace for longer than a week. When peace can’t even hold between Sunnis and Shiites, how was it supposed to hold between either Muslim group and the Jews? The Arab Spring reminded us that every state in the region is just one crackup away from splitting apart into a civil war. What made anyone think that a terror group could create a state?

Or that it even wanted to.

We can solve the problem that five administrations have struggled with if we reevaluate our flawed assumptions about the world, the Palestinian Authority and the fictional people it represents.

All we have to do is ask the right three questions.







Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Comments

  1. QUESTION:

    Who are the Palestinians?

    ANSWER:

    www.jns.org/opinion/the-invention-of-palestinians/

    www.algemeiner.com/2019/02/14/the-invention-of-palestinians/

    https://ShilohMusings.blogspot.com/2018/06/who-are-palestinians.html

    https://IsraelSeen.com/2019/07/20/timothy-benton-origins-of-the-palestinian-narrative/

    ===================================

    QUESTION:

    Did Captain Kirk believe in negotiating with terrorists?

    ANSWER:

    Captain James T. Kirk said:

    “We DO NOT negotiate with those who
    threaten our lives or the lives of others.”

    SOURCE: Star Trek: Savage Trade
    (chapter 17, bottom of page 303) by Tony Daniel,
    year 2015 CE, Pocket Books, New York,
    ISBN: 9781476765501 * ISBN: 1476765502

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous23/7/19

    What if there are no Palestinians?

    There's a video available on Youtube (if the "progressives" haven't expunged it from existence) from the 1930's showing the Australian soccer team playing a "Palestinian" team. When the action gets too fast for the five syllable identifier "Palestinian" the commentator identifies the team as the Jews.
    Yes, that's right - the real "Palestinians" are the Jews.
    When Palestine was a British mandate the British started issuing passports, birth certificates etc identifying the locals as "Palestinians". A certain segment of the population went ballistic, saying that being called "Palestinian" was an insult and that they demanded to be called "Arabs". It wasn't till after 1948 that their propagandists decided to co-opt the "Palestinian" brand.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous24/7/19

    Another Captain Kirk quote: In "The Savage Curtain", when Kirk, Spock, Lincoln, and Surak are teamed up against 4 creeps, Kirk has a conversation with a certain traitorous Colonel. Kirk addresses him, "You were notorious, Colonel Green, for striking at your enemies in the midst of negotiating with them."

    Describes negotiating with Arafat to a T.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Very nice analysis. Crystal clear, to the point, sharp as a razor. Better writing than I've seen anyone else do on the topic.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Beautiful. Simply beautiful.
    Never despair from exposing the truth.

    ReplyDelete
  6. The King of Jordan, Abdullah II bin Al-Hussein, is in trouble, and his monarchy might be overthrown. A new government might be Palestinian. What should Israel do if the new government offered to take over the Palestinian parts of the West Bank.

    PS. If you want to argue that the Palestinians do not exist, you have to confront the issue that Ashkenazi Jews are Europeans, not Jews from the Holy Land. Those Jews disappeared 2,000 years ago.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Anonymous16/7/20

      'palestinians' in Judea/Samaria were Jordanian citizens until 1988. Jordan relinquished all claims to Judea/Samaria when it signed the deal with Israel. Jordan only initially acquired the territory illegally in 1948 after waging a war of aggression and illegally annexing it, an annexation that was recognized by virtually no-one including Egypt and Syria. That is why it flooded the place with Jordanian squatters who you call 'palestinians' to try and legitimize their illegality.

      The anti-Semitic trope that European Jews are not from Judea has little to do with their claim of title. There has been a continuous Jewish presence in Judea for 4000yrs. If Jews are in Europe it is because Europeans put them there. The Crusaders alone murdered 300,000 Jews in the Holy Land. For your ilk Jews are the Christ killers for the purposes and convenience of persecution but are 'not from the Holy-Land' when they exercise their irresistible property rights as the rightful heirs of Judea. There has never been a 'palestine'. It is a geographic location, named by the Romans to vent their displeasure at Jewish revolution against their occupation. There is not even a 'p' phonetic in arabic. They call the place falastin. Arabs are 'palestinian' like I am Mickey Mouse. Please GFY.

      Delete
  7. Why did so many ‘experts’ come to believe, against all evidence, that the PLO wanted peace? Was it because they were out for a Jewish prey at all Jewish lives’ cost?

    ReplyDelete
  8. The only way to go forwards is: 1/ sanction the PA till they collapse economically; 2/ change the PA curriculum from the first letter to an ecumenism curriculum; 3/ declare Fatah and PLO a terrorist organizations; 4/ allow Israel to annex Are C and put the PA on a FINAL notice:
    Regarding Area A & B: you have 5 years to make a total change – end all terror, change education, extend hand in peace and act peace - if not, you lost the PA ruling forma and you will need to find homes elsewhere, as Area A & B are now under Israel’s sovereignty, as it should have been after the Six Day War. Israel was too generous. You made the generosity of Israel that intended to bring about real peace a business of being a recipient of enormous sums of money that did nothing but made you rich and your people poor and bitter and funded and still funds perpetual crimes of terror while despicably funding the Jew murders and their families. How uncivilized!

    ReplyDelete
  9. Anonymous24/7/19

    Let me try the three questions:
    1. What if the Palestinians don’t want peace?
    They don’t. War (Harb) goes til total Islam.
    2. What if there are no Palestinians?
    Just a name to distract (Taqiyya).
    3. What if there’s no such thing as peace?
    See number 1.

    Present Western feminized culture strives to
    empathize and compromise, shameful signs of
    weakness. Muslims see only Submit or Die.
    That’s the choice we need to give them. Now.

    Charlie

    ReplyDelete
  10. from the Jewish Virtual Library:

    “Leading up to Israel's independence in [year] 1948, it was common for the international press to label Jews, not Arabs, living in the mandate as Palestinians.

    It was not until years after Israeli independence that the Arabs living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip were called Palestinians.”

    SOURCE: Origin of "Palestine"
    www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/origin-of-quot-palestine-quot/

    ReplyDelete
  11. Anonymous24/7/19

    It's depressing to think this "peace process" has been going on for decades and that it's foundation has been nothing but lies and false assumptions. As someone else wrote this article is a beautifully written piece of prose Mr. Greenfield, even if the truth it exposes is ugly.

    ReplyDelete
  12. Great article. Great comments.

    Rich

    ReplyDelete
  13. Louis erba osou18/2/20

    “The French are two generations away from becoming a nation of pied noir themselves “
    I
    Don’t
    Think
    So

    ReplyDelete

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