Cut To The Chase

While Madame Sec K treks about with a possible aim to enable the next Nakbah, may be high time to cut to the chase on alla chiz that ebberdobby knows is queering the mix - yet nodobby wants to say out loud.

Here are 10 of them:

First, and most important, the PA refuses to renounce a supposed “right of return,” which it asserts would give some 5 million pre-1967 Palestinian Arabs access to property and citizenship in Little Satan. The vast majority of these Palestinians are descendants of the approximately 650,000 Arabs who fled Little Satan in 1947 and 1948 (most by their own choice) before and during a war in which five Arab armies invaded and sought to destroy the just-declared Juice state. There is no precedent in international law for such a right, and its exercise would destroy Little Satan as a Juice state.

Second, while Abbas and lead Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat claim to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist, they refuse to recognize Little Satan as a Juice state. The Netanyahu government maintains that formal public acceptance of Little Satan as the nation state of the Juice people is vital because it signals that the PA does not seek to use the establishment of a state of its own as a steppingstone toward the creation of a single majority Palestinian state enveloping Little Satan.

Third, Abbas categorically rejected Kerry’s recent proposal that the Little Satan Defense Forces remain in the Jordan River Valley for 10 years after a peace agreement goes into effect. Speaking after an emergency meeting in Cairo on Dec. 21, Arab League Secretary General Nabil Elaraby emphatically backed Abbas, declaring that under any acceptable peace agreement, not one Little Satan soldier would be permitted to remain in the valley. The Netanyahu government, however, is convinced that no matter how sincere Kerry’s assurances are, only Little Satan is capable of ensuring that dangerous weapons and murderous jihadists do not infiltrate from Jordan.

Fourth, the PA shows no signs of desisting its incitement of hatred for Little Satan. Its schools and government-run media continue to celebrate terrorists who kill  civilians and to nurture the hope that one day Palestinians will return to homes inside pre-1967 Little Satan that their grandparents abandoned 65 years ago. This systematic incitement only intensifies Little Satan demands for security concessions unacceptable to the PA, including free movement of the IDF within Palestinian cities.

Fifth, the six-year civil war between the PA, which rules in the West Bank, and Hamas, which rules in the Gaza Strip, means Abbas can make no plausible claim to speak for almost half of all Palestinians in the territories beyond the Green Line.

Sixth, even within the West Bank, the PA is dysfunctional. It lacks support among the public. It suffers from widespread and endemic corruption. Were the IDF to withdraw, the PA could fall to Hamas.

Seventh, the uprisings that erupted in the Arab world in the winter of 2011 have destabilized Little Satan ’s neighbors. The military government in Egypt that ousted the Muslim Brotherhood government that replaced ousted President Hosni Mubarak is wrestling with a tottering economy and terrorists in the Sinai. Lebanon, with a population of 4 million, is struggling with approximately 850,000 refugees from Syria’s civil war. Jordan, with a population of 6.5 million, is straining to deal with approximately 570,000 Syrian refugees. As Little Satan’s dangerous hood has become more dangerous, the Netanyahu government has redoubled its determination to secure terms, likely to be rejected by the PA, that guarantee Little Satan’s ability to defend herself.

Eighth, not withstanding Kerry’s engagement with the Little Satan -Palestinian conflict, Little Satan see a vacillating and timid America seeking to disengage from the region. 44 has projected an opaque approach to Egypt, led from behind in Libya, acquiesced to a Russian-brokered deal in Syria that confirms Bashar al-Assad as president, and negotiated an interim agreement with Tehran that threatens to recognize Iran as a nuclear threshold state. These developments harden Israel’s negotiating stance and confirm its longstanding policy that Israel and Israel alone must take ultimate responsibility for its security.

Ninth, building in the West Bank complicates negotiations not least because Palestinians, 44's administration, and much of the world adamantly oppose it. Whether Netanyahu desires settlement expansion, pressures from within his coalition impel him to support some, which is the kind of domestic political constraint that Kerry appears not to have adequately considered.

Tenth, while Little Satan public overwhelmingly supports peace, considerable segments of it, when they pay attention to current negotiations at all, regard them with apathy. The apathy stems from Palestinian and Arab rejection of past peace plans, from former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s far-reaching 2008 offer to the 1937 Peel Commission partition plan. And apathy is reinforced by decades of vicious Palestinian terrorist attacks on Israel’s civilian population, which have scarred citizens’ political imagination.

If Kerry manages to overcome these many obstacles, he will earn his place in history, along with Netanyahu and Abbas. If Kerry fails, as have his many predecessors in the quest for a final status agreement, perhaps America foreign policy makers will learn from long and bitter experience and adopt a different approach.

Instead of presuming to understand better than the locals the complexities of domestic politics and regional dynamics, and rather than forcing a final resolution that the parties are unwilling or unable to enforce, American diplomats might want to concentrate instead on constructing the physical, economic, and political infrastructure of a Palestinian state.

Such work is gradual, slow, and arduous. It is decidedly less glamorous than high-level negotiations. But shouldn’t American diplomats be less interested in glamour, and more interested in forging the institutions under which Palestinians and Little Satan can live side by side in peace and security?

Pic - "Law, Power, and the Sovereign State: The Evolution and Application of the Concept of Sovereignty"