Why Israel is the Victim AND Why There is No Peace in the Middle East by Horowitz David

Author:Horowitz, David [Horowitz, David]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: David Horowitz Freedom Center
Published: 2009-02-05T05:00:00+00:00

Why There Is No Peace in the Middle East

by Steven Plaut

The entire "peace process" that followed the "Oslo initiative" was based on ignoring and suppressing memory of the historic background to the Middle East conflict, documented at length in Why Israel Is The Victim. Indeed, the Oslo "process" required that the world overlook the two dominant facts of recent history in the region-that the Arab world had been behaving as violent genocidal aggressors since well before Israel was even independent; and that the Jews were the victims of fundamental injustice at the hands of the Arab state and terrorist powers, which denied the legitimacy of their existence as well as their right to self determination..

A large share of the blame for this situation needs to be attributed to Israel's own leadership. In initiating the Oslo process, the country's political elite undercut the consensus that had been shared not only by the bulk of Israeli public opinion, but was also accepted by the Western democratic world, or at least by the governments and public in the United States, ultimately the most important part of the Western world.

Before Israel's "peace initiative," it was widely accepted that the most Palestinians could expect was some form of limited autonomy well short of statehood. Egypt, the largest Arab state, had accepted that formulation when opening relations with Israel in 1978. The United States backed the idea, together with both American political parties. Successive American administrations, even that of Jimmy Carter, accepted the principle that the Palestinian Liberation Organization was nothing more than a terrorist group that could play no role in any regional settlement nor in any Palestinian autonomy arrangement. It went without saying that the other terrorist groups, particularly Hamas, should be dealt with only through the barrel site of a tank or chopper. The Middle East conflict was not about "self-determination" for "Palestinians." More to the point, the United States and much of Europe understood that it was not.

During the 1990s, Israel's own political leadership replaced history, rationality, and realpolitik with fantasies about peace, a Benelux style alliance with the Arabs, and a "New Middle East." At the initiative of Shimon Peres and his deluded socialist colleagues from the Israeli Labor Party, Israeli leaders proclaimed the PLO a legitimate negotiating partner and imported its leadership and its gangs of terrorists into the West Bank and Gaza, into the very suburbs of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. They expected that the PLO would supply quid pro quo and proclaim its acceptance of the legitimacy of Israel. That never happened.

Israel's peace overtures and territorial concessions bought only a massive escalation in terror, waves of suicide bombings in Israeli cities, the launch of thousands of rockets, and the need to fight two new defensive wars against terror.

In the summer of 2000, Israel unilaterally ended its presence in the security zone of Southern Lebanon, abandoning that area to the hegemony of the Hezbollah terrorist militia, which immediately began preparing for the war which erupted five years later. The same was true after the withdrawal from Gaza.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.