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Israel-Arab Accords an Earthquake for Palestinians
(Times of Israel) Avi Issacharoff - The Organization of Islamic Cooperation, representing 57 Islamic states, including Turkey and Iran, has been headed for the past four years by Secretary-General Yousef Al-Othaimeen, a Saudi politician. On Monday, in an interview to Sky News in Arabic, Al-Othaimeen said: "We need to think outside the box....This [Palestinian] issue has been going on for over 70 years. We have tried wars and throwing the Israelis into the sea; we have tried a lot. The new generation of our Palestinian brothers needs to try ideas that will lead to a solution to this problem, which is of interest to us all, but in new ways, ways that have not yet been tried....Why insist on the path of resistance and boycott and distancing? What should be distanced are the traditional and familiar ideas." Such statements would have been inconceivable a few months ago. They show how the Israeli normalization agreement with Sudan, and the earlier agreements with Bahrain and the UAE, have generated a Middle East earthquake. The world view of generations of Arabs was shaped around the Palestinian issue and the conflict with Israel. Yet that foundational worldview has collapsed. Suddenly, the Palestinians find themselves irrelevant.