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Dear Brethren, the War with Israel Is Over

[New York Sun] Youssef Ibrahim - As Israel continues its incursion into the same Gaza Strip it voluntarily evacuated a few months ago, a sense of reality among Arabs is spreading. The new views are stunning in their maturity. This is what they are saying: Dear Palestinian Arab brethren: The war with Israel is over. You have lost. Surrender and negotiate to secure a future for your children. We, your Arab brothers, may say until we are blue in the face that we stand by you, but the wise among you and most of us know that we are moving on, away from the tired old idea of the Palestinian Arab cause and the "eternal struggle" with Israel. The Palestine you could have had in 1948 is much bigger than the one you could have had in 1967, which in turn is much bigger than what you may have to settle for now or in another 10 years. Struggle means less land and more misery and utter loneliness. It isn't going to get better. You hold keys, which you drag out for television interviews, to houses that do not exist or are inhabited by Israelis who have no intention of leaving Jaffa, Haifa, Tel Aviv, or West Jerusalem. You shoot old guns at modern Israeli tanks and American-made fighter jets, doing virtually no harm to Israel. Your young people are growing up illiterate, ill, and bent on rites of death and suicide, while you, in effect, are living on the kindness of foreigners, including America and the UN. Every day your officials must beg for your daily bread, while your criminal Muslim fundamentalist Hamas government continues to fan the flames of a war it can neither fight nor hope to win. We, your Arab brothers, have moved on. Those of us who share borders with Israel, such as Egypt and Jordan, have signed a peace treaty with it and are not going to war for you any time soon. Only Syria continues to feed your fantasies that someday it will join you in liberating Palestine. The Syrians, my friends, will gladly fight down to the last Palestinian Arab. The war is over. Why not let a new future begin? The writer is an Egyptian-born American reporter serving for 24 years as a senior Middle East correspondent for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
2006-07-10 01:00:00
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