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Moving Beyond the "Peace Process"

(New York Post) Amir Taheri - In 1948 there was no Palestine problem; there was an Israel problem, in that the Arab League wouldn't tolerate a Jewish state in its midst. Nor was the 1967 war about Palestine. Egypt's Nasser, who started it, said the objective was "throwing the Jews into the sea." At no point was creating a Palestinian state even considered. Nasser failed, and the new status quo favored Israel by widening its security perimeter - with territories taken from Egypt, Jordan and Syria, not from Palestine. The demand for a return to pre-1967 borders is bizarre, to say the least. In 1967 there were no borders, just ceasefire lines drawn in 1948 - lines that symbolized an unstable status quo that led to two wars. Going back to them means returning to a situation that breeds war, not peace. The "peace process" also ignores a fact well established in human history: Every war ends with a winner and a loser; the winner dictates the new status quo and the loser grudgingly accepts. Israel is perhaps the only winner to be prevented from even thinking about cashing its chips. Each time it won a war, the UN and other outsiders intervened to put the whole thing on a different trajectory. All that the various "peace initiatives" have done is to raise Palestinian expectations beyond what any Israeli government could accept.
2014-05-01 00:00:00
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