Mideast peace plan is doomed to fail
Columnist Cal Thomas says President Trump’s new proposal lacks an understanding of how the Palestinian leadership thinks.
Twenty years ago, President Bill Clinton, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and PLO leader Yasser Arafat met at Camp David, where Barak offered almost all of what Arafat asked for in exchange for making peace with the Jewish state. Arafat rejected the offer.
The reason was, and remains, that the Palestinian leadership doesn’t want to make peace with Israel. Their goal is to eliminate it.
Now comes President Trump with his own peace plan, offering statehood, prosperity and peace to the Palestinians. Has anything changed in the last 20 years, indeed, since 1948 when the Arabs rejected the idea of a Jewish state and launched the first of numerous wars, spawning terrorist attacks?
Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas rejected the Trump plan before it was announced.
The flaw in the Trump plan is that it is designed, like all the others, by people whose thinking is radically different from Arab and Muslim leaders.
Let’s start with the Palestinian Charter, which says in Article Nine: “Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine and is therefore a strategy and not a tactic. The Palestinian Arab people affirms its absolute resolution and abiding determination to pursue the armed struggle and to march forward towards the armed popular revolution, to liberate its homeland and restore its right to a natural life .... ”
One of the requirements in the Trump peace proposal is for the Palestinians to reject violence, including violence by Islamic Jihad and Hamas. Neither terrorist organization has accepted Israel’s right to exist and is unlikely to do so now.
The president spoke of the importance of peace for the younger generation. But young people are being educated like those who have gone before. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, a 2017 study by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education, in Jerusalem, found that “Palestinian children are being taught to glorify and value terrorism and violence” and that “The new Palestinian curriculum, which includes new textbooks for grades 1-4, is significantly more radical than previous curricula . ... The curriculum teaches students to be martyrs, demonizes and denies the existence of Israel and focuses on a ‘return’ to an exclusively Palestinian homeland.”
How likely are those who believe and teach such things to do a 180 and start teaching peaceful co-existence with Israel? For years, sermons by Muslim clerics, Arab media and the actions of terrorists have been rooted in what they believe is a religious mandate to eradicate Israel and even the United States. One still hears such things from Iranian leaders who think ushering in Armageddon will reveal the Islamic messiah. How does the secular West convince radical Muslims to reject the command of their god?
Then there’s the failed formula of Israel relinquishing land in exchange for peace, another component of the Trump plan. It has been a one-way street for Israel, most recently in Gaza, which predictably became a Hamas base.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his political rival, Benny Gantz, have signed off on the plan, probably for political reasons with another election coming soon. But they can’t possibly believe the Palestinian leadership will agree to the proposal.
That Palestinian leaders will change their beliefs and desire to eliminate Israel is as likely as Democrats changing their minds about Trump’s presidency.