abolitionofman.com

The Annapolis Peace conference concluded this week with Israel and Fatah agreeing to re-commit the RoadMap for Peace. President Bush, Abbas, and Olmert made this statement:

“The final peace settlement will establish Palestine as a homeland for the Palestinian people just as Israel is the homeland for the Jewish people.”

If only the Palestinians Arabs wanted just their own homeland, and not the destruction of Israel, peace in the Middle East would have been achieved sixty years ago today, November 29, 1947, Partition Day. The Arabs rejected that offer out of hand, which was a particularly generous one considering the Palestinian Arabs where in effect allies of the Nazis, whereas the Jews were their victims.

In fact, as reported by policy group at the time “the Arab leaders often cooperated directly with the Axis,…Fascist and Nazi ideologies were not so much imitated as paralleled in the Arab world.”(Peters, 361) Indeed, the Grand Mufti besides issuing a fatwah against Britian in 1941, was also a willing participant in the Holocaust itself.

In 1940 the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem had requested from Hitler to acknowledge the Arab right “to settle the question of the Jewish element in Palestine and other Arab countries…along lines similar to those used to solve the Jewish question in Germany and Italy.” (Peters, 37) He went to Germany to plead this case exactly.

Hitler replied:

Germany stood for uncompromising war against the Jews. That naturally included active opposition to the Jewish national home in Palestine….Germany would furnish positive and practical aid to the Arabs involved in the same struggle….Germany’s objective [is]…solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere….In that hour the Mufti would be the most authoritative spokesman for the Arab world.

The Mufti thanked Hitler profusely.

So, being on the losing end of war, one would think that an offer of self-determination within a viable homeland would be jumped at by the Arabs. But no, it was refused, just as it again was in 2000 by the Grand Mufti’s nephew, Yasser Arafat. An offer which President Clinton, Saudi Arabia’s Prince Bandar, and chief UN negotiator Dennis Ross all claimed was a crime against humanity to reject. Instead of peace, Arafat launched the murderous Second Intifada which took the lives of 1000 Isreali’s and 2000 Palestinians.

So here we are on the Road Map to Peace again. But still, to this day, neither Fatah nor Hamas have admitted to Israeli’s right to exist and have as their stated goal its destruction. In Gaza, where a Palestinian state already exists, rockets are fired daily at Israel. The unfortunate fact is, the Palestinians and their sponsors have no interest in peace, only the destruction of Israel. For Israel to midwife an expanded Palestinian state in the West Bank, the creation of which will be a radical enemy on its border, is a demonstration once again of the Israeli’s fervent desire for peace as well as their tremendous courage.