The UN Should Be Ashamed of Itself - Stephen Daisley
- Jerusalem is Israel's capital; before that it was the capital of the ancient Kingdom of Judah. However hard the UN strives to erase the Jewish character of the city, its historical record isn't going anywhere. When Israel captured Judea and Samaria in 1967, they did so not from any state called Palestine (no such state has ever existed), but from Jordan, whose annexation was almost universally unrecognized - it was an illegal occupation - and prior to this these lands had been part of Mandatory Palestine.
- Mandatory Palestine was created by the League of Nations to "secure the establishment of the Jewish national home." The Israelis have many innovations to their name, but perhaps their greatest feat is being the first nation-state in history to "illegally occupy" their own territory.
- The people the UN harms when it works to isolate and delegitimize Israel are the Palestinians. It tells them that their long, painful campaign of national self-harm is just and holds out false hope that it will one day triumph. It won't.
- The priority of anyone who professes to be pro-Palestinian should be convincing the Palestinians to recognize that Israel is here to stay and, on that basis, finally accept offers of peace and statehood.
(Spectator-UK)
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The Promise of the Trump Peace Plan - Natan Sharansky and Gil Troy
- The conventional wisdom is that the Palestinian leadership didn't show up to receive the U.S. peace plan because Palestinians didn't get a good deal. This assumes these leaders would be interested in making peace, if only Israel made the right concessions. While many in the West wish this to be true, what's really missing is a Palestinian leadership interested in Israel as a peace partner.
- In the early 1990s, Israeli leaders and their Western counterparts brought Arafat back from exile in Tunis and made him a dictator. They viewed Arafat's authoritarian nature as a plus - to control even more violent Palestinian enemies of peace such as Hamas.
- But the zeal for peace at any price overlooked the basics of Dictatorship 101. Repressive regimes maintain control over their people by mobilizing them with external foes to fight and internal dissidents to destroy. To hold on to power, Arafat needed Israel as an enemy, not a partner.
- During Arafat's 10-year reign of terror he brutalized his own people from the start, crushing all opposition. He alternated between talking peace and terrorizing Israel when each was useful to him, while twisting his education system to make sure the next generation of Palestinians would hate Israelis even more. Meanwhile, he kept Western leaders believing that one more Israeli concession, one more agreement, would bring a peace he never intended to deliver.
- Natan Sharansky served as Israel's minister of industry and trade in the 1990s and was involved during the Oslo period in efforts to bolster the Palestinian economy. This firsthand look was sobering. For Arafat and his henchmen, it was more important to keep job creation and distribution under their control than to promote prosperity for ordinary Palestinians. International investments became opportunities for patronage and racketeering.
- Four years aren't enough to make a full transition from dictatorship to democracy or from decades of war to peace. But it could be enough for the first seeds of Palestinian civil society to sprout.
Mr. Sharansky was a political prisoner in the Soviet Union and served in four Israeli cabinets. Mr. Troy is a professor of history at McGill University.
(Wall Street Journal)
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