The Timing of It All

It is indeed quite curious why President Obama is rushing headlong into yet another attempt to create a peace process between Israel and the Palestinians.

While some might think that it's unheard of a President engaging in Arab-Israel relations this early in their presidencies, President Clinton was able to take advantage of the Oslo talks in 1993, which had begun in the wake of the Madrid talks under President Bush in the previous administration.

The problem here is that there's nothing to discuss. The Palestinians are split in two camps - Hamas, which engages in an ongoing war against Israel and the current hudna is in place so as to allow Hamas to regroup and rearm in Gaza, while Fatah operates out of the West Bank and whose residents remain under Palestinian civil administrative control, just as they've been since 1993's Oslo Accords and the succession of documents, like the Gaza-Jericho Accords, the Wye Accords, and various other agreements expanding Palestinian civil administrative control on the West Bank. Fatah can't speak for all Palestinians, and Hamas has a point about the legitimacy of the Palestinian Authority.

Until the Palestinians themselves can figure out what they want - and that it includes a true two-state solution with a Jewish state of Israel peacefully coexisting alongside a Palestinian state (or as many commenters will point out - another Palestinian state with Jordan being the first), Israel can do nothing except sit and watch and hope that the terrorists don't get itchy trigger fingers, as they always seem to do.

More to the point, Fatah can't operate in Gaza because Hamas threw them out in a civil war, and the tensions between the two terror groups remains to this day, spilling into open bloodshed on a periodic basis.

All the while, Israel awaits a true partner in peace, who is willing to provide concessions instead of demanding Israel make still more concessions before rejecting them out of hand without so much as a counter proposal, just as Abbas did last week.

So, for anyone to claim that serious progress is possible is engaging in nothing more than wishful thinking. It's pseudoreality, where the diplomats attempt to substitute their own reality for the facts as they are. A real sustained peace process requires that both sides engage in concessions, and none have been forthcoming from the Palestinians.

After all, this is who Israel has to negotiate with when dealing with the Gazans.

Then, there's the whole notion that the peace process hinges on Palestinians and Israelis coming to a peace deal. There's nothing stopping Israel's Arab neighbors from making their own peace deals. Jordan did it. Egypt did it. What does it take for anyone else in the region to do it?

There is nothing stopping these regimes from doing so, except the fact that these regimes have sustained themselves for generations on anti-Israel hatred, and to turnaround and make a peace deal now would show just how empty and vacuous these regimes truly are. It would mean that these regimes, like Saudi Arabia or the UAE or Kuwait or Iraq have to accept the region as it is - not as they have wished it to be for generations - a region without a Jewish state in Israel. It would mean treating those displaced persons from the Arab-Israeli wars as citizens of their states, instead of pawns in a war against Israel. Surely, there's enough oil money to go around and provide incentives for this to happen, but the obstacles - the Islamists and long ingrained beliefs in Israel's destruction - would not allow it come to pass.