By Charles Krauthammer
Of all the idiocies uttered in reaction to Benjamin
Netanyahu’s stunning election victory, none is more
ubiquitous than the idea that peace prospects are now dead because Netanyahu has declared that there will be
no Palestinian state while he is Israel’s prime minister.
I have news for the lowing herds: There would be no peace
and no Palestinian state if Isaac Herzog were prime minister either. Or Ehud
Barak or Ehud Olmert for that matter. The latter two were (non-Likud) prime
ministers who offered the Palestinians their own state — with its capital in
Jerusalem and every Israeli settlement in the new Palestine uprooted — only to
be rudely rejected.
This is not ancient history. This is 2000, 2001 and 2008
— three astonishingly concessionary peace offers within the past 15 years.
Every one rejected.
The fundamental reality remains: This generation of
Palestinian leadership — from Yasser Arafat to Mahmoud Abbas — has never and
will never sign its name to a final peace settlement dividing the land with a
Jewish state. And without that, no Israeli government of any kind will agree to
a Palestinian state.
Today, however, there is a second reason a peace
agreement is impossible: the supreme instability of the entire Middle East. For
half a century, it was run by dictators no one liked but with whom you could do
business. For example, the 1974 Israel-Syria disengagement agreement yielded
more than four decades of near-total quiet on the border because the Assad dictatorships
so decreed.
That authoritarian order is gone, overthrown by the Arab
Spring. Syria is wracked by a multi-sided civil war that has killed 200,000 people and that has
al-Qaeda allies, Hezbollah fighters, government troops and even the occasional Iranian general prowling
the Israeli border. Who inherits? No one knows.
In the last four years, Egypt has had two revolutions and
three radically different regimes. Yemen went from pro-American to Iranian
client so quickly the United States had to evacuate its embassy in a panic.
Libya has gone from Moammar Gaddafi’s crazy authoritarianism to
jihadi-dominated civil war. On Wednesday, Tunisia, the one relative success of
the Arab Spring, suffered a major terror attack that the prime minister said “targets the
stability of the country.”
From Mali to Iraq, everything is in flux. Amid this
mayhem, by what magic would the West Bank, riven by a bitter Fatah-Hamas
rivalry, be an island of stability? What would give any Israeli-Palestinian
peace agreement even a modicum of durability?
There was a time when Arafat commanded the Palestinian
movement the way Gaddafi commanded Libya. Abbas commands no one. Why do you
think he is in the 11th year of a four-year term, having refused to hold
elections for the last five years? Because he’s afraid he would lose to Hamas.
With or without elections, the West Bank could fall to
Hamas overnight. At which point fire rains down on Tel Aviv, Ben Gurion Airport
and the entire Israeli urban heartland — just as it rains down on southern
Israel from Gaza when it suits Hamas, which has turned that first Palestinian
state into a terrorist fire base.
Any Arab-Israeli peace settlement would require Israel to
make dangerous and inherently irreversible territorial concessions on the West
Bank in return for promises and guarantees. Under current conditions, these
would be written on sand.
Israel is ringed by jihadi terrorists in Sinai, Hamas in
Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Islamic State and Iranian proxies in Syria, and a
friendly but highly fragile Jordan. Israelis have no idea who ends up running
any of these places. Will the Islamic State advance to an Israeli border? Will
Iranian Revolutionary Guards appear on the Golan Heights? No one knows.
Well, say the critics. Israel could be given outside
guarantees. Guarantees? Like the 1994 Budapest Memorandum in which the
United States, Britain and Russia guaranteed Ukraine’s “territorial integrity”?
Like the red line in Syria? Like the unanimous U.N.
resolutions declaring illegal any Iranian enrichment of uranium — now
effectively rendered null?
Peace awaits three things. Eventual Palestinian
acceptance of a Jewish state. A Palestinian leader willing to sign a deal based
on that premise. A modicum of regional stability that allows Israel to risk the
potentially fatal withdrawals such a deal would entail.
I believe such a day will come. But there is zero chance
it comes now or even soon. That’s essentially what Netanyahu said Thursday in explaining
— and softening — his no-Palestinian-state statement.
In the interim, I understand the crushing disappointment
of the Obama administration and its media poodles at the spectacular success of
the foreign leader they loathe more than any other on the planet. The
consequent seething and sputtering are understandable, if unseemly. Blaming
Netanyahu for banishing peace, however, is mindless.
***
"I believe such a day will come. But there is zero chance it comes now or even soon."
So Krauthammer still
believes that someday by some miracle Hamas and their Charter will go
away.
But even if this were true, the rest of the Palestinians would still, until there is a reform of Islam by Muslims themselves, be influenced by Hadith Bukari Volume 4, Book 52, Number 177 from which Article 7 of the Hamas Charter is taken from.
The three prerequisites for peace will indeed not happen soon.
