The Obama administration is going to press ahead with efforts to broker an agreement between Israel and the "Palestinians" that will include a "two-state solution." There's nothing new about this, of course--Bill Clinton pursued the vision of two states, "Palestine" and Israel, living side by side in peace, unsuccessfully, as, equally so, did George W. Bush. Leaving aside the question of whether in fact a state peopled by members of Hamas, the PLO, and Fatah would live in harmony with a Jewish state next door, the "Palestinians" face another problem: The state their "leaders" have actually embraced for them is that of victimhood, the condition in which they have presented themselves to the world for the 60-odd years of Israel's existence. Their recent history of upping the ante after each Israeli offer of more--more concessions on land, more concessions on settlements, more on the status of Jerusalem--has secured the statelessness and immiseration of their people for a long time to come. Now, in an amazing display of honesty that aired on Al Jazeera in March, chief negotiator Saab Erekat admits as much:
On July 23, 2000, at his meeting with President Arafat in Camp David, President Clinton said: "You will be the first president of a Palestinian state, within the 1967 borders -- give or take, considering the land swap -- and East Jerusalem will be the capital of the Palestinian state, but we want you, as a religious man, to acknowledge that the Temple of Solomon is located underneath the Haram Al-Sharif."
Yasser Arafat said to Clinton defiantly: "I will not be a traitor. Someone will come to liberate it after 10, 50, or 100 years. Jerusalem will be nothing but the capital of the Palestinian state, and there is nothing underneath or above the Haram Al-Sharif except for Allah."
In November 2008 . . . Olmert, who talked today about his proposal to Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas], offered the 1967 borders, but said: "We will take 6.5% of the West Bank, and give in return 5.8% from the 1948 lands, and the 0.7% will constitute the safe passage, and East Jerusalem will be the capital, but there is a problem with the Haram and with what they called the Holy Basin." Abu Mazen too answered with defiance, saying: "I am not in a marketplace or a bazaar. I came to demarcate the borders of Palestine -- the June 4, 1967 borders -- without detracting a single inch, and without detracting a single stone from Jerusalem, or from the holy Christian and Muslim places." This is why the Palestinian negotiators did not sign.
And they're right. How much easier it is to retail the fantasy of pushing Israel back to its pre-1967-War borders and proclaiming Jerusalem their own capital than to begin the tremendously difficult work of state-building. And how much more profitable, too, to carry on lining their pockets and bank accounts with the proceeds from their welfare-addicted hat-in-hand importunings of foreign governments.
