Anger at the US for acknowledging Jerusalem is Israel’s capital is misplaced.
Today’s politically correct conflict resolution requires losers to be treated as winners. This ‘everyone is a winner’ fantasy supposedly makes compromise easier for the loser and helps alleviate Western guilt about past imperialism. This game plan in the Israeli-Arab conflict has become the new norm, encouraged by Americans and Europeans who claim that only they can resolve the conflict because they can cajole Israel to accept the Palestinians’ unrealistic demands.
Denial of reality is prevalent throughout the Arab world where inconvenient history is consistently reinvented. They try erasing the 3,000-year Jewish presence in Jerusalem with UN resolutions and fabrications. Jews lived in the Middle East for over 1,500 years before Mohammed was born. A Jewish State exists with 8.5 million people. The sooner Palestinians accept reality, the sooner peace can be achieved.
Palestinian society is mired in a paralysing morass. It is incapable of delivering education, jobs or hope for its citizens, despite billions of dollars of aid. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency employs 30,627 executives plus 21,571 educators to care for descendants of Palestinian refugees. Its 2018 budget is almost $1 billion.
Where does this money go? To teach children they haven’t lost wars in 1948, 1967, 1973 and the subsequent skirmishes. To teach that grandchildren of 1948 refugees have the ‘right of return’ and must kill Jews to recover all the land ‘from the river to the sea’. $100 million is spent annually for tunnel building and military equipment; $4.5 million monthly goes to ‘martyrs’ who kill Israelis. The Palestinian Authority acts as if Israel isn’t the State that truly matters in resolving this conflict. They avoid contact with Israel, instead appealing to Europeans, Russians and Americans to intercede for them to deliver their dreams. Meanwhile, the corrupt and oppressive Palestinian Authority, with its President serving his 14th year of a four-year term, is less a government than a kleptocracy. The West can’t address this since Mahmoud Abbas is the least worst alternative.
The West would better serve the intended beneficiaries by emphasising that a two-State solution won’t happen unless Palestinians create a functioning democracy that accepts the reality of Jewish neighbours, stops teaching hatred and ends stipends for murdering Israelis.
Recognising that Jerusalem is, and has been, Israel’s capital since 1948 does not prevent Palestinians from adopting its eastern part as their capital – if they can live in peace.
The overwhelming burden to make peace rests squarely on the Palestinians. Malta and the EU should stop fostering illusions that if Palestinians ignore reality long enough it will eventually disappear.