We are about to begin — if it doesn’t end before it starts — another round of the endless talks between the Palestinian Authority and Israel. The sense of unreality pervades; all but the most obtuse observers understand this charade is futile. Mahmoud Abbas threatens to break off talks if Israel doesn’t extend a settlement ban which it has said it won’t extend. The notion that Abbas is ready to surrender those things that he must surrender to obtain a state and make a binding peace deal is laughable. As one of the canniest observers remarks, a Palestinian state becomes reality only if:
… its citizens can renounce once and for all the creeping Islamism that would sooner see them suffering the miseries and oppression of twelfth-century religious and cultural practice than thriving in a modern society; if they can cast off at last the self-strangling mythology of their own victimhood; and if they can shed their century-old yearning to set the blood of their Jewish neighbors flowing in the streets. And if, that is, those same despised Jewish neighbors can succeed in destroying the Iranian bomb that threatens the potential state, Palestine—whose capital will be Ramallah—no less than the Jewish state, Israel—whose eternal and undivided capital is Jerusalem—which in the meantime the “Palestinians” have erased from their maps and the schoolbooks of their children.
(Read the whole thing for the compelling argument as to why Ramallah, not Jerusalem, is becoming the “defacto capital” for the future Palestinian state.)
The talks, as I have argued, are a thin reed holding together Obama’s dwindling credibility. It is not a good thing for an American president to be utterly discredited and embarrassed, to have a top foreign-policy goal shattered. But perhaps it is a needed wake-up call — for the administration, for the Palestinians, and for those who have, for too long, been obsessed with dragging those not ready to negotiate to the negotiating table. Admitting failure is the first step to a more realistic approach to the Middle East and to refocusing ourselves on the only issue that matters, the potential for a nuclear-armed Iran.
