Arabs should suspend contacts with Israel until Israel recognizes Palestine
The primary stumbling block to the establishment of a Palestine State and achieving Middle East peace is the weak leadership of the Arab World and their fear of standing up to Israel’s government extremism. Despite the Arab World’s public rhetoric and criticism of Israel’s government policies which block peace and fuel conflict, the Arab World, their private actions have empowered Israel and allowed it to pursue fanaticism. If the Arab World stood up to Israel by suspending ALL contacts, Israel’s government would be forced to take peace seriously.
Arab News March 1, 2018
By Ray Hanania
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas may not have the best communications team to convey his words and deeds, but he has been consisted from day one.
In a speech to the United Nations on Feb. 20, 2018, Abbas urged the UN Security Council to recognize Palestine’s right to statehood.
Of course, Abbas knows that his request will face the historically racist rejectionism of the United States, which has stood in the way of peace for more than seven decades, not just under the mercurial President Donald Trump but under every predecessor.
Yet, despite that reject of peace, Abbas reiterated the very foundations of peace that Israel’s government has refused.
It is ironic that Abbas is denounced for urging peace based on compromise and two-states, Israel’s government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is under investigation of corruption, has refused to embrace peace.
In fact, Netanyahu and many of Israel’s government officials speak the rhetoric of violence, hatred and conflict, denying the existence of Palestinians, denying the right of Palestinians to statehood and even denying that Israel’s occupies land’s taken during the 1967 conflict.
Abbas could have denounced Israel’s existence and mimicked Israel’s racist hate, but instead he clearly reiterated the same position that Palestinians have offered to Israelis since the late 1980s when Palestinians abandoned the revolution through conflict to establish one Democratic State of Palestine and instead agreed to a compromise to accept two states, one Israel and one Palestine.
The Palestinians have accepted the Two-State Solution, but Israel has not.
Despite Israel’s rejection of compromise, Abbas told the United Nations last week, “I confirm to you our commitment to maintain our institutions and achievements, which we have realized on the ground in Palestine as well as in the international arena. We are determined to remain committed to the political, diplomatic, legal path, far from violence, and through political negotiations and dialogue, which we have never rejected.”
Abbas emphasized, “We will continue to extend our hands to make peace and will continue to exert efforts to bring an end to the Israeli occupation based on the two-State solution on the 1967 borders and international legitimacy as per the relevant resolutions in order to achieve our national aspirations.”
The reference to the 1967 borders is not the definition of final borders but upon which the final borders will be measured. If Israel keeps some of the lands it occupied in 1967, then it would trade-off for land inside Israel taken in 1948.
But Israel is driven by a hateful government that covets all of the land of historic Palestine, denying the rights of non-Jews who have lived on those lands peacefully since the Biblical times of the Prophets Abraham, Jesus Christ and Muhammad.
Although Israel’s extremism has been the single greatest obstacle to ending generations of violence, the biggest obstacle has been the political castration of the Arab World.
The two nations that were instrumental in rejecting the United Nation’s partition plan in 1947, Jordan and Egypt, each signed peace accords with Israel. Egypt, under its dictator Anwar al-Sadat, signed a peace accord with Israel’s terrorist Prime Minister Menachem Begin on March 26, 1979.
That peace was supposed to open the door to peace accords with al of the Arab states leading to the establishment of a Palestinian State. But Begin, who was responsible for the murder of more than 100 women and children at Deir Yassin on April 19, 1947, broke that agreement, blocking all efforts to achieve peace with the Palestinians.
Jordan’s monarch, King Hussein, signed a peace accord after Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin agreed to peace with Yasser Arafat in October 1993. The Jordanian-Israeli peace accord was signed Oct. 26, 1994.
But Israeli fanatics, disciples of Netanyahu and Israeli war criminal Ariel Sharon, assassinated Rabin on November 4, 1995 ending peace.
Clearly, the real obstacle to peace is not Abbas, who is criticized as a weak leader. It is Netanyahu, a fanatic who survives only because he panders to the extremist hatred that is growing inside Israel. But the Arab World has not helped.
Instead of fueling peace, the Egyptian and the Jordanian peace accords were used by Israel’s fanatics as obstacles to peace. Israel removed Egypt and Jordan from the equation, leaving Palestine weak and voiceless.
How can Egypt and Jordan face their people as Israel violates all the agreements they signed? How does Egypt and Jordan allow Israel to build embassies in their nations, as Israel moves the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to occupied Jerusalem?
The burden though falls on the shoulders of the entire Arab World for its weak response to the collapse of the peace process and the Jerusalem embassy move.
Abbas has tried repeatedly to make peace but Israel is the obstacle, constantly slandering Abbas and all of the Arab World.
Egypt and Jordan should close the Israeli embassies and end all contacts with Israel. The Arab World should also end all contacts with Israel, too.
If the Arab World could find the courage to do the right thing and shut the door on Israel, Israel would immediately agree to a Palestinian State.
But Israel knows that the real weakness is not Abbas or the Palestinians, it is the Arab World that long ago abandoned its obligations.
(Ray Hanania is an award winning Palestinian American columnist and author. He writes for TheArabDailyNews.com, SuburbanChicagoland.com and for TheDailyHookah.com. Email him at rghanania@gmail.com.)
Ray Hanania is an award winning political and humor columnist who analyzes American and Middle East politics, and life in general. He is an author of several books.
Hanania covered Chicago Politics and Chicago City Hall from 1976 through 1992 at the Daily Southtown and the Chicago Sun-Times. He began writing in 1975 publishing The Middle Eastern Voice newspaper in Chicago (1975-1977). He later published “The National Arab American Times” newspaper (2004-2007).
Hanania writes weekly columns on Middle East and American Arab issues as Special US Correspondent for the Arab News ArabNews.com, at TheArabDailyNews.com, and at SuburbanChicagoland.com. He has published weekly columns in the Jerusalem Post newspaper, YNetNews.com, Newsday, the Orlando Sentinel, Houston Chronical, and Arlington Heights Daily Herald.
Hanania is the recipient of four (4) Chicago Headline Club “Peter Lisagor Awards” for Column writing. In November 2006, he was named “Best Ethnic American Columnist” by the New American Media. In 2009, Hanania received the prestigious Sigma Delta Chi Award for Writing from the Society of Professional Journalists. He is the recipient of the MT Mehdi Courage in Journalism Award. He was honored for his writing skills with two (2) Chicago Stick-o-Type awards from the Chicago Newspaper Guild. In 1990, Hanania was nominated by the Chicago Sun-Times editors for a Pulitzer Prize for his four-part series on the Palestinian Intifada.
His writings have also been honored by two national Awards from ADC for his writing, and from the National Arab American Journalists Association.
Hanania is the US Special Correspondent for the Arab News Newspaper, covering Middle East and Arab American issues. He writes for the Southwest News newspaper group writing on mainstream American issues.
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