U.S. has wrong focus

Editorial

If we do not accurately identify the cause of a problem, the chances of resolving it are remote. The latest proof that the Israeli-Arab conflict will not be resolved anytime soon is the return of the obsession over Jewish settlement in the West Bank, a red herring that is cited as a legitimate barrier to peace.

The issue of settlements was apparently the primary point of disagreement between Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and United States President Barack Obama in Washington last month. As Obama travels the Middle East this week, settlements are on the U.S. diplomatic tom-tom again, undermining his administration's expressed optimism that it could get peace negotiations back on track. As the New York Times put it Tuesday, Obama "reiterated his call for a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians that Israel's hawkish leaders have not accepted."

The folly of the American position, which raises the issue of West Bank settlements to the level of serious threat to peace, is that it eclipses the genuine barriers to peace. To view Israel's "hawkish" leaders as the barrier to a two-state solution is plainly Orwellian in its reversal of cause.

Israel's leaders have accepted a two-state solution. Hawkish Likud, dovish Labor and middling Kadima all got in line with peace plans in the 1990s and that agreement could have seen a two-state solution probably fully operational by now. That didn't happen, basically because the Palestinian leaders rejected the generous compromise as insufficient – to whit, Israel continued to exist – and reverted to violence in 2000, continuing today to act as though suicide-homicide will triumph in the end. How's that for hawkish?

Moreover, and most obviously, Israel withdrew from the settlements in Gaza, demonstrating as clearly as history possibly could that settlements are not the cause – or even a cause – of this conflict. True, the West Bank settlements are more significant both in number and in historical significance. Gaza had no sites of Jewish historical importance, while the Jewish people get our name from Judea, in the West Bank, and some of the holiest sites in Judaism are there.

Singling out the issue of settlements seems particularly ludicrous at a time when Iran is preparing a holocaust. The American administration thinks it can negotiate away the Iranian threat, apparently taking diplomacy lessons from Neville Chamberlain. Meanwhile, Obama is lending legitimacy to the nonsense that long-term peace and security is threatened by Jewish families building granny suites.

We hope, against reason perhaps, that this silly issue is Obama's way of appearing tough, that he is the "true friend of Israel" Netanyahu said he is and that the U.S. administration needed something to use against Israel to legitimize putting pressure on the Palestinians to confront the real causes of the conflict.

Settlements will be an issue for discussion when the Palestinian leaders sit down like civilized members of the international community at the peace table whose legs they kicked out in 2000. But settlements cannot come close to providing the threat to peaceful resolution that a litany of other issues present. Yes, there are borders to be determined, the preservation and administration of holy sites, water and other natural resources to be shared, restitution for refugees (Arab and Jewish), not to mention Jerusalem. But all of these are manageable issues for which Israel and the world community have proposed reasonable responses that are open for negotiation.

The real, intractable problem facing those who seek peace in the region is none of these – and it certainly isn't settlements. The single barrier to peace today remains that which has precluded peace for the past six decades: the Arab world, personified since the 1960s as the Palestinians, will not consider history complete until Israel ceases to exist.

Everything that the Palestinian leadership has done is driven by this solitary aim. The Palestinian leadership, not alone among the Arab world, has nurtured generations of violent Jew-hatred through school curricula, popular culture, religion and martyr-worship. The resolution to this conflict will not come from ending settlements or from any of the other demands not met by "Israel's hawkish leaders," but solely by a revolution in Palestinian and larger Arab thinking that does not view the presence of a Jewish state as an apostasy. This will not take weeks, months or even years. It will take a generation or two, or more. And that peace process has not even begun.

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