It’s That Simple – “God Isn’t a Real Estate Agent and Negotiations are Possible if You Want them to be”

 

Around a day ago, the Jordanian Foreign Minister, Mr. Ayman Safadi, gave an interview with JNS and made the point that:

https://www.jns.org/ridiculous-to-say-unrwa-a-threat-to-israel-jordans-foreign-minister-says/

 

 You could say that this interview was a case of stating the obvious. The current conflict in the Middle East, has lasted nearly a year and instead of seeing a “de-escalation” is showing all signs of escalation. The focus is now on Lebanon and the conflict with the so called “Party of God” or “Hezbollah.” The fighting is tragic and taken the lives of thousands, especially the lives of children.

While the loss of human life is a tragedy, the global diplomatic maneuverings have exposed the global order as being a farce. Everyone sees who the victim is. However, when the bully walks onto the global stage, you have the nations that claim to stand up for things like human rights, democracy and decency clapping and cheering for him. So, when people like Mr. Safadi get onto the world stage to point out the obvious like the fact that the current Israeli government has no interest in peace:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8zFcL67rvk

 

You have plenty of people in the so called “decent” nations of the Western world wringing their hands telling us that the issues of the Middle East are complicated. The reality, however, is that the issues in the Middle East are quite simple. As Piers Morgan was forced to admit when debating Medhi Hassan, Israel is an ally of the West and whether we like it or not, nations where people of European decent killing semitic people for having the audacity to fight back is called “self-defense.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qo_uGb95hic

 

 However, the main issue of the Middle East is land and there have been several attempts to create a solution. Israel has signed peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan as well as with the Palestinian Organisation (PLO). All these deals had one simple element to them – the trade off between land and peace. Israel gave up certain territories and shared resources in return for peace.

Unfortunately, peace making is “dangerous” and not encouraged. Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian President who signed the first Camp David Accords was assassinated by the Muslim Brotherhood. Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli Prime Minister who signed the Oslo Accords with the PLO and Wadi Araba treaty with Jordan was shot by a Jewish settler.

As faulty as the Oslo Accords may have been, they were at the time, popular on both sides. Israelis saw a way where they could live in peace. The nations that made peace Israel also had sense that they’d not be humiliated and robbed. However, for the leaders on both sides, the lesson was clear – peace was very bad for staying in power.

This was particularly true on the Israel side, when Benyamin Netanyahu became the luckiest politician in Israeli history by making a career of destroying whatever attempts had been made by his predecessors to secure anything resembling a lasting peace.

What made Mr. Netanyahu seem successful has been be blind backing of his Western allies, or more specifically the United States, which remains the one indispensable power to the region. Mr. Netanyahu is well aware of the fact that no American politician wishing to stay in power crosses the Israeli lobby and whenever there’s an excuse to bomb the living daylights out of any of the Palestinian states or an Arab state without oil, the America inevitably does as instructed by Israel.

This hasn’t made life easy to America’s Arab allies like Saudi Arabia or Jordan. King Abdullah of Jordan received online criticism for shooting down Iranian drones that were fired at Israel, thus preventing an escalation of tensions. And if you talk to enough people outside the region, they’ll take the view that Israel is merely trying to defend itself from Arabs and Muslims who have an “irrational” hatred of the Jewish state.

Yet, everyone seems to forget that, it’s not the “post-Rabin” Israel making efforts to make peace. In 2005-2006, it was the late Saudi King Abdullah (as a matter disclaimer, I worked for the Saudi embassy in Singapore at that time and wrote for Arab News of Saudi Arabia) who proposed an independent of America, peace plan based on existing UN resolutions. Solution was simple withdraw to 1967 borders in return for diplomatic recognition by all 22-members of the Arab League. As a former Saudi Ambassador to Singapore said at the time,” We’ve given them a guarantee of security.”

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2010/3/28/the-arab-peace-initiative

 

 Sure, October 7, 2023 was a crime against humanity. However, the answer to a war crime should never be a bigger war crime and we should all do well to remember which side is actually interested in finding a solution to a problem that is relatively simple and which side is complicating things for its own brutal benefits. It’s time “decent” nations of the world understood that.