Article content continued

The Palestinian leadership never understood that the Arab powers were chiefly interested in them to distract the Arab masses from the despotic misrule their rulers inflicted on them; the Palestinians themselves were generally regarded by most Arabs as sharpers like the Jews and the Lebanese Christians. When the Arab leaders were shaken by terrorist threats, encroached upon by Iran and Turkey (when it recoiled from its rebuff by the European Union) and Egypt dodged the bullet of the Muslim Brotherhood that had been the 800-pound gorilla within for 75 years, the game changed entirely. (The Muslim Brotherhood was elected after the George W. Bush championship of democracy produced an anti-democratic election result, which also elevated Hamas in Gaza. The Egyptian army overthrew the elected government when it showed its dictatorial intentions. If Egypt had gone the way of Islamist Iran, the consequences would have been grievous.)

Photo by Ali Hashisho/Reuters

The threats to the main Middle Eastern Arab powers — Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan — are from the fundamentalist Muslims, led and bankrolled by Iran (until the Trump administration put the sanction screws on the ayatollahs). And their most powerful and reliable ally is Israel (which has also benefited from the discovery of offshore oil and natural gas, which it generously shares with Jordan). The Palestinian militants are starved for funds and with terrorism thoroughly out of fashion and subject to fierce reprisals, Middle East peacekeeping is more promising than it has been. It is no longer the hopeless process of trying to get the Palestinian leadership to agree to anything useful. From the 1973 (Yom Kippur) War on, they tried “land for peace,” which effectively meant land the Arabs had lost in wars they had initiated with Israel and lost, in exchange for ceasefires, which they quickly violated. Israeli leaders Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres and PLO leader Yasser Arafat won the Nobel Prize for Peace for the Oslo Accord in 1993, which required the PLO to amend the Palestine National Charter to accept Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state and pledged to assist in disarming terrorists and reduce its own arms level to that of a well-equipped police force of 40,000. All of these, and other commitments, have been ignored. At any point since then the Palestinians could have had their state, though it would have been a modest one. But they fought on, oblivious to the evaporation of their bargaining position. With peace, Arafat, and Mahmoud Abbas who followed him, would have ceased to be world personalities and would have been only the leaders of a dusty little country.