As usual quite a few heads of state including the kings of Saudi Arabia and Jordan, as well as the aging, ill Egyptian president gave the gabfest a pass. Their absence was barely noticed as the assembled Deep Thinkers of Arabia considered two matters of grave importance. These were, quite unsurprisingly, the (posited) impending failure of the Israeli-Palestinian peace "process," and what-are-we-going-to-do about Iran?
The Arab League capo, Amr Moussa, opined that the Arab states have to get their act together and consider the "alternative" when (not if) the current peace "process" comes a total cropper. He represented a consensus to the effect that the "process" is doomed by Israeli obstinacy which in turn had been facilitated by a previous Arab failure. That failure, he averred, resulted from the Arabs, more specifically, the Palestinians under Yassir Arafat, having given the Israelis an open ended process years ago at Oslo.
The diplomatic blunders of the past gave the Israelis time to bulldoze and build in the "Palestinian" portions of Jerusalem. The resultant creation of "facts on the ground" stiffened Israeli political will so that now only the complete halting of construction followed by a total Israeli withdrawal from the purportedly illegally seized "Palestinian" territories would allow the peace "process" to continue.
What made Moussa's views worthy of consideration is his nearly unprecedented willingness to admit that Arabs could or have made any errors in diplomatic judgement. Of course, a less subjective view of the Arabs and diplomacy looking back over the past seventy-five years of talks regarding Jews in the Mideast and their relationship with their Arab neighbors would conclude that the Arabs have an unsurpassed record of diplomatic failure mainly through self-inflicted wounds.
Now, Moussa apparently is convinced that the Obama administration is so eager for a peace settlement that it will do the heavy lifting required for the Arabs to achieve their minimum politically acceptable goal, rolling Israel back to the line of demarcation which existed with the armistice ending the active hostilities of 1948-49. This line of demarcation, which was drawn along the line of military force contact was not an international border, nor was it intended to be such by the UN negotiators. The line, famously drawn on a map in green ink, became known as the "Green Line."
When the Israelis rolled over the Green Line in the Six Day War of 1967, the resultant UN Security Council resolutions did not alter the established nature of the Line as a purely temporary, de facto feature identical to the armistice line drawn at the end of the shooting phase of the Korean War. Neither the Green Line nor the later line of contact in Korea was intended to be a de jure international border.
Thus it takes a highly selective reading of the historical record to conclude that the territory in and around the Old City of Jerusalem was unlawfully seized by the IDF from the sovereign state of Jordan. It takes an equally selective and biased reading to transform the relevant UNSC resolutions following the Six Day War into documents creating an international border where none existed before.
The government of Israel moved rapidly to incorporate the territory in and around the Old City of Jerusalem into the State of Israel. The US government understood and, at the very least, tacitly approved the action even though it refused to move its embassy from Tel Aviv. While it can be argued with accuracy that the Johnson administration approval was motivated by domestic political considerations, that is as irrelevant as stating that President Truman moved with haste almost unseemly in recognizing the new state of Israel for identical reasons.
The annexation of Jerusalem is both a fact on the ground and a fact in law. This twin consideration renders the no-settlement demand nugatory. It does the same with respect to the Saudi Arabian 2002 plan which is the preferred diplomatic fall back position of the Arab League. In fact and in law Jerusalem is a part of Israel. This means that the Israelis may choose to give some or all of it away to the Palestinians but they are not under any duty to do so. They may decide to give away some or all of those portions of Jerusalem which are on the "Jordanian side" of the old Green Line to buy their peace, but there is no objective requirement that they do so.
In the messy real world there is no possibility that the Israelis will evacuate their "settlements" on the east side of the Green Line. Least of all is there any probability that Israel will relinquish the Old City. History and its far more potent cousin, myth, militate against that with irresistible force.
Nor is there much likelihood that the government of Israel will accept the other key provision of the 2002 Saudi plan, the acceptance of a Palestinian "right of return" to property they or their ancestors owned and occupied prior to the 1948-49 wars. There is no right of return, nor is Israel under any affirmative duty to "compensate" either those who fled or their descendants for alleged losses. In this regard it must be remembered that most of those who fled did so at the urgings of the sundry Arab governments whose armed forces were attacking the infant state filled with the certainty of impending victory. (This does not relieve the Israelis of their moral culpability for the several atrocities committed against Palestinians by elements of their armed forces.)
The first take away is simple. All parties, Arab as well as American, best get a grip on the inconvenient fact that Jerusalem is part and parcel of Israel, and it is going to remain such unless and until the Israeli public allows a government to purchase peace with some or all of the Old City and environs.
The second take away is equally simple albeit more unpleasant. The only alternative to continuing the peace "process" as currently conceived and structured is war.
While the current process is slow, painful, and, for the Arabs in particular, unlikely to produce a result which is palatable, it is far less messy, infinitely less painful, and not quite as likely to produce a completely unacceptable result than is war. And, no mistake should be made here, the only alternative is war.
That subtext resided quite clearly in the words of Moussa and others at the Monster Rally in Sirte. The war may be open, conventional, or semi-covert, asymmetrical in nature. In either event the highest probability is that the Arab/Palestinian side will come up short. They will lose as their predecessors have lost so often in the past.
It is not improbable that the realization of this dismal possibility undergirds the call for "engagement" of Iran by the Arab League as a collective polity. True the call for collective engagement was couched in terms of concern over the Iranian nuclear program and apprehension regarding the growing influence of Iran in the region.
At the same time the call acknowledges implicitly that only Iran possesses the actual and potential means to defeat Israel in either open or proxy war. The realization that the Shia Persians have capacities lacking in the Arab League members individually or collectively must be bitter in Arab mouths. Nonetheless that is the reality today and into the foreseeable future.
If the only alternative to the current peace "process" recognizable to the Arab states is war then it follows that the only way in which the Arabs can hope to do other than lose is with the enlistment of Iran on their side. In this context the Arab League would do well to recall the hoary proverb about riding tigers: It is far easier to mount the beast than to get off without being eaten in the process.
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