I'm sick of all the useless fiddling with lines on maps, and I fear the Obama-as-messiah movement seeking a US-imposed "peace".
You can’t impose peace. While the Arab leaders continue to vilify Jews, incite hatred and glorify martyrdom, they cannot make peace and no-one else can make it for them.
The solution doesn’t lie in lines on maps, nor “compromise” imposed by outside parties.
At the time of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, there were two quite different reactions from the Arabs of the region.
On the one hand leaders (and there were many of them) like Hussein, Sharif of Mecca, who was the King of Syria and later King of Iraq, called on the Arab population in Palestine to welcome the Jews as brothers and to cooperate with them for the common good.
His son, the Emir Faisal, signed a treaty with Dr. Chaim Weizmann in February 1919, in which it was taken for granted that western Palestine (west of the Jordan River) was to be a Jewish state. Regarding that Agreement, Emir Faisal wrote the following (to Harvard Law School Dean and later US Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter): "We Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement. ...We will do our best, in so far as we are concerned, to help them through: we will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home. … The Jewish movement is national and not imperialist. Our movement is national and not imperialist, and there is room in Syria for us both. Indeed, I think that neither can be a real success without the other."
On the other hand the British-appointed Mufti of Jerusalem, the Haj Amin al-Husseini, opposed Jewish immigration to Palestine. He engineered the bloody riots against Jews in 1929 and 1936. He also instituted assassinations and suicide bombings, targeting Arabs who refused to support his violent opposition to the Jews.
Thus a rejectionist Arab leadership took hold, violently persecuted Jews, and launched a relentless campaign, against the interests of their own people, to obliterate the Jewish national revival ….BEFORE any “occupation” and even before the establishment of the State of Israel (not as a "resistance" to it).
They flatly rejected the restoration of the Jewish homeland as mandated by the League of Nations in 1920. Even after Jordan was created from 80% of the British Mandate of Palestine, they rejected the still-legally-valid-today international right of Jewish settlement ANYWHERE in western Palestine (the remaining 20%, west of the Jordan River). They also rejected the 1937 Peel Commission proposal to partition western Palestine.
The Mufti later went on to collaborate with Hitler and planned with him to set up a death camp in Cairo modelled on those in Europe. Fortunately the Allies, largely thanks to the Australian and new Zealand Army Corps (ANZACs), held the Nazi forces off at Tobruk and turned Rommel back at El-Alemein in North Africa, otherwise we would have seen the Jews in Israel also fall victim to the Nazi Death Camp industry at a subsidiary in Cairo.
But for the Arabs' violent attempt to abort the 1947 UN partition of western Palestine, there would have been no war, no dislocation and no “Palestinian Refugees” (as uniquely defined by UNRWA) in the first place.
After the war, the Mufti spent the rest of his life fomenting violence against Israel. In 1948 he issued a fatwa: "I declare a Holy War, My Muslim Brothers! Murder the Jews! Murder them all!"
And the rejection of Jews (not just Israel, but Jews) continues to this day.
In 1949, Israel offered to return captured land as part of a formal peace agreement. Arab rulers refused.
From 1948 to 1967, Israel did not control the West Bank and Gaza.
The Islamo-totalitarian Yasir Arafat continued the legacy of his relative, the Islamo-fascist Mufti. The PLO could have demanded an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza from Jordan and Egypt, but did not. Had they sought peace and reconciliation, instead of rejection and global terrorism, a Palestinian state could have been established from the 1960’s.
They rejected the offer of Palestinian autonomy in the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace negotiations. They scuttled the Oslo process that began in 1993 leading toward the creation of a Palestinian state, by violating their commitments. In 2000, they also rejected the offer at Camp David to create a Palestinian state.
And they rejected an even better offer from caretaker-prime-minister Olmert in 2008.
The fact that now in 2009 they demand that the West Bank be ethnically cleansed of Jews, just emphasises their century-old rejection of co-existence with Jews.
Since the 1920s, misguided, self-serving Arab leaders have treated their own constituents as political pawns and cannon fodder, fed on hatred and false hope; and squandered repeated opportunities for statehood and economic progress.
The answer is not lines on maps, nor Obama, nor Mitchell …or the Messiah.
It is a new and fundamentally different Arab leadership.
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