An essential, but still not the best perspective?
Reader comment on item: Arab-Israeli Fatalities Rank 49th

Submitted by Ron Thompson (United States), Oct 8, 2007 at 18:30

As a great believer in the power of numbers and facts, this piece is excellent to have and ponder on all the carnage - perhaps 99.5% of it completely absurd and pointless as well as tragic - since 1950. Nor am I surprised that the figures of the Arab conflict with Israel (the more accurate name for me) are so relatively small.

And yet, as valuable as this perspective is, I'm still not sure it's the very best, especially in view of Dan Pipes' hope that the conflict will somehow, sometime, mysteriously ..... "subside."

If it's true that the Arab conflict with Israel rests not primarily on Palestinian "suffering" (which the Palestinians' 'brothers' in neighboring areas have done so much to perpetuate and institutionalize), but rather on the fact that the very existence of Israel is viewed as an aggression against Islam, and a source of humiliation to Arab pride, then I view the Western search for a negotiated two-state solution as a perfect cover for endless non-acceptance of Israel and eternal grounds for hope among the Arabs that sooner or later Israel will be worn down, or the West will do the Arabs' dirty work for them, or that some Arab State will acquire a deliverable A-bomb which a delusional leader will use.

If this is so, then the best perspective would seem to me to cease all talk of an Palestinian State until some number, say a majority, of Arab and Moslem States, RECOGNIZE Israel and send embassies to Tel Aviv, thereby unmistakably signaling that they do not support continued terror, and terror talk, against Israel.

I say this particularly in view of how much talk there has recently been (which view I agree with) that the US should be in constant communication with Iran. If that is so, how more should the World, and the West, insist that the Moslem world, and particularly the Arab Middle East , should sit across the table from Israel.

In other words, the 'goal posts' which were successfully moved by the Arabs in 1948, and again in 1967 after the Six-day War, when the Arabs refused to deal with Israel - and the West shamefully accepted that refusal - should be moved back to where they make sense. The bluff of the Arab world should be called before the West prolongs any further its witless investment in the mirage of a two state solution preceding an unambiguous Arab acceptance of Israel and rejection of terrorism and extermination language.

Having the courage to lay down and stick by that policy would have a chance (after weathering intial outbursts and outrage) of causing the Arab conflict with Israel to "subside", whereas pursuing the bizarre Western belief that there is any Palestinian or Arab leadership actually willing to negotiate on the basis that the Arabs lost the struggle to destroy Israel will only continue to fuel the conflict.

Ron Thompson

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