Marty Peretz on Palestinian Statehood...

I have a soft spot in my heart for Peretz....

The Arabs of Palestine have always nurtured a strategy to avoid negotiating a peace deal with the Israelis; and it is that they won’t negotiate at all unless Israel meets so many Palestinian preconditions that the map from which they and their Arab neighbors launched their wars would be completely restored in advance of talks. Poof: There was no Six Day War in 1967 and there was no Yom Kippur War in 1973. Forget both of these and smaller battles in between and after. Then, OK, let’s meet and see where we can go from here or actually there. Which, as Barack Obama didn’t quite have the nerve to say but certainly meant, is the armistice lines of 1949—yes, that’s exactly what he intended and almost said.

So, 63 years after, the president wants to enshrine the momentary configuration of where the fighting happened to stop as the formal and operative borders between the State of Israel and Palestine, notwithstanding that there are now two putative Palestines (the West Bank and the Gaza Strip) governed by two enemy regimes and that there is another one waiting to be birthed in Jordan. (Look, I like the Hashemites, sort of. But they don’t have long for this world. You believe in Arab Spring? Then why shouldn’t roses also bloom in Amman?)

It’s true that Obama’s scheme allows for a reciprocal transfer of real estate between Israel and the not quite nascent Palestine. But, given the fuss his administration has made even about Jewish land going back three millennia, like the City of David as if it had been a water hole or a mere parking lot for chariots, you have a sense of the utter ahistoricity of the president’s perspectives on these matters. The fact is that Jews and Arabs will not live neighborly lives once it is clear that Palestinian half-rule does not mean the restoration of the Mandelbaum Gate and the Jews excluded from their deepest history and their most sacred sites. (I know that many liberals and especially Jewish liberals don’t cotton to the idea of Jewish sacred sites and think it downright primitive. Ah, but a Muslim shrine! Well, you know the difference, of course you do.)

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