The War Is Over. The Palestinians Lost.

Reuel Marc Gerecht echoes a point I have made on several occasions. The war or the conflict or the drama between Israel and the Palestinians is over. Israel won. The Palestinian Authority has lost. All that remains is for the Palestinians to find a face-saving exit from their insane and wildly self-destructive policy.

Gerecht does not mention the important regime change in Saudi Arabia, but he does point out that President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital was a nail in the coffin of Palestinian dreams of destroying Israel. Keep in mind, the cause was not to have a state; the cause was to destroy Israel and to rid the region of Jews:

A lot of people are in a funk over President Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. The liberal media, most former government officials who’ve dealt with the Israeli–Palestinian imbroglio, and just about everyone at the United Nations appear certain that the decision had a lot to do with Mr. Trump’s disruptive nature, the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, Evangelical Christians and pro-Israel Republican donors.

It’s possible that his decision was based instead on an old-fashioned understanding of the way the world works, one that would be familiar to Middle Easterners: There are winners and losers in every conflict, and Palestinians have decisively lost in their struggle with the Jews of the Holy Land. Diplomacy based on denying reality isn’t helpful.

Gerecht adds that in diplomacy, as in negotiation, both parties should walk away feeling that they had won something. When one party has won everything and the other party has lost everything, the new conflict seems inevitable. Stark contrasts between winners and losers is generally a bad idea. Allow him his word:

This view runs smack into the tenets of contemporary conflict resolution, in which diplomacy tries to make losers feels like winners, so that unpleasant compromises, at least in theory, will be easier to swallow. It alleviates the guilt of a Westernized people triumphing over Arabs that has made many in Europe and even the U.S. uncomfortable with Israeli superiority. It also runs counter to an assumption held widely among Western political elites—to wit, quoting the current French ambassador to the U.N.: “Israel is the key to peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians.” Israelis, in this view, must make the big compromises.

All parties ought to save face. Now, in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Palestinian strategy was precisely to avoid any face-saving compromise. After all, multiple American presidents had promised them a state. They have systematically turned it down. And they have systematically practiced terrorism to get their way. Terrorism feels like a child throwing a tantrum… insisting that he get his way.

Gerecht is quite correct to see that Palestinians have refused to compromise because Western political elites have seen Israel as the problem, not the solution. The error was grotesque. It was appalling for its moral caducity. It persuaded Palestinian leaders that they might have it all. Thus, they had a reason to pursue their folly.

For that, Western elites are to blame. At present, they prefer to blame Donald Trump, because, as I have mentioned, they cannot admit that they wasted half their lives pursuing an impossible peace process. And they are not going to accept that the solution was to help the Palestinians to understand that they were not going to be allowed to gain territory or legitimacy by committing acts of terrorism or by killing more Jews.

They are certainly not going to accept, without a fight, that one Donald Trump grasped a simple point that they had spent decades ignoring.

The Palestinians have been duped by Western elites. Gerecht continues:

Far too many Palestinians still want to pretend they haven’t lost, that the “right of return” and Jerusalem’s unsettled status give hope that the gradual erosion of Israel is still possible. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas tapped a common theme among Palestinians in his recent oration before the Organization of Islamic Cooperation when he complained that Jews “are really excellent in faking and counterfeiting history and religion.”

Apparently, Abbas heard the same message from the Crown Princes of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The grand orations and the claims for the right to kill Jews are mere drama, now. Unless, of course, these Western elites can work their diplomatic magic to undermine the reformist princes in the Arabian peninsula.