Where Is the Arab Street?

Viscerally opposed to anything that Donald Trump does, the elite that has been in charge of American foreign policy for decades now declared last week that the world, and in particular the “Arab street” would erupt in rage at Trump’s declaration that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.

It makes some sense. These great minds had refused to recognize Jerusalem because they feared the might wrath of the Arab Street. Don’t say that terrorism doesn’t work? Besides, in America today, if you do not erupt in rage at anything Trump says or does, you will be shunned from polite liberal society. Just ask Alan Dershowitz.

I have already offered my views on the matter. On the response of the Arab street Lt. Col. Ralph Peters has it right. It was yet another occasion where the bien pensant progressives and the cowardly Europeans got it wrong. Why did they get it wrong? For one simple reason: their own residual anti-Semitism:

In the wake of President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital last week, the “experts” crowding the media predicted strategic calamity: Vast, violent protests and a wave of terror would sweep the Muslim world in the coming days.

Instead, the largest demonstration anywhere this weekend was the funeral procession for Johnny Hallyday, the “French Elvis.” Nothing in the Middle East came close.

We have witnessed, yet again, the carefully phrased anti-Semitism of the pristinely educated; the global left’s fanatical pro-Palestinian bias; and the media’s yearning for career-making disasters.

Rather than waves of protest, the waiting world got tepid statements of disapproval from otherwise-occupied Arab governments; demonstrations in the West Bank and the Gaza strip that, combined, barely put a thousand activists in the streets; and yes, four deaths: two demonstrators and two Hamas terrorists hit by an Israeli airstrike.

One suspects that Western leftists hate Israel because they are trying to appease the millions of Muslim immigrants they allowed into their countries and who are now wreaking havoc.

As I have been reporting on this blog, things have changed in the Middle East.

Peters explains:

Once upon a time, the Palestinians were the only game at the propaganda casino, a marvelous tool for Arab leaders to divert attention from domestic failures. Then came al Qaeda. And Iraq. Iranian empire-building. The Arab Spring. The oil-price collapse and the rise of ISIS, with its butcher-shop caliphate. The civil war in Syria, with half a million dead. And, not least, the region-wide confrontation between decaying Sunni power and rising Shia might.

Thus, geopolitical realities have caused the Middle East to see Israel, as I have often noted, as the solution, not the problem. I would add that Israel has far more to offer modernizing Arab nations than do the parasitic Palestinians.

But by far the most-significant factor is that Israel has become an indispensable, if quiet, ally of Sunni states against Iran. Although well-armed, Saudi Arabia remains inept on the battlefield, bogged down in Yemen and terrified of Iranian gains in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. Israel doesn’t need Saudi Arabia, but Saudi Arabia definitely needs Israel.

As for the Palestinians they never wanted to negotiate peace anyway. They wanted and they still want to destroy Israel. They use peace negotiations as a means to that end. Had they wanted a state, Peters argues, they could have had it, many times over.

Since the failed 1948 Arab assault on newly reborn Israel, the Palestinians have had literally dozens of opportunities for an advantageous peace. Yet, even Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton — no friends to the blue-and-white flag — ended up frustrated as Palestinian leaders, on the cusp of peace time and again, decided that three-quarters of the pie was insufficient.

Inevitably, the pie got smaller over time — but the Palestinian leadership continued to profit from “occupied” status. Now it’s too late for anything that looks like a viable Palestinian state. It’s time we all faced that reality.

If you will, the Palestinians claimed “occupied” status to receive the support and admiration of Western liberals… happy as they were to consider Israel  a hegemonic, imperialist, colonialist power. If the Palestinians were incapable of building a functioning modern economy they could step forth and claim the status as vanguard of the next Marxist revolution. Obviously, this appeals to unreconstructed Western leftists.

So, perhaps the world has turned a page. Perhaps the rage of today’s Arab street is more show than substance. Once Saudi Arabia turned its back on the Palestinian madness, the party effectively was over. It was time to learn the lesson of World War II—appeasement does not work:

A Central-Asian proverb runs that “The dog may bark, but the caravan moves on.” The hounds of appeasement have barked for generations, but the Israeli caravan kept going, arriving at the only admirable (or even livable) state in the Middle East, an island of civilization amid vast deserts of barbarism.

The analogy is apt. And, let’s not forget, the grand mufti of Jerusalem during World War II, uncle of Yasser Arafat, strongly supported Hitler’s final solution for the Jewish people. Could it be that the Palestinian resistance has merely kept the Nazi hope alive? Could it be that the call for revolution was also a call for a return to the days of Nazi persecution of Jews?

To modify a poet's words: This is the way the Palestinian cause ends; not with a bang, but with a whimper.