An interesting piece from Leslie Gelb, a former New York Times correspondent and currently the President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, on the speech President Barack Obama gave last week and the reaction to that speech:
Entwined within this Gordian knot is a truth so terrible as to be rarely spoken. It is that Arabs hate two peoples, not one—the Jews, of course, and also, shockingly, the Palestinians. Yes, the Arabs incessantly demand justice for Palestinians, but the words belie a historical pattern of using Israel as a whipping boy to deflect attention from Arab injustices. Thus, their Arab champions allow Palestinians to fester in refugee camps throughout the region, make no effort to integrate them into their own societies, and provide them with only the most modest economic assistance. Arab leaders and intellectuals say this is necessary to sustain pressure on Israel to take Palestinian refugees back. Yet, they know full well this will never happen. Arabs themselves keep the Palestinians segregated, perhaps because they do not like or trust them, perhaps because they see Palestinians as an inferior tribe or a superior one, perhaps as too demanding, perhaps as too much like the Jews who sprang from the same Abrahamic loins. And Palestinians have often returned these same unkind sentiments in kind, as when they sought to overthrow King Hussein of Jordan in the 1960s and cheered as Saddam Hussein's Iraq troops conquered Kuwait in 1991 . . .
Obama ran open-eyed into the Palestinian-Israeli buzz saw….
Experts and negotiators will declaim over the bowl full of details in Obama's Thursday speech. But its heart is this: Israel would accept a Palestinian state outlined by 1967 borders with land swaps to accommodate Israeli settlers on the West Bank, while Palestinians would recognize a Jewish state of Israel and agree that its state be demilitarized. In other words, Palestinians would receive statehood, and Israelis would have their security. The equally volatile issues of Jerusalem and the right of Palestinians to return to Israel were to be set aside for later determination. Suffice it to say, the Israeli government went bonkers, and the Palestinians weren't happy either…
