Sorry, but ‘Counting to 10’ won’t bring peace to the Middle East - by Stephen M. Flatow

Palestinian Arabs are not children throwing a temper tantrum who need to calm down. They are Arab nationalists and devout Muslims who see their war to destroy Israel as a national and religious obligation.

Stephen M. Flatow..
JNS.org..
30 April '20..

One of the main authors of the Trump Mideast peace plan is appealing to Palestinian Arab leaders to “count to 10” before rejecting the plan. Despite spending years observing Palestinians and negotiating with Palestinian officials, he still believes that peace is possible if Mahmoud Abbas would just take a deep breath.

Writing last week in The Jerusalem Post, former U.S. special envoy to the Middle East Jason Greenblatt pleaded with Palestinian Arab leaders to “see the advantages of counting to 10 before officially reacting to the proposed peace plan.”

Greenblatt’s article was co-authored by Bishara Bahbah, a former Palestinian negotiator. I get why Bahbah likes the plan: It would create an independent Palestinian state in three-fourths of Judea and Samaria, with a capital in part of Jerusalem and a corridor to the Hamas state in Gaza. But the leadership of the Palestinian Authority has obviously decided that they will hold out of a better deal.

My concern is with the premise that apparently lies at the heart of the Trump administration’s approach. Greenblatt’s appeal for the Palestinians to “count to 10” follows a similar statement at the United Nations the previous week by a senior U.S. representative, Cherith Norman Chalet. “When this [coronavirus] disease passes,” he said, “we will be able to point to the cooperation we’re seeing now and say that dialogue between the Israelis and Palestinian is possible. We will be able to say that achieving mutually beneficial solutions is possible.”

The P.A. “cooperates” with Israel only to the extent that of its immediate, practical advantage. It’s like when P.A. officials quietly go to Israeli hospitals for medical treatment. They don’t mind exploiting Israel’s kindness or benefiting from Jewish-led innovations. But that has no effect whatsoever on the unending Palestinian war against Israel.

Anybody remember the Israeli greenhouses in flames in Gaza? The diplomats and pundits and peace activists all insisted that Israel should hand them over intact when it pulled out of the Gaza Strip in 2005.

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