A long time coming, but the center of gravity has shifted under the Palestinians’ feet - by Sarah N. Stern

My Muslim and Arab dissident friends tell me that the deep-seated preoccupation with the Palestinian cause that has united the Arab world until this day is being examined internally as an obsession that has held its own people back in their development as individuals and as nations. This obsession was best described by Egyptian Gen. Gamal Abdel Nasser when he called Arab children “bullets in the war machine.”

Sarah N. Stern..
JNS.org..
19 August '20..

The deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates radically shook the ground in the Middle East and begrudgingly awakened the stale, tired, conventional wisdom of the policy establishment. For far too long, the Palestinian Authority has seen itself as the center of gravity and the final arbitrator of independent Arab governments who have wanted to open up to the public their “under the table,” warm relations with the Jewish state but have been held back by the stubborn, maximalist demands of the Palestinian Authority.

This has given far too much power over the years to the Palestinians to reject overtures of peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors, and has stood in the way of a great deal of progress that this region could have benefited from by partaking in what Israel has to offer.

Far too many in the Washington political establishment and the European Union have bought into the mistaken notion that the Palestinian issue is the lynchpin upon which peace between Israel and their Arab neighbors rests. This is surprising considering our long history of involvement in various wars in the Middle East, as well as our education about the myriad, tribal, internecine conflicts in the region.

Even prior to Israel’s birth in 1948, the Arab League rejected any presence of a Jewish state in the Middle East. After the Six-Day War in June 1967, when Israel was victorious in its defensive war on all sides, it had attempted to trade the land it conquered for peace. It brought that notion to a meeting with the Arab League in Khartoum, Sudan, several months later in August, and its response was the famous “Three No’s”: “No peace, no recognition and no negotiations with Israel.”

Meanwhile, the Palestinians have consistently proven that they have not negotiated in good faith.

I was in the audience of a Washington think tank on July 25, 2000—the day the Camp David talks between U.S. President Bill Clinton, Israel Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat broke up. Elyakim Rubenstein, who had been the Attorney General of the State of Israel, came to address the group. His words were: “There are people crying on the way to Ronald Reagan Airport right now because they felt if we just offered Arafat everything that he wanted, he simply could not refuse it. I can tell you that what we offered was as far as any responsible government could possibly go. In fact, some would argue that we were not being responsible. What we offered was: shared sovereignty over Jerusalem, with the Palestinian control of the Harem al Sharif (the “Temple Mount”), and Israel of the Western Wall; a land mass equal to 95 percent of the West Bank, plus Gaza, (which was still in Israel’s hands); and a ‘right of return’ for thousands of Palestinian refugees, with a monetary package to compensate for those Palestinians that did not want to return. Arafat did not say yes, and he did not say no. He simply walked away from the table.”

His response came a few months later in the form of a renewed intifada, in which more than 1,000 Israeli civilians lost their lives.

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Sarah N. Stern is founder and president of the Endowment for Middle East Truth (EMET), a pro-Israel and pro-American think tank and policy institute in Washington, D.C.