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Worse, it has played into the hands of extremists. ‘They talk about freedom and democracy as long as it suits them,’ goes the saying in the camps and on the Arab street. Radical Islamists always time their attacks to occur just before major events, such as Israeli redeployments. Equally, Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli extremist putting an end to the Oslo process. What George Bush has to do is read the riot act to Israel’s right wing, force the only democracy in the Middle East to revert to the 1967 borders, swap lands equal in size and quality to ensure territorial contiguity for both Israelis and Palestinians, and then, finally, ignore the provocations by both sides until a viable independent Palestinian state is born. Most important of all is for Bush to use the stick where settlement activity is concerned.
Sounds impossible, doesn’t it? But just imagine if Bush forces the Israeli hand and ignores warmongers. Just think if Bush manages to bring peace to the Holy Land what it will do for his reputation, now lower than even that of my hero Richard Nixon. The Arab world would have to shut up for once. Ronald Reagan tried and failed, Bush senior promised to stop the settlements and lost to Bill Clinton for his efforts, and Bubba went for the Nobel Prize, shook a lot of hands and made a lot of promises but came up with zilch.
The good news is that many Israelis have had enough of having their chain pulled by mostly American-born extremist settlers. In The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé traces the entire period when pre-state Zionist leaders planned forcibly to expel the locals in order to create the Jewish state. Pappé’s figures don’t lie. Over 90 per cent of the land was Palestinian in the early 20th century, and by 1948 the Jewish minority owned only 5.8 per cent of the land. The ethnic cleansing came under the name of Plan Dalet, and it included files on every Arab village and its inhabitants that would allow Jewish militias to attack them and drive them off their lands.
The result was that 800,000 Palestinians became refugees. We in the West pride ourselves on fairness and compassion. As do the Jewish people everywhere. Where’s the fairness there after all these years? Avraham Burg, a former speaker of the Knesset, and former chairman of the World Zionist Organisation and the Jewish Agency for Israel, calls present-day Israel ‘Holocaust-obsessed, militaristic, xenophobic…’ and writes that ‘Israel, having ceased to care about the children of the Palestinians, should not be surprised when they come washed in hatred and blow themselves up in the centres of Israeli escapism’.
Imagine if anyone said something like that on the Senate floor in DC. He or she would be out of a job pronto. In order for the Taki plan (just kidding, of course) to work, Bush has to forget that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) exists, get rid of the creeps who have manipulated him for so long, read the riot act to the Saudis (who have never stopped financing terror), force the Israelis to dismantle the settlements, force the Palestinians — through bribes — to sit down and sign, and, presto, Taki receives the Nobel Prize and Bush is declared the greatest president since Lincoln. Mind you, I will not be holding my breath for Stockholm to ring with the good news.
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