The region was already burning when…John Kerry rolled into town in July 2013, on his fifteenth-odd visit to Jerusalem… Syria was well into its third year of carnage, with sectarian strife beginning to spill over into Lebanon…Libya was in shambles, with Islamist militias carving out spheres of influence following the American-led operation to remove Muammar Gaddafi…Yemen, once a major US ally in the fight against terrorism, was without a stable government after the overthrow of long-time ruler Ali Abdullah Saleh…In the wake of the total US military withdrawal from Iraq, that country was coming apart at the seams under Nuri al-Maliki…Egypt, the pillar of regional stability for decades, was in turmoil…
Yet in his blinding arrogance, Kerry was certain what was needed most: The renewal of a 20-year-long “peace process” that neither Israeli nor Palestinian officialdom had asked for nor wanted. Kerry would, with unsinkable hubris, secure his place in history by succeeding where everyone before him had failed. In any event, the move would deflect attention away from other US foreign policy blunders that had contributed to plunging the Middle East and North Africa into chaos…
The only thing negotiations were ever bound to deliver were more corpses to the morgue. Engagement with the Palestinians has never produced anything other than the weakening of Israel’s bargaining positions and the erosion of its legitimate rights…
Just weeks after the breakdown of talks…Hamas dutifully reminded Palestinians of their nationalistic responsibilities. The incorporation of Gaza’s rulers into a unity government with…Abbas was near-unanimously hailed as a positive step by the international community, effectively justifying terror against Israelis. The kidnapping and murder of three Jewish teens this past June, accompanied by a surge of rocket fire on civilian population centers, was the outcome…
And while the world was perversely condemning Israel’s “disproportionate” response to the terror it helped to unleash, unrest was brewing in the West Bank and especially Jerusalem. Violent demonstrations in Arab-Israeli cities likewise foreshadowed the campaign of murder currently being waged against Jews within the so-called “1967 borders.”…
The question of whether or not another Palestinian “uprising” has started is irrelevant – because it is unavoidable. It is the natural consequence of the venomous indoctrination with hate of an entire population based on the total rejection of the Jewish people’s right to live within any borders in its one and only state, the recurring result of a phony peace process which holds only one side accountable and deems the construction of schools in disputed territories as a greater sin than the taking of life. In the result, Israel finds itself in a great conundrum, from which it cannot escape without altering dramatically the prevailing, warped paradigm. One needs to look no farther than the media coverage of Tuesday’s attack to understand the depths to which the country has fallen. Canada’s public news station, the CBC, conjured up this headline: “Police fatally shoot two after apparent synagogue attack.”… But nobody should be surprised; the US Embassy in Tel Aviv, after all, described the first terror attack in the recent series – which saw a Palestinian mow down as many bystanders as possible on the streets of Jerusalem – as a “vehicular accident.”…
(Jerusalem Post, Nov. 24, 2014)
Charles Bybelezer is a correspondent for i24News
and a former CIJR Publications Chairman
