Abrabanel: Musings on the Jewish condition

In what is becoming an annual ritual, we poor nations of the Middle East are about to be subjected to another glitzy round of optimistic photo-ops collectively but inaccurately known outside the world as a “peace process.”

French President Nicolas Sarkozy apparently came up with the latest idea:

Sarkozy seeks to capitalize on the momentum created by the participation of European leaders at a summit Sunday in Sharm al-Sheikh summit on the recent hostilities in Gaza, according to Le Figaro.

The paper also states that Sarkozy convinced German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who had feared the cease-fire would not be kept, to attend the summit in Egypt.

The goal of the conference, the paper reported, is to reach a peace accord within a year, and it will be held a few weeks after a meeting of European foreign ministers in Egypt due to take place in February.

The form of the summit will reportedly be similar to that of the one the United States hosted in Annapolis in late 2007.

Here’s our problem with this “peace with a year” idea. According to our sources, Israeli intelligence believes Hamas would win election in every single Palestinian city were they held right now. Hamas rejects every arrangement with the Zionist entity that does not somehow lead to its destruction. The organization even took pains not to “accept” – but only “acknowledge” – the ceasefire announced yesterday.

If peace with Hamas itself is impossible, and peace with Fatah is meaningless because it doesn’t solve Gaza and may not hold traction in the Palestinian street, what could a French diplomat’s cajoling possibly change here?

We got here through the mistakes of many sides, including the Israelis, the Americans and the Europeans. But most importantly, we got here because the Palestinians have not yet decided as a nation to take their fate into their own hands. The leadership robbed its own people and the international community of an entire national economy. They refuse to begin even the most basic processes of sovereignty until all issues are resolved, things like currency, customs, diplomatic representation.

There is only one path to peace we can see. The US and a significant Arab party – Saudi Arabia? Egypt? – must begin a serious nation-building project in the West Bank, recreating an economy, an education system, the trappings of statehood (recall that both a US president and an Israeli PM have publicly declared the goal of negotiations to be a Palestinian state). Create a Palestine that will allow Israelis to believe that a pullout of settlements from the West Bank won’t bring a second Hamastan and rockets on Tel Aviv.

Is Sarkozy planning to do that? Does Obama, weighed down by the US financial implosion and blood on the line in Afghanistan and Iraq, have the bureaucratic bandwidth to engage in such a project? Can Egypt or Saudi Arabia participate in something like this without ruining it by trying to control it?

We don’t know. But we do know this: this conflict has not continued for lack of French cocktail parties.

Livni on Thursday:

“My solution for maintaining a Jewish and democratic State of Israel is to have two nation-states with certain concessions and with clear red lines,” Livni told a group of students at a Tel Aviv high school. “And among other things, I will also be able to approach the Palestinian residents of Israel, those whom we call Israeli Arabs, and tell them, ‘your national solution lies elsewhere.’”

Abu Ala over the weekend:

There will be no room for Jews or settlements in the West Bank because their presence there will always be an obstacle to peace with Israel, Ahmed Qurei, head of the Palestinian Authority negotiating team, said at the weekend.

“All these attacks prove that the settlers are dangerous and that it’s impossible to live with them. If these settlers are allowed to stay, that would mean more friction and confrontation. Peace can be achieved only if Israel withdraws to the last centimeter of the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967,” Qurei said.

In a perfect world, nations would coexist and borders would be merely electoral districts. This is not a perfect world, and Palestinians and Jews in this land have bled in a zero-sum battle over land and the right to a national identity.

Those still calling for a polite democratic coexistence are dangerously disconnected from the sentiments of the people living in this land.

First, we split apart. Only then “reconciliation” – that is, accepting the other’s legitimate national identity – can begin. We’re not holding our breath here. It will take a lot of time for the Palestinians to recognize there is justice in Zionism.

At least the leadership on each side is talking sensibly about separation, not peace or love or some other unstable, doomed fantasy.

AqsaTube, the Hamas website for sharing jihadist videos, was taken down after a Jerusalem Post report revealed it was hosted by French internet company OVH.

AqsaTube (www.aqsatube.com) featured videos inciting against Israel, glorifying terrorism (the “resistance”) and preaching the doctrines of radical Islam.

According to the BBC, OVH initially denied hosting AqsaTube, but later confirmed that the website had been hosted by them and had now been taken offline.

The disappearance of AqsaTube follows Google’s removal of their AdSense program from the website following a request filed by the Post to Google Israel.

The Post really took those guys to the cleaners. Good for them.

We initially linked to the story on the Forecast Highs blog, a blog belonging to the paper’s news editor Amir Mizroch.

The starving, imploding, besieged Gaza Strip apparently still has some funds left over for a sophisticated jihadist video-sharing website. Announcing: AqsaTube!

The Forecast Highs blog reports:

According to the Israeli Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, the Hamas site, however, is devoted entirely to propaganda and incitement. Its contents, like those of other Hamas websites, are a reflection of its ideology and strategy. They include videos inciting against Israel , glorifying terrorism (the “resistance”) and preaching the doctrines of radical Islam. There is also a link to Hamas’s satellite channel, Al-Aqsa TV, which increases the number of its viewers and enables it to bypass restrictions on its broadcasts, according to the ITIC, a think-tank closely associated with Israel’s intelligence community based in Ramat Hasharon.

It’s also a money-maker, thanks to Google AdSense. The good news is that the site is hosted by French Internet firm OVH, so there may be room here for outside pressure.

This comes from Yoram Ettinger, a former Israeli diplomat in Washington and researcher of demography. He contends that the demographic trends in this country, contrary to popular belief, are in the Jews’ favor. This implies, of course, that time is on Israel’s side when it comes to territorial concessions to the Palestinians.

His latest findings: The Jewish birthrate is up while the Arab birthrate is down.

Inside Israel:

The number of Jewish births during the first half of 2008 (55,948) amounts to 76% of total births within pre-1967 Israel, compared to 75% of total births in 2007 and 69% in 1995.

Compared to the Arab population:

Annual Jewish births have grown 40% during 1995 (80,400) – 2007 (112,000), while annual Arab births within pre-1967 Israel have stabilized around 39,000 during the same 13 years, reflecting a significant dive in Arab fertility. Such a dive results from successful Arab integration into Israel’s infrastructures of health, education, finance, commerce, agriculture, sports and politics. From a 3rd World fertility rate, Israel’s Arabs are shifting towards Israeli fertility.

In the West Bank, too:

Arab fertility rate has declined in Judea & Samaria, as demonstrated by the stabilization of annual Arab births during 1995-2007 (around 58,000 annually per PA Ministry of Health documentation). Arab population growth in Judea & Samaria has declined systematically – since 1992 – following the dramatic ascension since the 1967 integration into Israel’s infrastructures. The current decline is the outcome of substantial emigration (triggered by terrorism, PLO-Hamas civil war, PA abuse and corruption and rise of price of oil), urbanization, expanded education especially among women, higher median wedding age, all time high divorce rate and PA/UNRWA campaign against teen-pregnancy and for contraceptives.

This is interesting but, in our view, not all that relevant. It serves as further proof that the Palestinians are not a strategic threat to Israel, and that they won’t become such a threat in the foreseeable future.

Then again, our own support for Palestinian statehood was never based on strategic necessity, but on the moral imperative of national self-determination, which, being old-fashioned, we genuinely believe in.

Yes, they rejected peace and statehood in the aftermath of both ‘48 and ‘67. Yes, they don’t recognize our own right to our identity and country. Yes, they have created a tyrannical kleptocracy that wasted away an entire national economy in a quixotic war against us. Yes, the boots-on-the-ground occupation is tactically necessarily to fight terrorism. Yet, all that being true, Israelis are still driven to keep trying to relinquish our control over them as soon as possible. That’s not because we’re afraid of their wombs, but because we’re decent human beings.

Hassan Yousef is probably going through one of the worst crises of his life. The Hamas chieftain (an Israeli intelligence analyst told me he was “no. 10″ in the Hamas political hierarchy) has sat in Israeli jails on and off for years. He is known as a Hamas moderate, since he is by all accounts a sweet man, and has expressed a willingness to marry his violent ideology with an honest attempt to explain himself to Israelis, Americans and other enemies of Islam. He maintains contacts with Israeli anarchists and far-left activists and believes that a comprehensive jihad includes not only suicide bombings, but explanation of Islam targeted at converting the enemy. This (very relative) moderation has brought him to accept in principle the notion of temporary ceasefires in Hamas’s long-term struggle for restoration of the Islamic caliphate over the Holy Land (and the rest of Islam, and of course Spain, Greece, etc.).

But now, reports the Telegraph, his son Mosab has left Ramallah, and with it Islam, to become an American evangelical Christian. The move is so drastic that Mosab is driven to declare:

If they want to kill me, let them do it. I’m not going to stop anyone. It’s going to be my freedom. My soul’s going to be free of my body, not flesh any more.

I don’t know what drove Mosab to make the vast journey from one reality to another, across such a vast divide of culture and enmity, but the Telegraph interview demonstrates the depth of his alienation from the culture of his birth. Few Palestinians can say of their society:

Palestinians look really ugly in front of everybody in the world and they are very, very good people … they are misled, and their picture is very dark because of this leadership. They need some help, they need people to stop lying to them, and lying to the world.

It is tragic that one must be an outsider to say such words about Palestinian society, which has manifestly failed to respond to the challenges it faces. Or this:

Hamas, they are using civilians’ lives, they are using children, they are using the suffering of people every day to achieve their goals. And this is what I hate.

There will be peace with Israel, and also within Palestine, when a Palestinian can say this from Ramallah, not just from an evangelical church in California.