The War with Israel Is Over

[KrustyKidd]

The War with Israel Is Over - and they won.

by Youssef M. Ibrahim, Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Now let's finally move forward. With Israel entering its fourth week of an incursion into the same Gaza Strip it voluntarily evacuated a few months ago, a sense of reality among Arabs is spreading through commentary by Arab pundits, letters to the editor, and political talk shows on Arabic-language TV networks. The new views are stunning both in their maturity and in their realism. The best way I can think of to convey them is in the form of a letter to the Palestinian Arabs from their Arab friends:

Dear Palestinian Arab brethren: The war with Israel is over. You have lost. Surrender and negotiate to secure a future for your children. We, your Arab brothers, may say until we are blue in the face that we stand by you, but the wise among you and most of us know that we are moving on, away from the tired old idea of the Palestinian Arab cause and the "eternal struggle" with Israel . Dear friends, you and your leaders have wasted three generations trying to fight for Palestine , but the truth is the Palestine you could have had in 1948 is much bigger than the one you could have had in 1967, which in turn is much bigger than what you may have to settle for now or in another 10 years.

Struggle means less land and more misery and utter loneliness. At the moment, brothers, you would be lucky to secure a semblance of a state in that Gaza Strip into which you have all crowded, and a small part of the West Bank of the Jordan. It isn't going to get better. Time is running out even for this much land, so here are some facts, figures, and sound advice, friends.

You hold keys, which you drag out for television interviews, to houses that do not exist or are inhabited by Israelis who have no intention of leaving Jaffa , Haifa , Tel Aviv, or West Jerusalem. You shoot old guns at modern Israeli tanks and American-made fighter jets, doing virtually no harm to Israel while bringing the wrath of its mighty army down upon you. You fire ridiculously inept Kassam rockets that cause little destruction and delude yourselves into thinking this is a war of liberation.

Your government, your social institutions, your schools, and your economy are all in ruins. Your young people are growing up illiterate, ill, and bent on rites of death and suicide, while you, in effect, are living on the kindness of foreigners, including America and the United Nations. Every day your officials must beg for your daily bread, dependent on relief trucks that carry food and medicine into the Gaza Strip and the West Bank , while your criminal Muslim fundamentalist Hamas government continues to fan the flames of a war it can neither fight nor hope to win.

In other words, brothers, you are down, out, and alone in a burnt-out landscape that is shrinking by the day. What kind of struggle is this? Is it worth waging at all? More important, what kind of miserable future does it portend for your children, the fourth or fifth generation of the Arab world's have-nots? We, your Arab brothers, have moved on.

Those of us who have oil money are busy accumulating wealth and building housing, luxury developments, state-of-the-art universities and schools, and new highways and byways. Those of us who share borders with Israel , such as Egypt and Jordan , have signed a peace treaty with it and are not going to war for you any time soon. Those of us who are far away, in places like North Africa and Iraq , frankly could not care less about what happens to you.

Only Syria continues to feed your fantasies that someday it will join you in liberating Palestine , even though a huge chunk of its territory, the entire Golan Heights, was taken by Israel in 1967 and annexed. The Syrians, my friends, will gladly fight down to the last Palestinian Arab. Before you got stuck with this Hamas crowd, another cheating, conniving, leader of yours, Yasser Arafat, sold you a rotten bill of goods - more pain, greater corruption, and millions stolen by his relatives - while your children played in the sewers of Gaza .

The war is over. Why not let a new future begin?

Youssef M. Ibrahim, a former New York Times Middle East Correspondent and Wall Street Journal Energy Editor for 25 years, is a freelance writer based in New York City and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.

[Bonam]

Nice article. Similar sentiment to what I posted in one of the other threads here - they should accept what they can still get and make the best of it, because the longer they wait and the longer they wallow in their futile rage, the less they will end up with.

[KrustyKidd]

Nice article. Similar sentiment to what I posted in one of the other threads here - they should accept what they can still get and make the best of it, because the longer they wait and the longer they wallow in their futile rage, the less they will end up with.

I wonder what realistic actions could be taken by both sides that would advance this problem before the Israelis simply build a wall, close everything down and forget about it all together.

[Muddy]

I would say that Muslims have more to fear from Islamists than the Jews. Islamists kill more Muslims than the Jew ever could ,but the Left world seems OK with that . How about Iran recently and then there is that other little holocaust that the left ignores ,or at least does not lay the blame where it belongs. DARFUR!

[kuzadd]

Yes Palestinian people, lay down for the people who continue to unlawfully steal and occupy land outside of their assigned borders.

Palestinians accept your oppression, cause if you don't, the state of Israel will kill you all anyway and take what is left of the land they haven't stolen.

Nice article, good to see who it is agrees with colonialism, and slaughter of a people.

[Bonam]

I wonder what realistic actions could be taken by both sides that would advance this problem before the Israelis simply build a wall, close everything down and forget about it all together.

I dunno, but they are just about there. Technologies to shoot down those rockets with near perfect reliability are just about ready to be deployed along the border, and certainly will be within the next decade. No more Qassams or Katyushas raining down on Israel after that. And with the wall complete no more suicide bombers either. Then they can just pull out of most of the West Bank and forget about the Palestinians, let them wallow in their self-created misery.

Yes Palestinian people, lay down for the people who continue to unlawfully steal and occupy land outside of their assigned borders.

Palestinians accept your oppression, cause if you don't, the state of Israel will kill you all anyway and take what is left of the land they haven't stolen.

Nice article, good to see who it is agrees with colonialism, and slaughter of a people.

They were offered their own state multiple times, starting in 1948 and continuing to this day. Every time, they have rejected the opportunity to have their own state. The longer they wait, the less will still be on the table. Simple truth, and the sooner the Palestinians realize it, accept responsibility for building their own state, and work towards improving their own lives rather than raging against Israel, the better off they will be. As the article shows, even the Arab world is beginning to realize this. Only brainwashed Western supporters of Palestinian terrorism and suffering, like yourself, continue to think otherwise.