And It Starts Once Again

 

United States Vice President Pence flew into Egypt on Tuesday and following will visit Israel. What remains to be seen is whether the royal Palestinian High Mucky-Muck Mahmoud Abbas will deem it worth his while to allow the United States Vice President to meet with him. Just after President Trump made his monumental recognition of the historically obvious, Jerusalem is the Capital City of the Jewish State of Israel, Palestinian Authority (PA) President, PLO Chairman, Fatah Party Chairman and chief swindler Mahmoud Abbas announced that he determined that the United States could no longer be acceptable as a just and impartial arbiter in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Abbas refused to give any reason beyond the recognition of Jerusalem as Israeli Capital despite the critical mention in that speech which stated a number of qualifiers which included the following:

“In making these announcements, I also want to make one point very clear: This decision is not intended, in any way, to reflect a departure from our strong commitment to facilitate a lasting peace agreement. We want an agreement that is a great deal for the Israelis and a great deal for the Palestinians. We are not taking a position of any final status issues, including the specific boundaries of the Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem, or the resolution of contested borders. Those questions are up to the parties involved.
“The United States remains deeply committed to helping facilitate a peace agreement that is acceptable to both sides.
“I intend to do everything in my power to help forge such an agreement. Without question, Jerusalem is one of the most sensitive issues in those talks. The United States would support a two-state solution if agreed to by both sides.
“In the meantime, I call on all parties to maintain the status quo at Jerusalem’s holy sites, including the Temple Mount, also known as Haram al-Sharif.
“Above all, our greatest hope is for peace, the universal yearning in every human soul. With today’s action, I reaffirm my administration’s longstanding commitment to a future of peace and security for the region. There will, of course, be disagreement and dissent regarding this announcement. But we are confident that ultimately, as we work through these disagreements, we will arrive at a peace and a place far greater in understanding and cooperation.
“This sacred city should call forth the best in humanity, lifting our sights to what it is possible; not pulling us back and down to the old fights that have become so totally predictable. Peace is never beyond the grasp of those willing to reach.
“So today, we call for calm, for moderation, and for the voices of tolerance to prevail over the purveyors of hate. Our children should inherit our love, not our conflicts.”

 

Our bet is the Mahmoud Abbas may not have listened to the entire speech as with his keen sense of observation and knowledge of human nature and political insight that after the words, “Thank you. When I came into office, I promised to look…” he stopped listening already having figured out the remainder of the speech thus not needing to wait for the actual speech itself. He had judged that with just these words that everything had changed. He was partially correct. What is most interesting is that when, back in April of this year, President Putin announced that Russia was recognizing Jerusalem, West Jerusalem, as the Capital City of Israel Mahmoud Abbas saw nothing wrong with that announcement. After reading all, and we obviously mean all, of President Trump’s Jerusalem speech and making sure to see and fathom the meanings of every phrase, we see little difference in the actual recognitions. The measurable difference is that as long as the future does not alter things as they currently stand, then the default position is that all of Jerusalem, united and whole, will forever be the Capital City of Israel, but that is only if nothing changes. Should there come a peace between the Arabs and Israelis establishes a Palestinian State with its capital in East Jerusalem with the Temple Mount under “international” United Nations protection, then we will return to the situation from before 1967 within six weeks as the United Nations guardians of the Temple Mount flee to Tel Aviv and then back to wherever they came from while Israel will be forced to once again place a tall cement barricade between the two halves of the city. This wall will not be an apartheid Wall but a bullet stopper just as was necessary for nineteen years from 1948 through June of 1967 and the fateful six days that changed the world. Should their be a peace agreement with someplace other than East Jerusalem as the capital, then Jerusalem as a whole will be the Israeli Capital. Any negotiation result in the world attempting to impose an Arab state with all of Jerusalem as the capital, then that would be the equivalent of giving away sovereign Israeli soil and a casus belli for war.

 

Now to the reality of the threats from Mahmoud Abbas and his official echo chamber of underlings, they sent their usual threat to break relations with the United States and refuse the United States as a mediator and rely on the United Nations, European Union and other world bodies to find a suitable settlement. Well, it was nice of Mahmoud Abbas to all but list the groups which must never be permitted to mediate anything in the Middle East, not the European Union, not the United Nations, which in this case they means the General Assembly, Human Rights Commission, UNESCO and other pro-Palestinian NGO’s and not the remainder of those referenced do-goodies of the world. Mahmoud Abbas is not really going to break relations with the United States and the PA will continue to sit comfortably in their New York and Washington D.C. offices and retain their chair in the General Assembly Hall and their open back door at the United States State Department. What they are demanding is that the United States now proves their impartiality by forcing some concession out of the Israelis. They already have forced the cessation of any further construction by the Israelis with small allowances within the approved communities (settlements) as well as limitations on further destruction of illegal Arab structures with a special emphasis on those built by their friends at the European Union who even leave their flag on each structure just so the Israelis know who is placing these facts on the ground in Area C, where the Palestinian are not permitted to build and is completely under Israeli jurisdictions by the Oslo Accords, strategically placed to surround Jerusalem cutting it off from the other Israeli communities. These are the people Mahmoud Abbas trusts as impartial as truly impartial mediators favor Israel because they actually want peace allowing both sides to exist. Abbas defines impartial as anybody who agrees that all the land belongs to the Arabs and the Jews are not entitled to anything. So, now we will see what happens when, despite encouragement from the State Department to force further Israeli concession, President Trump actually dares to ignore the desire and threats from Mahmoud Abbas and simply leaves well enough alone and waits to see what develops.

 

For this, President Trump is taking a different tactic compared to his predecessors. Where President William Jefferson Clinton attempted to cajole and use friendly good-old-boy country charm to persuade an agreement out of the two sides and came close when he pushed and extracted from Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to meet every last demand which he had somehow extracted through negotiations as the minimal demands which would satisfy Yasser Arafat. The next morning Yasser Arafat realized he had been snookered into actually making a deal, so he walked right past the gathered American and Israeli delegations, got into his limousine, drove to the airport, boarded his plane, returned to Nablus via Jordan and a short while later loosed the Second Intifada on Israel blaming it on the fact that Prime Minister elect Sharon had the audacity to take a walk through the Temple Mount which Arafat defined as entering the al-Aqsa Mosque setting the precedent that the Arabs consider the entirety of the Temple Mount to be the al-Aqsa Mosque.

 

This definition has been used in order to claim that the Jews who enter the Temple Mount are transgressing into the al-Aqsa Mosque and thus profaning its purity. This is what is used to justify and instigate the Temple Mount rioting which is used regularly whenever the Arabs feel like heightening tensions and raising a ruckus in the media. This is the means by which the Arabs force the closure of the Temple Mount to Jews by demanding such a closure to end the rioting, which still takes at least a week to wane to a safe level. The Israelis, should they ever choose, could end the rioting within a few minutes by using less measure force. The reality is the Israelis attempt to keep injuries on both sides to a minimum and avoid fatalities as much as possible. The Arabs see this as a sign of Israeli weakness and not as respect for human life. It is this supposed weakness which also makes the Arabs believe that they will win and that time is on their side. They believe they can out-wait the patience of the Israeli People; they can out-wait the Jewish People who have waited for two thousand years for their return to their ancestral homelands, that is almost one and a half times the length of time Islam has existed which is under fourteen hundred years.

 

Mahmoud Abbas will still rely on the United States to be the suckers using shuttle diplomacy flying between Washington D.C. and the Middle East from Jerusalem to Nablus and once around the capital cities of a number of Arab and even European cities so as to make the trips not entirely about the Arab-Israeli conflict. Perhaps there might be a trip which includes Moscow as getting Putin to back a proposed peace might make it more difficult for Abbas to simply refuse outright. The truth is that as long as any agreement permits even Tel Aviv metropolis to be considered the Jewish State, Abbas will either refuse or depend on the coming war to eradicate even that shred of Jewish land from continuing to exist. From the Khartoum Resolution and the “Three No’s”: “no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel,” Yasser Arafat pledged the PLO’s continuing allegiance to the heart and soul of the Khartoum Resolution and guaranteed that there would be no permanent peace with Israel and that the resistance, code for terrorism, would continue after any agreement and that was how they would destroy Israel in stages. Mahmoud Abbas was beside Arafat as his second in command and fully invested in his mentor’s vision. This is the reality and it has supporters outside of the Arab world as has become obvious from many points across Europe, the European Union, the United Nations and its appendages such as UNESCO and numerous other NGO’s and individual nations. Sampling the college and university campuses, we see the future leaders of the developed world to be a frightening prospect with the anti-Israeli and accompanying anti-Semitism which has become pervasive at many of the leading schools.

 

Zechariah’s Jerusalem

 

The Biblical story could be taken from Zechariah, Chapter 12, which reads,

Zechariah – Chapter 12
1) The prophecy of the word of the Lord concerning Israel: Says the Lord, Who stretches out the heavens and founds the earth and forms the spirit of man within him:
2) Behold! I am making Jerusalem a cup of weakness for all the peoples around, and also on Judah, [that he] shall be in the siege against Jerusalem.
3) And it shall come to pass on that day that I will make Jerusalem a stone of burden for all peoples; all who bear it shall be gashed, and all the nations of the earth shall gather about it.
4) On that day, says the Lord, I will smite every horse with bewilderment, and its rider with madness. And upon the house of Judah I will open My eyes, and all the horses of the peoples I will smite with blindness.
5) And the princes of Judah shall say to themselves, “The inhabitants of Jerusalem were my strength through the Lord of Hosts, their God.”
6) On that day I will make the princes of Judah as a fiery stove among wood, and as a brand of fire among sheaves. And they shall consume on the right and on the left all the nations round about, and Jerusalem shall still stay in its place in Jerusalem.
7) And the Lord shall first save the tents of Judah, so that the boasting of the house of David and the boasting of the inhabitants of Jerusalem shall not increase over Judah.
8) On that day the Lord shall protect the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and the weakest of them shall be, on that day, like David. And the house of David shall be like angels, like the angel of the Lord before them.
9) And it shall come to pass on that day, that I will seek to destroy all the nations that come upon Jerusalem.
10) And I will pour out upon the house of David and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and supplications. And they shall look to me because of those who have been thrust through [with swords], and they shall mourn over it as one mourns over an only son and shall be in bitterness, therefore, as one is embittered over a firstborn son.
11) On that day there shall be great mourning in Jerusalem, like the mourning of Hadadrimmon in the Valley of Megiddon.

 

Beyond the Cusp