Slouching towards Annapolis

Tuesday, 20th November 2007

There has been a clutch of good pieces in the last couple of days about the forthcoming Annapolis farce by Bret Stephens, Hillel Halkin and Frank Gaffney.

To all these, I would merely add the following observations. The Annapolis conference (meeting?) is grotesque because Israel is being dragooned into ‘negotiating’ and making ‘painful sacrifices’ with an Arab side which is quite explicit that Israel should not exist at all (see chief negotiator Saeb Erekat’s statement, reported in my earlier post, that the Palestinians will never agree to Israel remaining a Jewish state). The very fact that America is forcing this meeting to take place regardless of this position is to legitimise and thus strengthen the terrorist Palestinian entity that has never stopped trying to wipe Israel off the map.

The apparent belief that a Palestinian state would a) rescue Mahmoud Abbas’s ‘moderate’ Fatah and b) be a bulwark against the threat from Iran is risible. There is only one thing which is currently preventing Hamas from taking over the West Bank just as it took over Gaza. That is the presence in the West Bank of Israeli troops, which are acting against Hamas and saving Abbas’s skin. If Israel were to withdraw tomorrow, Hamas would take over and Abbas would be history. A Palestinian state in the West Bank would turn into Hamastan and, just as in Gaza, would become a proxy for Iran and quite possibly also an incubator for al Qaeda. If no Palestinian state is established, Abbas will be history anyway. Either way, this is not good news for the region.

If the moderate Arab states want to avoid this terrible development on their doorstep — and they do — there is only one way forward. Jordan must legally take control of the West Bank that it formerly illegally occupied, thus subsuming the Palestinians into the state that was always effectively ‘Palestine’ and finally bringing about the two-state solution.