And If We Don't Give the Palestinians What They Want....?

When I was 16 years old, I believed that Israel and Palestine could come to some kind of agreement and just drop everything. I believed that this was about a homeland. I no longer think so, because I became convinced of the reality that Mark Steyn is talking about:

“That’s why there was no peace in 1948, no peace under the British mandate in the 1930s, no peace at the time of the 1922 partition because one party to the dispute wants to kill the other. So, if they are wedded to that, then you got to put pressure on the party that doesn’t want to kill each other, to make concession – to keep throwing concessions in the face of the beast that wants to devour it and I think that’s – if you look at where he’s applying the pressure, I think that tells you a lot about the fundamental fraudulence of these negotiations.”

Now it could be that all this talk of wanting to drive Israel into the see is so much bluster. But if you were an Israeli Jew, how much would you want to bet on it? Palestine could have had peace in 1999, when Israel offered them more or less the same deal that Obama wants them to offer now. Palestine chose war, instead. Because war is what they want.

So war is what Palestine gets. And so long as Israel refuses to surrender anything to an enemy they have no reason to trust, it's a war they will slowly lose.