U.S. President Donald Trump has a genuine desire to bring the peace to Israel and the Palestinians. He met with both leaders, and maybe wants to believe that Abbas sincerely wants to “achieve our freedom, our dignity, and our right to self-determination.” And wants “Israel to recognize the Palestinian state just as the Palestinian people recognize the State of Israel.” However, the problem at the core of the conflict remains the unsolvable issue of the Palestinian’s to accept Israel’s right to exist as a sovereign Jewish nation on the Land of Israel, they still call Palestine.
The problem at the core of the conflict has never been about the territory of Judea and Samaria, It’s about whether the land is Israel and belongs to the Jews, or Palestine and belongs to the Palestinians. Whether Jerusalem is the holy city of the Jews, or the holy city of the Muslims.
The other unsolvable issue is the Palestinian demand that all refugees around the world (about 6 million) come back home to Palestine. They are the only group in the world that have kept their status of refugees for over 70 years and have not been absorbed into any country, including Arab countries. Israel will never agree to this issue, and to the refusal to accept the right of Israel to exist in their land as a sovereign Jewish nation
In their schools and Mosques, Palestinians teach that the land is theirs, that Jews have no claim to Muslim Jerusalem. They refuse to accept the true history of the land according to the Bible and history. The true history is that the name of Judea and Israel was changed by the Romans after they expelled the Jews from the land. They renamed it Palestrina, hundreds of years before there was Islam and the invasion of Arabs in the land.
According to the Bible, the land belongs to God and He gave it to Israel as an everlasting possession. Yes, Israel was punished, temporarily expelled from the land, but God promised to bring His people back to the land from all parts of the world, and this is what’s happening.
History of the Peace Talk
In 2000 the then Israel PM offered Palestinian leader Arafat, with US mediator President Bill Clinton, a far-reaching peace agreement proposal. A Palestinian state on almost 90% of the West Bank and 100% of Gaza, and municipal authority on west neighborhoods of E. Jerusalem. Special authority on the Temple mount and right of return to tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees, with a special program of unifying families in Israel. Arafat rejected the proposal, mainly the issue of Jerusalem and the return of refugees. He demanded a return of millions of refugees and complete sovereignty over the Temple Mount. He even objected to the declaration of the end of the conflict because it was an “Israeli/American narrative.”
In 2008 former Israeli PM Ehud Olmert proposed the mutual recognition, re-partition of Jerusalem and territorial swaps that would allow Israel to keep the settlements blocks. Olmert essentially agreed to forgo sovereignty of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, Judaism’s holiest site, and proposed that in the framework of a peace agreement, the area containing the religious sites in Jerusalem would be managed by a special committee consisting of representatives from five nations: Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Palestine, the United States and Israel. The advisors and Fatah officials heard from Abbas that Olmert laid out for him not only the details of the agreement but also a large map upon which he outlined the borders of the future Palestinian state. But in the end no peace deal was signed between Israel and the Palestinians despite Olmert’s far-reaching offer. Until today, the Palestinian Authority has not responded either positively or negatively to Olmert’s offer.
President Trump needs to ponder whether Abbas means what he says.
Abbas has a reputation of always being willing to talk about peace but blowing up negotiations — or walking away from them as he did in 2008 with Olmert. His behavior and the Palestinian Authority’s continued support of incitement against Israel and Jews, as well as financial support of terrorists, discredits advocates of territorial withdrawal in the near future. Even the leaders of the two leading opposition parties to Netanyahu think that a two-state solution would have to wait at least 10 to 20 years until the Palestinians proved they had given up on terror and wanted peace. Most Israeli politicians from center-left to center-right think that a two state solution might be a good idea in principle, but would be impossible to implement in the near future.
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