Daniel Ayalon, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, had an op-ed in the Washington Post yesterday, in which he issued this warning:
Time is running out for the Palestinian leadership to confront the terrorists. . . . Lest the Palestinians miss another historic opportunity, the world should insist that they crack down on terrorism now.
Earth to Danny: they just got a waiver of U.S. sanctions for “noncompliance” with their earlier “commitment” to crack down on terrorism, and they just received a $9 billion pledge from the G-8 with no strings attached (such as “cracking down on terrorism"). They are not likely to be worried about missing another “historic opportunity.”
In any event, the only penalty for missing an “historic opportunity” is always . . . another “historic opportunity.” The Palestinians have now missed seven in a row: they could have had a state in 1937 (the Peel Commission proposal), 1947 (the UN Partition Plan), 1967 (the Allon Plan), 1978 (the Egypt-Israel peace treaty), 2000 (Camp David), 2001 (the Clinton Parameters/Taba), and 2003 (the Roadmap).
It may be that a state next to Israel is not the historic opportunity they seek.
On the contrary, as they watch as Israel unilaterally turns over land on its southern border to Hamas, replicating the unilateral turnover of land on its northern border to Hezbollah, they may feel instead that they are moving steadily closer to a different historic opportunity.
In a joint Israeli-Palestinian public opinion poll conducted last month, 72% of the Palestinians saw Sharon’s disengagement as “a victory for the Palestinian armed struggle against Israel.” Why would they conceivably want to “crack down” on what produced it?