Headed nowhere: Secretary of State John Kerry in Washington yesterday with the Israeli and Palestinian negotiators, Tzipi Livni and Saeb Erekat. (Reuters)
Back in the 1960s, dorm rooms across America featured a cutesy wall poster that read, “What if they gave a war and nobody came?” The similar question to be asked in light of the big-nothing event this week in Washington is: “What if they gave peace talks and nobody cared?”
You may not even know that so-called “peace negotiations” began yesterday between Israel and the Palestinians under the stage management of Secretary of State John Kerry.
There was a time when you would have known — oh, would you have known. The fact of the talks would’ve screamed at you from the front pages, would’ve begun every nightly newscast, would’ve been the subject of every editorial, every op-ed, every talking-head panel.
Now? Bupkis. That’s the Yiddish word for “nothing,” and it’s the mot juste for what’s going on here.
The urgent need to negotiate a peace between the two parties has always been based on a widely held theory that has been utterly discredited by recent history. The theory held that instability and tension in the Middle East was driven by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, so solving it was the key to moving forward in the region.
Who on earth thinks that now? The Arab world has been on fire for 2 1/2 years now as a result of events and circumstances having absolutely nothing to do with Israel or the Palestinians. For more than two years, Islamists and would-be democrats and military-junta types in Egypt have been enmeshed in a titanic roundelay in which Israel does not figure.
Syrians are locked in a horrifyingly bloody civil war in which all the violent dysfunctions of the Arab world are now in play.
For once, no one is blaming the Jews, or acting as though the way to calm the storm is to create a Palestinian state.
(Many of those who preached this false gospel actually don’t want the storm calmed: They want Assad to fall in Syria, and they want the streets of Cairo to remain under siege so that neither the Army nor the Muslim Brotherhood feels it has the right to dominate Egypt.)
Meanwhile, back over where the peace talks are going to be happening, the Palestinian Authority is saddled with an increasingly dysfunctional government. The president, Mahmoud Abbas, can’t find himself a prime minister to run the place. The man in the job, the respected economist Salam Fayyad, quit earlier this year; his replacement lasted all of two weeks. The post is unfilled at what we are told may be a hinge moment in world history.
So, yeah.
Abbas has been governing illegally since 2009, after he canceled an election he feared he would lose. And this is the man — politically compromised at best with no one credible to back him up — who is going to make a highly complex deal with the Israelis? Please.
The Palestinian political system is cleaved in two, just as the land controlled by the Palestinians is divided. The Palestinian Authority rules over the West Bank; Hamas rules over the Gaza Strip. They hate each other.
Hamas has no interest in a deal with Israel; its stated purpose is the destruction of the Jewish state. And the Palestinian Authority has made it clear for the greater part of two decades that it can only accept a deal with Israel in theory, not in practice.
So here we are: Civil war in Syria, Egypt on fire and John Kerry trying to broker a deal with Palestinians who can’t deal and an Israeli prime minister who seems willing to go along with the charade (including releasing more than 100 terrorists from prison, a move the Israeli public hates) to make nice with the new man at Foggy Bottom.
This summer spectacular is already a bigger bomb than “The Lone Ranger.”