The Palestinians do not want peace. They want victory, a victory that will lead to the elimination of Israel and the expulsion of the Jews.
The 1968 charter of the PLO has never been changed, despite decades of promises that it would be modified. Although secular in character, it advances much the same attitudes as those found in the Hamas charters. In Article 2, for example, it defines “Palestine” in boundaries encompassing the entirety of Israel: “Palestine, with the boundaries it had during the British Mandate, is an indivisible territorial unit”. This means that calls for a Palestinian state based on that definition are also calls for the destruction of Israel.
All attempts at normalization between Palestinians and Israelis or between other Arab states and Israel are routinely dismissed as treachery, a position that endangers the lives of any Palestinian who seeks peace.
Meanwhile, Western leaders, including religious figures such as the Pope, are enchanted with the fantasy that a peace process exists, and forever chant the mantra that nothing must be done to interrupt it. President Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel is the first time any world leader has stood up to the threats of anger and violence.
On December 6, US President Donald Trump fulfilled a promise that was made by Congress on November 28, 1995 in its Jerusalem Embassy Act — to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of the State of Israel and to mark this by moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to the ancient city. That move, according to the Act itself, was to “be established in Jerusalem no later than May 31, 1999”. Trump’s declaration that the US will now implement the Act has been a historical démarche. So why has it taken so long to act on this agreement?
For more than two decades, this clear expression of the will of Congress had, in effect, been held in abeyance following an amendment (section 7) that introduced a waiver that allowed presidents to “suspend the limitation set forth in section 3(b) for a period of six months if he determines and reports to Congress in advance that such suspension if necessary to protect the national security interests of the United States”. Since then, every president who followed (including Trump, six months earlier) exercised this waiver.
Over the years, implementation of the Act was caught up in increasingly complicated legal and diplomatic issues that made deferment appear judicious and necessary in the belief that stalling it might help the so-called “peace process” between Israel and the Palestinians: according to Time Magazine:
“though both the Clinton Administration and Israeli government ‘support the move to Jerusalem in principle, they would prefer to see the peace process more stabilized before confronting the explosive issue of Jerusalem’.”