yeoldecrabb.com.
It must have been a shock to its right-nick listeners. But even government-subsidized National Public Radio [NPR] had a commentator last week declaring that the so-called Israel-Palestine Peace Process is going anywhere. And, more importantly, he noted, the rest of the Middle East at the moment doesnt care all that much about the issue. Thats quite an admission for the increasing anti-Israel lobby which now counts The New York Times and NPR among its brightest stars.
Nor was Pres. Barack Obama likely to have heard much about the Israel-Palestine schmoozle in his peripatetic travels including trying to put a band aid on worsening Washington-Riyadh relations. True, the Arab League which has more differences among its members than the United Nations Security Council recently did come out against a Jewish state. But the Arab League has become less and less a spokesman for the Arabs. Its anti-Israel screeds are all thats left of what broke away from British tutelage with Gama Nassers overthrow the British protected Egyptian monarchy in the early 50s.
Indeed, the list of issues is long facing the Arab world, and Muslim majority nations in general, and the Western powers ostensibly led by the U.S. in the Middle East. It is fraught with so many other threats that the problem of Israels relations with the Arabs pales in comparison. Nor does anyone believe the myth held among Pres. Obamas Arabist coterie that solution of the Israel-Palestine problem would be an open sesame to solving all the Middle East myriad difficulties.
Foremost now, for the Sunni Arab regimes and even those nominally secular such as Egypts new military rule is the specter of the growing regional power of the mullahs in Tehran. Thats exemplified for the Saudis by the growing evidence that the bloody Syrian Dictator Basher Assad relies on Iran for life support. The Saudis publicly keep reminding Obama and the Europeans they had promised to eliminate him. Instead, there is even the prospect that Assad may negotiate his way into some sort of permanence through, ironically, Washington-sponsored peace talks.