Israeli settlements are not the problem in Middle East

Maybe if most Arab nations were democracies that acted only with the approval of their citizens, they would more-easily be able to understand what has happened to the Middle East peace process. It's fairly obvious that U.S. President Barack Obama, who perhaps unwisely raised expectations in the Arab world about changing this country's policies toward Israel, has acquired a greater appreciation of what Jerusalem has been telling him about peacemaking with the Palestinian Authority. Israel's willingness to compromise, which has varied over time, has never produced a lasting agreement because Palestinian leaders have been unwilling to prepare their people for the possibility of peace -- probably out of fear for their own safety -- after years of agitating for war. Israeli intransigence is not the chief cause of the decades-long deadlock; rather, it's the refusal of the Palestinians and of most of the countries in the region to plan for a future that includes their Jewish cousins. That's why it was kind of sad to see U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton go traipsing around the Arab world this week trying to convince those countries to accept Israel's partial settlement freeze proposal and return to peace talks, as the Reuters international news service reported. The Palestinian Authority still thinks its warlike posture toward Israel, a posture supported by its Arab backers, is the best way to achieve its goal -- a Middle East without Israel. That's why previous overly generous Israeli peace offers that included the sharing of Jerusalem were rejected by Palestinian authorities. Now, with the election of a conservative government in Israel, such offers are almost certainly off the table. But a readers of this blog know, Israeli settlement-building in the West Bank is not an obstacle to true peace in the region. What it does complicate, however, is the kind of peace that is merely the absence of war. If Palestinians and Israelis are going to live side-by-side in the long term, it won't matter what country they live in assuming their rights are respected and protected. The fact that this has yet not occurred to anyone in the region strongly suggests that none of the parties is prepared to come to anything more than an interim agreement, if at all.

Were pope's mistakes in Jerusalem too obvious to be accidental?

What's up with Pope Benedict XVI? Did the first actual Nazi to lead the Catholic church really think he could visit Israel and not have his every move, his every word, microscopically examined for vestiges of the ideology of hatred? Of course not. He is not a stupid man -- he has risen despite his past to the pinnacle of one of the world's greatest religions. He is considered one of the holiest men in the world and his visit to the Middle East -- holy man in the Holy Land -- was a major event. So why would this guy, with so much to prove, fall so pitifully short? In the first visit of any pope to the Holy Land since John Paul II's trip in 2000, Benedict deliberately alienated his Jewish hosts with cavalier references to the Holocaust, in which 12 million people, including 6 million Jews, were brutally slaughtered by the Nazis, according to the Cable News Network (CNN). Benedict knows what happened in World War II, he has no doubt seen the "concentration" camps that made a perfectly innocuous word into a euphemism for evil. Yet he angered many Jews in Israel by referring to Holocaust victims as having been "killed" instead of "murdered," a distinction not overlooked by his predecessor. No doubt, John Paul II would not have rehabilitated an excommunicated bishop who denies the Holocaust, either. But perhaps Benedict's biggest mistake was trying to navigate the treacherous Israeli-Palestinian dispute without understanding it. The pope actually said that "one of the saddest sights" he saw was the wall being built on the West Bank to protect Jewish communities. What is he talking about? Is the wall around Vatican City "sad?" Is the wall around Jerusalem "sad?" Hardly. Also, the West Bank wall is not made of stone and built to stand for a thousand years; it can easily be removed, and no doubt will be, when the Palestinian Arabs of the West Bank finally resolve to live in actual peace with the people of Israel. That is the problem between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and between the Israelis and most of the other countries of the Middle East, and all the rhetoric in the world is not going to solve it until the Arab nations face up to their internal and international responsibilities and change the dialog. Benedict, apparently, has not even begun to get a clue.