Andrew Stuttaford over at The Corner quotes an article in the Financial Times (the voice of the European establishment) by one Mamoun Fandy:
The US and the rest of the world should take into account the concerns of moderate states and moderate elements within Muslim societies – or else Washington’s desire to create a “new” Middle East may bring to the fore a very old one. To avoid this, the US and Europe have no option but to tip the balance in favour of moderate governments. One way would be to convene an international conference similar to the one in Madrid in 1991 after the first Gulf war to address the root of the problem, namely to solve the issue of Palestine and get the world behind the idea of the two-state solution. Only then can the world deny the Islamists their ultimate rallying cry, take the Middle East from the hands of the Islamist movements and put it back in the world of nation states.
Mamoun Fandy is either irretrievably naïve or cynically manipulative. I don’t know anything about him, so I can’t say which.
But by all means, yes, let’s repeat Madrid, which led to Oslo, which has been such a resounding success.
How on God’s green earth is “Palestine” the root problem related to Hezbollah? This is a group that teamed up with Syria to manufacture the Shebaa Farms issue so they had an excuse to keep killing Jews.
Israel keeps offering a two-state solution. The Palestinians keep choosing war. They have now voted in a government who are Islamists. Why would Hamas willingly deny themselves their rallying cry? And why is Holocaust denial radical and dangerous from Iran, but acceptable and “moderate” from Abbas? (That was his PhD thesis – that only a few hundred thousand Jews were killed.)
We can debate drawing the line here or there or the sanctity of the pre-1967-borders-but-not-the-pre-1948-borders from now until Doomsday (or August 22, whichever comes first), but none of that is the point. The conference could decide that the permanent, defensible borders of Israel were the city limits of Tel Aviv and it wouldn’t make any difference.
