The Thrill Is Gone

Rachel Abrahms
The Weekly Standard
02 November 09

“Palestinian” “leaders” are afloat in a sea of anti-Zionism and self-pity so deep and so wide, so intractable and so paralyzing, they have made bedfellows -- odd as they may be --- of Bibi Netanyahu and the U.S. secretary of state. Only a few months ago Mrs. Clinton was pursing her prissy schoolmarm’s lips at the Israeli prime minister over even the minimal “natural growth” of settlements; today she is using those same lips to hail his moratorium on new construction -- a considerable compromise -- as “unprecedented”. Politicians in Ramallah are disheartened, as indeed they should be. Now, says one, “the mask has fallen off the face” of Barack Obama.

But the mask has fallen off the face of the “Palestinian” leadership, as well. They had good reason to rejoice in thinking they’d found a champion in the man who was going to put daylight between the U.S. and Israel. What the Obamic minions doing their own “unprecedented” pressing of Israelis perhaps hadn’t comprehended was that the Arabs of Judea and Samaria thought the American president would save them from taking responsibility for their own fate.

Have they lost their savior? So it would appear, though you can never predict, really, with the mercurial foreign policy of this president. And what’s revealed with their unmasking? Nothing really new, though maybe it’s news to George Mitchell. “Peace” is not their object; never has been: “Negotiations,” says a “Palestinian” spokesman, “are about ending the occupation and settlement expansion is about entrenching the occupation.” And this: “Palestinian Authority officials on Sunday warned that Washington's failure to force Israel to halt all construction in the settlements would lead to an ‘explosion.’” And this:

Nabil Abu Rudaineh, a spokesman for PA President Mahmoud Abbas, said that the region was on the verge of a volcanic eruption because of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's refusal to accept the Palestinians' demand to halt settlement construction.

“Explosion” and “volcanic eruption.” Would that mean violence against innocent Jewish citizens sitting in cafes and riding on buses?

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