surveyor: The best illustration I can think of regarding Israel’s getting screwed in negotiations is the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords.
Israel scrupulously followed the agreement, while the PLO failed to live up to nearly all of the agreed upon points. Most notoriously, Arafat did not deliver upon his promise to remove the central tenet of the PLO Charter, which is the denial of Israel’s right to exist.
The Accords called for the creation of a Palestinian state, and were hailed by the Clinton Administration as a means for finally stopping the violence and offering a real solution. In point of fact, Arafat had no intention of following through, as his actions clearly show, and he “rewarded” Israel’s diplomacy by launching a new intifada in 2000.
The Palestinians are nothing other than disposable pawns, and have been used by the Syrians, Jordanians and Saudis for years as just that. If the goal is truly a self sufficient Palestinian state, why do all of the neighboring Arab nations treat them as castoffs? Look at Jordan’s treatment of the Palestinians, including forced expulsion, and tell me how bad Israel is.
The Europeans have consistently made a hash of the Middle East, from the British Mandate for Palestine to the French in the Levant (Lebanon). Now we are trusting their diplomatic skills in Iran, a country committed to regional hegemony and utterly contemptuous of the Europeans.
