Bashing Netanyahu Won’t Bring Peace Any Closer. By Jeff Jacoby.

Bashing Netanyahu won’t bring peace any closer. By Jeff Jacoby. Boston Globe, March 5, 2014. Also here.

Jacoby:

The delusion at the core of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is that the lack of Palestinian sovereignty is what keeps the conflict alive, and that the tension and violence would end if only the Arabs of Palestine could have a state of their own.

That has never been true. What drives the conflict is not a hunger for Palestinian statehood, but a deep-rooted rejection of Jewish statehood. Arab leaders vehemently rejected the “two-state solution” that the United Nations recommended in 1947. Nearly 70 years later, the Palestinians are still unwilling to acknowledge Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people — to recognize that Jews are entitled to a sovereign state in their national homeland, just as the Irish are entitled to Ireland, the Italians to Italy, and the Japanese to Japan.

Yet Palestinian leaders heatedly insist that they will never agree to any such thing. “This is out of the question,” Abbas said last month. Palestinian Authority negotiator Saeb Erekat complains: “When you say, ‘Accept Israel as a Jewish state,’ you are asking me to change my narrative.”

Just so. That narrative — that Jews are aliens in the Middle East, and Jewish sovereignty over any territory is intolerable — is precisely what must change if this conflict is to be resolved. Bashing Netanyahu may please the anti-Israel set, but it brings a just and lasting peace not one hour closer.