Peter Hitchens column @ Mail on Sunday:
Pointless 'peace plans' that fuel violenceread more
Whatever happened to Middle East peace? Some sort of deal between Israel and the local Arabs was, for decades, the vital goal of diplomacy.
US presidents were obliged to try to achieve it. Both sides were repeatedly dragged to summits where they were forced to shake hands and smile at each other while clenching their teeth.
I was once present at one of these horrible staged occasions, on the White House lawn in September 1993, when a smiling Bill Clinton compelled Israel’s Yitzhak Rabin and that awful old antisemite Yasser Arafat (who once said ‘I have no use for Jews. They are and remain Jews’) to pretend to be friends.
That particular episode ended with the murder of Yitzhak Rabin by an ultra-Zionist fanatic and with a renewed wave of organised Arab violence on the West Bank of the Jordan.
In fact, this has been the outcome of almost all such efforts: more division, more violence, more barriers, more checkpoints.
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