Ninety Years Since Balfour...

Media Monitors has an interesting, although somewhat disjointed and sarcastic, article which provides some great background information for the upcoming Middle East Peace conference scheduled to begin shortly in Annapolis, Maryland...a conference that was seemingly (?) scheduled to roughly coincide with the 90th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Some of the quotations in the article are real eye-openers, so it's certainly worth a read.

Annapolis, November 27, 2007:
Only Fools Believing in Miracles Rush In Land
for Peace or Land--Piece by Piece by Piece

This reminds me that I once heard that (and this was years ago), upon being asked whether they would formally recognize the State of Israel, Palestinian negotiators replied: "Define the State of Israel"—which obviously put the Zionists in the precarious position of having to answer the one question that is now at the heart of this conflict: What are the borders of the Zionist state? If they had said it includes the West Bank and Gaza, well they would have defied the U.N., almost every country in the world...thus the Palestinians could have just walked away and gained at least a moral and diplomatic victory (assuming that media coverage was fair...which it never is). However, if the Israelis said that the State of Israel constitutes only its pre-1967 borders, and thus promised to adhere to United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, then the Palestinians would have won the justice that they've so long been denied! So whether this story is apocryphal or not, the point behind it is quite solid: Demand that Israel define its borders before asking to be recognized. This will be one giant step towards ending the confusion and the conflict...but don't hold your breath.

Deen on...