Conrad Black:
The Arab Spring was nonsense — the notion that democracy can easily take hold where it has never been and no institutions exist to promote it was a fantasy worthy of George W. Bush, whose aggressive championship of democracy handed Lebanon to Hezbollah and Gaza to Hamas, and contributed to the victory of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, where it had been the 900 pound gorilla in the Arab house for 75 years. (By the dumb luck of the Brotherhood’s incompetence, the West dodged the bullet and the Egyptian army took back the government.) The only way forward is authoritarian government seeking economic growth and gradual social progress. This was essentially the course followed by the Shah of Iran, the most enlightened ruler Persia has had since Alexander the Great’s transitory regime 23 centuries ago, and he lost control of events to mad medieval theocrats. Saudi Arabia, a state that has been a joint venture between the House of Saud and the Wahhabi radical Islamic leadership, is now modernizing and becoming a benign and more secular dictatorship, leading the resistance to Iran. The new government of Saudi Arabia has proposed to the Palestinians a settlement of its affairs with Israel less generous than the Israelis have themselves offered, and it implicitly acknowledges that Jerusalem is Israeli.
There will be no significant opposition to this move, apart from festive burnings of American flags and pictures of Donald Trump in the West Bank and Gaza. The Arab masses don’t care what happens to the Palestinians or Jerusalem (and the U.S. will presumably put its embassy in an uncontested section of Western Jerusalem). The Chinese and Russians object because they consider themselves rivals to the United States and are happy when the United States is mired in Middle Eastern conflicts as a prolonged, low-key Vietnam, as it was for 13 years under George W. Bush and Barack Obama. China has no dog in that hunt, and Russia fancies it has a role to play as champion of factions in several of the fictional or failed states in the region. The Western Europeans object because they think they have a role there as former colonial powers. In fact, there has never been a West European post-Second World War policy in that region except to await the American position and then stake out something more favourable to the Arabs.
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I dont know what the fuss is all about. The reality is that there has never been a country known as palistine. Some Arabs moved to present day israel . stole land from Jews and called it palistine to legitimize their theft of the Jewish land.
Actually before the establishment of Israel, I think there was never a 'country' called 'Jewish land' either. It was a peripheral land of Persian empire called Yahood (Yiddish land). You are right that it had its local yiddish governance. Since then, it was always a peripheral land of somewhere else, until the Ottoman empire and then British empire. The back-warded 'honour killer' local muslims don't even know that the first resistance toward the establishment of the state of Israel was not coming from them, it was coming from the British empire. Their land was bought by the Jews from their Cairo or Damascus resident landlords who never saw the land (very much like our own 'national hero' Mossadeq) and then they realized they have no footing on the land they were born in. Instead of fighting the back-ward social structure they were victims of, they started to fight Israel, in order to go back to their social back-warded structure. If they had the faintest idea about modernity they could realize that Israel could be a great assistance to them.