Policymakers are envisioning an era of “normalization” after the current fighting in the Middle East ends.
That would also be convenient for Israel.
After all, Theodor Herzl, the symbol of Zionism, dreamed of a “normal” Jewish state.
However, there’s one problem. That is, there is no “normalization” between Israel and Palestine, neither in law nor in diplomacy.
Incredibly, the enthusiasm for normalization stems from the fact that Israel’s adversaries have been waging war against the Jewish people since the country’s first day in 1948.
The next day, the Arab League sent a telegram to the United Nations declaring the policy of extermination of Jews in Palestine, and the war against Jews continues to this day.
The same applies to the Palestine Liberation Organization, which upon its creation in 1964 issued a charter on the extermination of Palestine’s Jews.
Contrary to Arab League policy, Egypt and Jordan signed separate peace treaties with Israel, while Syria and Lebanon each agreed to a ceasefire with the Jewish state.
Saudi Arabia, a central figure in the Arab League, has yet to agree to an armistice or peace treaty with the Jews.
The PLO, currently operating as the Palestinian Authority, signed the First Oslo Accords, a peace treaty with Israel on September 13, 1993.
However, the five-year “transition period” has passed without a final agreement being reached, and PA chief Mahmoud Abbas, leader of the PLO’s largest faction, Fatah, has declared that Palestinians “will no longer be bound” by the transition period. .
According to reports, both Saudi Arabia and the PLO are finally ready to normalize relations with the Jews.
What should normalization look like?
Start with these four steps.
- Delete Palestinian teachers and texts that continue to preach war against Jews.
A Pennsylvania school is featuring a fourth-grade textbook featuring the legacy of Dalal Mughrabi, the Fatah member and female terrorist who commandeered a bus and killed 38 Israeli passengers, including 13 children.
In the spirit of normalization, Pennsylvania’s war curriculum should be abolished.
- Resettle descendants of Arab refugees from the 1948 war in dignified conditions Instead of some 60 “temporary” UN refugee camps where they have been confined since the 1948 war in the name of a “right of return” to villages that no longer exist.
The Palestinian Authority has instilled in the minds of all children that their only future lies in the villages left behind in 1948, making normalization, if it ever happens, an inappropriate goal.
- Repeal the PA law that gives people who kill Jews a lifetime salary.
A policy of normalization would require the abolition of this legalized motive for murder.
When I first heard about this law in 2015, I thought it must be a discredited urban legend.
Therefore, our agency hired two Palestinian journalists within the PA to check whether such a law exists.
They found documentation of this unprecedented law in the Palestinian Ministry of Justice. The idea was that if you killed a Jew, you would get paid for life.
PA spends hundreds of millions of dollars each year on these payments.
- Delete PA map that obliterates Israel.
Since the PA’s new curriculum came into effect in August 2000, maps of Palestine have been shown with the names of all Jewish communities in all textbooks used in all schools run by the Palestinian Authority and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. Replaced with the name of an Arab village.
Simply put, a new generation of Palestinian children has not yet seen Israel on a map.
The normalization policy would present a map depicting all UN member states in good standing, including Israel.
These four steps toward normalization will bring new hope to the new Middle East.
David Bedine is director of the Israel Resource News Agency and director of the Nahum Bedine Center for Near East Policy Studies. His books include The Genesis of the Palestinian Authority and Obstacles to Peace: How the United Nations Perpetuates the Arab-Israeli Conflict: Rethinking UNRWA Policy.
