Middle East Beer Summit

They are touting it as the resumption of bilateral peace negotiations between Bibi Netanyahu’s Israel and Mahmoud Abbas’s “Palestine”—the crowning achievement of nine months of flitting hither to Jerusalem and thither to Ramallah by George Mitchell for “proximity” talks intended to bring together (for “imity” talks?) a disposed enough Netanyahu and an Abbas so reluctant he was begging the Arab League to hide him; and double that many months of pressure on Bibi by the president of the United States, et al., to make concessions no Israeli leader could possibly make—yet here, so far, is what the team of Obamic geniuses has actually accomplished: A dinner at the White House scheduled for September 1st for three—Obama, Netanyahu, and Abbas—and twenty—“King” Abdullah of Jordan will be among them, as will Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak (who’ll be tearing himself away from his busy schedule of suppressing democracy and imprisoning human rights activists in his own country), Tony Blair, to speak for Salam Fayyad, the author of whatever progress toward modernity there is to be had in Arab Judea and Samaria, and a whole bunch of lackeys, likely including the American tools Dennis Ross and Dan Shapiro (whose embarrassing job it was to try to sell this ludicrousness to the American Jewish community); and, the following day, a trilateral meeting convened by Hillary “Human Rights” Clinton at the State Department. In other words, one mighty big beer summit here, minus the beer.

Nothing good has ever come of decades of American meddling in the Israeli-Arab “peace process”—at best, it’s been a monumental waste of everyone’s time; at worst, it produced the Second Intifada—and nothing good can come of this latest and most farcical effort.