Israel....now

Neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post shares Time’s malevolence toward the Jewish state, but both of these papers ran major features in the past week discussing whether Israel’s hawkish Benjamin Netanyahu could turn into a peacemaker.

All Israeli prime ministers have seized any opportunity for peace. The hawkish  Begin returned the Sinai for a peace treaty with Egypt and sought one with Lebanon as well.
The even more hawkish  Sharon ordered the Gaza withdrawal. The left-of-center hawk,
Rabin, signed the 1994 peace treaty with Jordan and the Oslo agreements with the PLO, and,
Barak, a former military commander, pulled Israeli forces entirely out of Lebanon. The Israeli public’s yearning for peace is so strong that no leader, of whatever feather, can afford to spurn a chance for it.
In contrast, Arab publics have rarely supported peace and few of their rulers have espoused it. The exceptions have mostly been assassinated, notably Jordan’s first King Abdullah, Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, and Lebanon’s Bashir Gemayel.

President Abbas, who presides over the West Bank, is clearly more a man of peace than his predecessor, Yasir Arafat, or than Hamas, the anti-Semitic terror group that rules Gaza. Is he ready and able  to make a deal? Would he dare? And does he or the Palestinian Community Network represent Palestinian sentiment? These are the real questions, and not whether Israelis want peace, which only the blind or the bigoted could doubt.