No doubt making new friends is a good thing, and so it is good that Israel and the United Arab Emirates…UAE…have shaken hands toward an official peace deal. The two were not at war, but that’s beside the point, for the moment… but at present, kudos to the Trump Administration for helping to pull this off. So why am I not thrilled? (Neither is this or this writer, and for excellent reasons.} In fact, I have made it my business to read hardly any news about the deal, nor to watch any of the hoopla occurring on TV. That’s because I know which way this is going. Spare me the aggravation. They are going to rejoice, but for the wrong reason. Yes, peace, wonderful, terrific, but even better, for them, is that Israel is to be kept in its place. Annexation is “off the table.” If the Jews insist on going back home to the land of their ancestors, and staying there, at least, so goes the slant, let them be small. That is the focus. That’s why all the dancing. Since 1948, welcoming Israel among the nations has been a grudging experience. Some attitudes never die. If the Jews insist on going back home to the land of their ancestors, and staying there, at least, so goes the slant, let them be small. Do not let them expand, continues the thinking, even to land that rightfully belongs to them as Jews, as Israelis. So Israel’s false friends and detractors pump fists to celebrate at what just happened… a setback for Israel’s sovereignty movement. T That’s their idea of a good day. Drinks all around. I’m thinking Europe, where nothing has changed, and I’m thinking the Democrat Party, where everything has changed. The EU keeps a sharp eye on Israel…always ready to wag a finger at the Israelis. Don’t you dare move an inch beyond your allotted space. So goes that thinking, all the way back to the 1930s. The Europeans can’t seem to get with the program, which is that the Israelis are not their Jews anymore. The Democrats? That’s a Party that’s gone from friend to foe in one leap. JFK, as we have said, was the last good guy Democrat. Read this . Harold Loeb, who became the despised “Robert Cohn” in Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises,” laughed when asked if he thought Hemingway was anti-Semitic. “Are you kidding?” Loeb responded. “They were all anti-Semitic.” The media? They are all Democrats…so what do you expect? Despite my plan to steer clear of the news, I happened to catch a few moments of a news conference, where a child, of 25 or 30, excitedly asked the president…without naming him Mr. or Sir… to confirm that annexation was truly off the table. Poor millennial, pretending to be a reporter, needed the assurance to sleep well at night. Ladies used to be taught how to use the right fork; now it’s the right pronoun, or no pronoun. Here was someone who knows nothing about anything, but enough to worry that Israel may get to be too big. Does she know Herzl? Ask her about Jabotinsky. A generation raised on women’s and gender studies…suddenly experts on Israel and the entire Middle East. Why, I yelled, is this any of your business? Yet, on Israel, seems everyone is entitled to have a say. So, the next question, from a “reporter” standing-in for Rashida Tlaib and Ilan Omar, was about the two-state solution, as I guessed it would be, and so I tuned out. I am getting good at tuning out…except… Give peace a chance? Sure…and why not give the sovereignty movement a chance? New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva. He wrote the worldwide book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal,” the authoritative newsroom epic, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” followed by his coming-of-age classics, “The Girls of Cincinnati,” and, the Holocaust-to-Montreal memoir , “Escape from Mount Moriah.” For that and his 1960s epic “The Days of the Bitter End,” contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Website: www.jackengelhard.com
