Annapolis is doomed to fail. Support it anyway.

This article by Efraim Inbar explains well why the Annapolis Middle East conference is doomed to fail: The great American delusion Despite the near certainty that the conference will fail, it is still important for Israel to participate because: 1. All opportunities for peace should be pursued. 2. Israel’s greatest ally – the United States – is the sponsor. It isn’t smart to turn down your ally, especially when you are Israel and you do not have many allies. That said, my fear regarding this latest peace conference is that when it fails, there will be yet another spasm of violence as there was in 2000 after Camp David. Nevertheless, when this happens, Israel should unilaterally withdraw to a border roughly based off the 1967 borders, but taking in major settlement blocs – basically what everybody knows Israel will do eventually. Any Palestinian attacks emanating from relenquishedterritory should be considered an act of war and dealt with appropriately, i.e. harshly. The reason Israel needs to make this unilateral move is because the occupation of millions of Palestinians – no matter how justified from a security and historical standpoint – is untenable. The sole card the Palestinians have when it comes to garnering sympathy from anywhere outside the Islamic world is the “occupation” card. Israel should take that card away. I realize there are some anti-Israel countries that will never sympathize with Israel no matter what Israel does (or other countries that do sympathize, but cow tail to Arab demands out of fear of terrorism or their continued supply of oil). But I believe it is nevertheless important for Israeli society to end the occupation. I think it will unify Israelis in a way that they haven’t been truly unified in decades. And a united righteous Israel – an Israel faced with an enemy that can no longer lie that it is fighting for its own state, but instead for the destruction of the Jewish state – is one hell of a determined foe. Or, put another way: Most Israelis live in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, the Gallil, the Negev, the coastal plain, etc. They will defend those places far more vigorously than they will defend Hebron or Nablus, where the vast majority of the people are Arabs anyway. And, although I am still bitter and distrustful at the way many Western European countries treated Israel after the failure of Camp David, I do believe that an Israeli unilateral withdrawal will serve to strengthen Israel’s relations with those important countries overall. I am heartened by the change of heart we have witnessed in France, for example, with the election of Sarkozy. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if Israel captured the 1967 territories in a defensive war, or if Israel would have given most of them up in the recent past. The bottom line is that Israel is a country that cannot exist without support and relations with outside states, and so to an extent Israel must placate its allies. Not fair? Of course it’s not fair – life’s not fair. Get over it! Israel is not Iran and cannot stand alone against the world. And any Jews or Christians who think God won’t let anything happen to Israel weren’t paying attention during the Holocaust or a lot of Jewish history for that matter. Okay, done.