Hobby or Necessity?

Mr. Thomas Friedman wrote an article for the New York Times last month saying, for Israel, pursuing peace was more of a "hobby" than necessity.

(Thomas Friedman is a well known pundit in the USA and is often thought of as 'middle of the road' and a voice of reason on a variety of subjects and issues. I happen to agree, but not on Israel. No one with a pair of eyes and ears could agree with this assessment)

-Ask the 9,000 Jewish folks who were kicked out of their homes in Gaza in 2005 to make way for Arabs how much of a hobby peace has been for them. (Most of them have not been resettled into permanent residences)

-Ask the cities of Sderot and Ashkelon, bombarded by rockets with even more intensity starting in 2005 after Israel disengaged for peace. A grand total of over 5,700 rockets and 4,000 mortars have been fired at these desert communities. Ask their maimed children, dead spouses, or the hordes of little children forced to live in (or at all times be within 8 seconds of) bomb shelters about Israel's peace 'hobby.'

-Ask the Jews around the world who have felt a surge of Judeophobic violence since Operation Cast Lead in 2009. (Cast Lead was an operation by the IDF which was executed to stop the rocket fire from Gaza, the same Gaza Israel unilaterally withdrew from in 2005)

-Ask Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel in 2000 and current defense minister, who with President Bill Clinton, offered the Palestinians 92% of the West Bank, all of Gaza,  a capital in East Jerusalem, as well as an internationally funded (including Israel) aid package for the Palestinians to build their state. Arafat turned down this generous offer WITH NO COUNTEROFFER!!

-Ask Mahmoud Abbas, The Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority. Mr. Abbas told the Washington Post (Abbas's Waiting Game, by Jackson Diehl) that former Prime Minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert, offered him an even more generous offer than Arafat got in 2000, with a whopping 97% of the West Bank offered to the Palestinians. Abbas turned it down, he didnt like the borders.

In an effort to be Politically Correct, and using some kind of backwards moral equivalency, Mr Friedman doesnt see that it is plainly the Palestinians (or their leaders, more specifically) who treat peace as a hobby, if that.

SIDE NOTE:

The difference between the Palestinians and Israel: The Palestinians are not DESPERATE ENOUGH for their own state. The desperate post-Holocaust Jews even accepted a non-contiguous state in Palestine in 1948. Arabs chose war. This plays out over and over and over and again through history, with the Jews going to the table, and making sacrifices, with Arabs not even making the slightest of sacrifices, like ending the practice of naming Palestinian Streets after terrorists who committed attacks with civillian death tolls as high as 37.

If the Palestinians were desperate for independence like the Jews were, there would have been a state in 1948. Or 2000. Or in Gaza in 2005. Or with Olmert in 2009. Or after 1967, Or 73. The list goes on and on.