This is not an unreasonable reflex, given that no substantive negotiations have achieved anything useful in the Middle East since the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981. The United States is now the world’s largest oil producer and a net exporter. The Palestinian leadership is bitterly divided between Hamas in Gaza and the Palestine Liberation Organization on the West Bank (of the Jordan River). It is no longer the hopeless process of trying to get the Palestinian leadership to agree to anything useful. It is the best chance peace has had in the Middle East since the British and French evicted the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire in 1918.

Source: National Post January 31, 2020 21:33 UTC