There was plentyof negative news about Jews and Israel still left to discuss this week. But with the end of the Three Weeks, I decided to give it a break
Even though Egypt would again launch an invasion against Israel in 1973 and it would be ten years after the Six Day War until Anwar Sadat visited Israel and began negotiating for peace, the Six Day War ended forever Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser’s pan-Arabic vision of a united Arab Middle East, with Israel gone. Oren questions whether Israel’s victories in the current war will similarly end the Iranian vision of pan-Islamism. He notes that even Iran has begun deemphasizing its status as an Islamic state in favor of Iranian nationalism.
Whatever happens, he writes, the pre–October 7 status quo has been “irreparably shaken,” and the “regional aftershocks will be felt for years.”
One of the first of those aftershocks may have been hinted to in a letter addressed by five sheikhs in the Hebron district to Israel’s Economic Minister Nir Barkat, in early July. In that letter organized by Wadee al-Jaabari, the sheikhs recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. In return, they seek recognition for the Hebron district as a separate emirate and request to enter the Abraham Accords on that basis.
Jaabari told the Wall Street Journal that “there will never be an independent Palestinian state — not even in a thousand years.” Certainly not after October 7. The only thing the Oslo Accords have brought, he continues, are “death, economic disaster, and destruction.”
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