In the not too distant future President Obama will outline his “peace plan” for the Middle East. Perhaps as early as next month, when he travels to Cairo to address the Muslim world, he’ll mention to Israel and the Arab states surrounding her how he thinks they can all work together to solve the intractable problem of Palestinian statehood. And, just as he sees himself as carrying the burden of fixing the Guantanamo “mess” left him by his predecessor, he clearly also believes–or so, at any rate, his secretary of state has indicated–that the failure of the previous administration to see to the creation of a Palestinian state is just another mess for him to clean up, and that a bit of pushing on the Israeli prime minister accompanied by some importuning of the Arab dictators and kings is a good start. Perhaps so. Wouldn’t it be a miracle? I’m wondering, though, how he will approach the equally intractable problem of Arab Jew-hatred. Anyone looking at a map of the Middle East cannot miss the fact that Israel, at 10,000 square miles, is less than one third the size of her next largest neighbor, Jordan (34,495) one seventh the size of Syria (71,498), one thirty-ninth the size of Egypt (387,000), one seventy-sixth the size of Saudi Arabia (756,985). (Okay, it’s true that Lebanon–even including the part occupied by Syria–is less than half Israel’s size, but that’s for another day.) It helps to have a visual:
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