The journey of an Israeli politician to Washington on being elected prime minister is a ritual, made even more necessary in our time of acute troubles in the Middle East and beyond.
For Ehud Olmert, visiting President George Bush in the White House and then addressing a joint-session of the U.S. Congress was as much a ritual as sending a message to the world that Israel and the United States are two democracies bound together in a special relationship.
But once the fanfare is over, the hard reality sinks in. And this peace, or minimally the final settlement between Israelis and Palestinians endlessly discussed and negotiated over since at least the Madrid Conference of 1991 and the Oslo Accord of 1993, remains elusive.
More ink has been spilled on this subject than possibly any other in recent times. More diplomatic effort has been invested by the international community in bringing Israelis and Palestinians to settle their differences than in any conflict between two peoples anywhere else in the world.
In April, 2003, the Bush administration presented the road map in the final settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and for the first time an American president publicly committed his country in the making of a Palestinian state.
A month later, Ariel Sharon, then- prime minister of Israel, admitted publicly the “occupation” of Palestinian territories was “a terrible thing for Israel and for the Palestinians” and it could not continue indefinitely. This thinking was behind his unilateral withdrawal of Israeli settlers from Gaza in August, 2005, and its return to the Palestinian Authority.
Since then Palestinians have elected as their representatives Hamas, a party publicly committed to the destruction of Israel. For Palestinians, electing Hamas was an improvement over the corruption of Yasser Arafat’s party, Fatah, defeated in the January 2006 election.
For western governments funding the Palestinian Authority since the Oslo Accord, Hamas is, to put it mildly, a party sharing ideological affinity with radical Islamists or, to put it bluntly, it is the Palestinian wing of the global terror network affiliated with al-Qaida and its supporters.
Under such conditions Israel is left with the alternatives of maintaining the status quo following the Gaza withdrawal, or acting unilaterally to define its final settlement borders with what might eventually be a Palestinian state.
No state, threatened with extinction, has had demands made for concessions to its enemies as have been demanded of Israel.
If Israel had been defeated in 1948 or in any of the several wars since, the land of Palestine demarcated by Britain with the League of Nations approval in 1922, surely would have been divided among competing Arab states in the area.
Any subsequent notion of an independent Palestinian state would have been dealt with by monarchs, despots and dictators of the region as ruthlessly as Palestinians have been regularly treated with disdain, as in Jordan during September 1970, or expelled as they were from Kuwait in 1991, or as Arab-Muslim states in general have dealt ruthlessly with Kurds, Darfurians and other minorities.
Olmert and his party—Kadima, founded by Sharon—have pledged themselves to acting unilaterally with guarded support from Washington. Hence a Palestinian state resulting from unilateral Israeli actions is loaded with irony.
Whenever such a state emerges it will be because of Israeli realism and Jewish sense of rightness with American support, and despite Palestinian incapacity or unwillingness to disavow the politics that have brought them only grief.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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