The definition of insanity is . . .

From The Washington Post:

President Bush launched a diplomatic effort yesterday to revive the long-moribund Middle East peace process, announcing aid to the Palestinian government and calling for an international conference this fall aimed at paving the way for the creation of a Palestinian state side by side with Israel.

Five years after becoming the first president to fully embrace a "two-state solution," Bush acknowledged that it remains distant after violent clashes that have politically sundered the Palestinian territories. But Bush called this a "moment of choice" for the region and renewed his commitment heading into his final 18 months in office.

I have no doubt that future historians will look back on this era and scratch their heads with wonder at how the United States, Europe and Israel itself could have repeated the same error over and over again and expected a different result.

I am certain that there are Palestinian people who wish to live at peace with Israel. We know this because from time to time mobs of average Palestinian people locate a collaborator (someone who wishes to live at peace with Israel) and stone them to death in the streets. So they do exist, but have learned not to advertise their existence.

The fact that these peace-loving and tolerant Palestinians make up only as vanishingly small part of the total Palestinian population (and getting smaller all the time as more of them are identified and murdered by their neighbors) seems to go right over the heads of Western political leaders.

I'm going to be politically incorrect here and state the plain and simple truth. If you want a Palestinian state to exist side-by-side with Israel then Jordan should be that state. The population of Jordan already consists of a majority of Palestinian Arabs and the state itself was carved out of the original Palestinian Mandate. Israel should formally annex Gaza and the West Bank and relocate all Palestinians found there to Jordan. The UN should then recognize Israel's new borders and set about sending aid to Jordan to help the new Jordanian citizens integrate into Jordanian society.

The UN should also set up a buffer zone between Jordan and Israel and aggressively patrol it to prevent terrorists from crossing into Israel. US troops would have to be used for this since the antisemitism of most Europeans would cause them to look the other way most of the time and let suicide bombers and other terrorists slip past them.

This will not happen, of course. The UN is itself an antisemitic body. It is also a democratic organization made up of representatives of nations which are not free and are hostile to nations which are free. It would simply be unnatural for the dictators' club on Turtle Bay to favor free Israel over the unfree Arab states even if antisemitism was not a part of the equation.

If Israel wishes to solve its Palestinian problem it must realize that the answer is not to be found in international conferences.