Time is running out for Palestinian radicalism

David Goldman:

The Palestinian Problem Is Dying of Natural Causes

...
It turns out that time is on Israel's side, as Ambassador Yoram Ettinger and other Israeli analysts have argued for years. The Arab "demographic time bomb" turned out to be a dud, as fertility rates plunge across the Muslim world, a phenomenon I discussed in my 2011 book How Civilizations Die. In a 2011 analysis for Asia Times, I counseled Israel not to attempt to make peace with a Palestinian population heavily tilted towards hot-headed youngsters, and to wait until the declining Palestinian fertility rate had raised the average age of the West Bank population. Like Northern Ireland, the militants would find themselves married with mortgages (at least those who survived). Prime Minister Netanyahu generously commented on the article when it was published.

Although the aging kleptocrats who still run the Palestine Authority out of Ramallah won't admit it, the time is ripe for the kind of peace plan that the Trump administration offered at last month's Bahrain conference. Drafted under the direction of presidential adviser Jared Kushner, the plan would channel $50 billion in development aid to the West Bank over a ten-year period. Israeli observers note that despite the PA's intransigence, the administration plan has shifted the debate in the Middle East and isolated the Palestinian jihadists.
...

Never underestimate the ability of the old Palestinian leadership to miss an opportunity for a deal that would benefit them.   They still have to overcome their unwillingness to accept the fact that Israel is a Jewish state and not a Muslim state.