Showing posts with label Avigdor Lieberman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Avigdor Lieberman. Show all posts

Thursday, May 30, 2019

A left turn? Actually, there's nothing new about Avigdor Liberman - by Dr. Aaron Lerner

Last night PM Netanyahu charged that Avigdor Liberman is "now" part of the left after forcing snap elections for the second time. In truth - Liberman has ALWAYS been left! Here is something I wrote over two years ago:

Dr. Aaron Lerner..
IMRA..
30 May '19..
Link: http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=73518





Weekly Commentary: Liberman Consistent: Border Inferior to pre- '67, 3rd
Party-Based Security, Multiple Sovereignties
Dr. Aaron Lerner 15 March, 2017

There's nothing new about Minister of Defense Avigdor Liberman's positions.

From the very start of his political career he has advocated:

#1. Redrawing Israel's borders to remove large Arab communities. The resulting lines would be militarily inferior to the terrible pre-'67 border. While Liberman promises the move would dramatically reduce the Arab population inside Israel this assertion ignores that the affected Israeli Arabs could opt to change their official place of residence to a location remaining inside Israel and/or successfully challenge their unilateral loss of Israeli citizenship in the Supreme Court.

#2. Relying on third parties for security. In his 2004 book, "My Truth" he proposed that Jordanian and Egyptian security forces take responsibility for the West Bank and Gaza Strip respectively. Later he proposed that NATO forces be deployed.

#3. The West Bank and Gaza Strip not being within a non-Israeli sovereignty envelope. Again - either Jordan and Egypt or simply Palestinian sovereignty.

Each of these key features of Liberman's positions is radically different from those of the national camp in general and Binyamin Netanyahu in particular.

Saturday, May 28, 2016

Avigdor Lieberman’s first challenge - by Caroline Glick

...With the traditional Arab regimes still in place fighting for their survival, and Iran ascendant, Israel needs to assume that more terrorist regimes like Hezbollah, ISIS and Hamas will be formed from the wreckage of the Arab state system in the future. Instability, then, can be expected to remain a chronic condition of the Arab world. The good news is that Israel has the capacity to adapt and forge constructive strategies for weakening and dividing our enemies. The bad news is that so long as we insist on obsessing over ourselves, we are unlikely to do so.

Caroline Glick..
Carolineglick.com..
27 May '16..

Last week, a mob of 300 Muslim men in southern Egypt stripped a 70-year-old Christian woman naked and paraded her through the streets.

This Islamist atrocity came a few days before an EgyptAir flight from Paris exploded in the skies near Alexandria. It was the second passenger jet bombed by jihadists in Egypt in recent months.

Egypt is hanging on by a thread. Like the attack that downed a Russian passenger jet over Sinai last October, this week’s attack is likely the work of an Egyptian airport employee. It is yet more proof that nearly three years after the military deposed the Muslim Brotherhood’s jihadist government, the Brotherhood’s supporters remain seeded throughout the country and are capable of threatening the regime and the very survival of the Egyptian state.

It isn’t in the least surprising that Islamists have this power. Most Egyptians support them.

In the parliamentary elections four-and-a-half years ago, Islamists won more than 65 percent of the vote. Those were the most open elections in Egyptian history.

Given their strength, it is far from certain that President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi will long succeed in preventing the most powerful and populous country in the Arab world from becoming another branch of Islamic State.

From Israel’s perspective, how this battle pans out is of pivotal importance. But you wouldn’t know it from the media – or from our national security leaders.

As far as they are concerned, the gravest threat facing Israel is the Israeli Right. From their perspective, the most significant development of the year was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to appoint Avigdor Lieberman to replace Moshe Ya’alon as defense minister.

Consider for example a recent national security program on Army Radio.

On Tuesday veteran Arab affairs correspondent Avi Issacharof hosted Egyptian journalist Munib Muhamed on his radio show. Since the show was broadcast two days after the EgyptAir attack, Issacharof might have been expected to ask Muhamed about the bombing.

But then Israel wouldn’t have been the story. Instead, Issacharof asked Muhamed what Egyptians think of Lieberman. And again, there was nothing out of the ordinary in his discussion topic.

As the states around us collapse or struggle to survive, our media and our security brass spend the better part of their time telling us that Israeli society is dangerous. Our democracy is in danger. We are dangerous people. And we are making our neighbors angry.

As our elites obsess over Netanyahu’s coalition building and demand that the rest of the world obsess with them, we spend precious little time thinking about the long-term strategic implications of the revolutionary changes happening all around us.

Friday, May 20, 2016

On the other hand....Observation: Civilian Defense Minister a Plus

...To be clear: I am hardly a fan of Avigdor Lieberman. And I am particularly concerned by his tendency to seek solutions that are based on relying on third parties taking a security role. But the fact that he is a civilian is not the problem. Its an advantage.

Dr. Aaron Lerner..
IMRA..
19 May '16..

Some talking heads in Israel are essentially asserting that only senior brass are qualified to serve as minister of defense.

But ex-brass come to the job with the mind set of the defense establishment.

And while the defense establishment may be fantastic planning an operation after the operation's goals have been delineated, they have been a profound disaster in setting goals and policies.

I could write thousands of words on their failures, but I'll just mention here that the Israeli military mindset approaches a problem as if all the parameters will remain unchanged for an eternity.

Everyone in power remains in power.

Whatever alliances exist today will continue forever.

And our enemies will never have a "counter gizmo" to our gizmos.

That's why the top brass were convinced we could replace the Golan with gizmos.

Its also why otherwise intelligent people can talk with a straight face about the F-35 being "stealth" for the next 50 years.

Monday, October 20, 2014

The Proud Western Enablers of Abbas’s Incitement

...Hamas gets results, in other words, though they may come at a high price. Abbas does not spill enough Jewish blood and he does not put enough fear into the hearts of Israeli civilians to compare favorably to the genocidal murderers of Hamas. Therefore, he has to step up his game. If the international community were to do the right thing and isolate Hamas while refusing to fund the next war on Israel, Abbas could plausibly have the space to do something other than incite holy war. But they won’t do the right thing, and Abbas predictably resorts to terror and incitement. I hope the humanitarians of Washington and Brussels are proud of themselves.

Seth Mandel..
Commentary Magazine..
20 October '14..

It was not a quiet holiday weekend in Jerusalem, though all things considered the violence and anti-Semitism against Jews in their eternal home and capital was not as vicious as Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas might have hoped. Abbas, Israel’s supposed “peace partner” and raving anti-Semite, echoed some of the ugliest moments in the modern history of the land when he explicitly attempted to incite violence against Jews seeking to enter the Temple Mount and resorted to the kind of fear mongering over Jerusalem that has long been a prelude to anti-Jewish rioting.

And yet the revolting persona Abbas has adopted more publicly of late is an indictment of the international community as well. Here is a brief rundown of Abbas’s Jew hate over the weekend:

Abbas said it was not enough for Palestinians to say that “settlers” have come to the Temple Mount.

“We should all remain present at the Noble Sanctuary [Temple Mount],” he added.

“We must prevent them from entering the Noble Sanctuary in any way. This is our Al-Aksa and our church. They have no right to enter and desecrate them. We must confront them and defend our holy sites.”

Abbas said Palestinians must be united to defend Jerusalem.

“Jerusalem has a special flavor and taste not only in our hearts, but also in the hearts of all Arabs and Muslims and Christians,” he said. “Jerusalem is the eternal capital of the Palestinian state and without it there will be no state.”

What Abbas wants is to enforce by terror and rioting a full-fledged ethnic and religious apartheid against Jews on the Jewish holy site. He won’t be the target of “apartheid weeks” the way Israel is on college campuses because most young leftists are ignorant hypocrites, and their defense of “human rights” in the Middle East has always had precisely zero to do with human rights. But Abbas would be a good candidate for such opprobrium, were the Western left to at any point develop a degree of intellectual integrity.

Friday, October 26, 2012

Avigdor Lieberman in His Own Words – Hardly the radical right winger

Dr. Aaron Lerner..
IMRA Weekly Commentary..
25 October '12..

Many from the Left reacted to the announcement this evening that FM Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu will run together with the Likud in the coming elections by claiming that this represented a sharp shift to the "radical right".

But when one considers Lieberman's actual positions, the opposite is the case.

Let’s walk through some of his key position statements and related material in recent years.

#1. 28 October 2007 "Principles of Permanent Agreement"

1. The entry into final arrangement negotiations requires first and foremost the achievement of security for the State and Israel and a significant improvement in the economic conditions of the Palestinians. Any attempt to impose a diplomatic arrangement before a substantial end to terror, and in particular the firing of Qassams, and the reality that there are more than 60% unemployed on the Palestinians side - is doomed to fail.

2. The solution of the conflict must be based on the agreement to exchange land and populations and the creation of a reality of two nationally homogeneous states, such that the situation will not develop that that there will one and a half Palestinian states and half a state for the Jews…

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Avigdor Lieberman is right again

Fresnozionism.org
28 December '10

News item:

In the harshest public words by an Israeli minister toward Turkey in months, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said on Sunday that Ankara’s demand for an apology over the Mavi Marmara incident is “beyond chutzpa.”

“There will be no apologies, and if so, we’re waiting for one from Turkey,” Lieberman said at an annual gathering of Israel’s ambassadors and counsel-generals at the Foreign Ministry. Ankara needed to apologize for its cooperation with terrorists, such as the IHH – which organized the violent incident aboard the Mavi Marmara – Hamas and Hizbullah, he said…

Lieberman’s comments came on the same day that some 10,000 people welcomed the Mavi Marmara back to Istanbul. Hundreds of balloons were released as the ship sailed into Istanbul’s Sarayburnu port, following repairs at a port on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast. The activists, mostly members of pro-Islamic groups, waved Palestinian and Turkish flags and chanted “Down with Israel” and “Allah is Great” as they greeted the vessel. Protesters also boarded boats to welcome the approaching ship, which was adorned with a poster of the nine Turks killed during the raid.

Welfare and Social Affairs Minister Isaac Herzog [Labor Party] took issue with Lieberman’s comments, issuing a statement saying that as foreign minister Lieberman does not understand that his job was to “open doors,” not slam them shut.

Herzog said that [Turkish FM] Davutoglu’s comments in their entirety showed that he was interested in reconciliation with Israel and indicated that a “window of opportunity has been opened to renew relations between the two countries.”

Herzog said Israel did not have the “privilege” to miss this opportunity, even if it “demands Israeli flexibility,” and that a way to repair ties with Turkey needed to be found, even if it entailed “bypassing” Lieberman.

In many ways nations aren’t like people. Applying ideas that normally apply to relations between individuals to relations between nations can be what philosophers call a ‘category mistake’.

(Read full "Avigdor Lieberman is right again")

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Friday, December 24, 2010

Why Arabs hate land swaps

Fresnozionism.org
23 December '10
Posted before Shabbat

There is a guy named Dan Friedman who sends me (and numerous others) several e-mails a day. He is very, very right-wing, in his American politics and his views on Israel. I’m sure a lot of people dislike him, but he’s got a great sense of what’s important.

He often spots interesting things, like this Newsweek interview with Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman — another smart guy that a lot of people dislike — in which Lieberman talks about land swaps:

Newsweek: You’re talking about drawing a line so that how many Israeli Arabs will no longer be part of Israel?

Avigdor Lieberman: At least half.

N: Polls suggest that 90 percent or more of Israeli Arabs don’t want that.

L: You have 20 percent of the population that’s the Arab minority. You have 80 percent that’s Jewish. From 80 percent of the Jewish population, 70 percent support this idea.

N: So even if a resident of [the Israeli Arab town] Umm al-Fahm, for instance, doesn’t want to become part of Palestine, if a majority in the country says he has to, he has no choice?

L: He can continue to live in his property, his house, his land [and become a citizen of Palestine], or he can move to Israel.

The idea of a land swap is that borders should be determined by the populations living inside them. So rather than arbitrarily dividing the land according, for example, to the 1949 armistice lines, borders are drawn as much as possible to separate Jewish and Arab populations. Rather than evacuating hundreds of thousands of Jews from ‘Palestine’ — interestingly, no one ‘respectable’ ever talks about evacuating Arabs from Israel — they can stay where they are and become part of Israel, while heavily Arab areas presently inside Israel can become part of Palestine.

(Read full "Why Arabs hate land swaps")

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Thursday, December 23, 2010

The Amazing Power Of News Magazines To Read The Minds Of Israelis

Daled Amos
22 December '10

First it was Time Magazine which told you exactly how Israel felt about peace:



To be fair, Karl Vick did not read minds--he just spoke to some real estate agents and extrapolated from there.

In any case, now come Newsweek with its headline:

Avigdor Liberman

Israel’s most popular politician right now is a burly cigar smoker who wants to redraw its borders to exclude most Arabs. What is the far-right foreign minister thinking?

I'm sure it is just modesty that prevents them from telling you exactly what he is thinking. Instead, Newsweek goes through the formality of actually conducting an interview.

They merely read the minds of Israelis to tell you that Avigdor Lieberman is Israel's most popular politician.

And how do they know that?
They don't.

Shmuel Rosner points out that apparently Newsweek just made up Avigdor Lieberman's popularity:

(Read full "The Amazing Power Of News Magazines To Read The Minds Of Israelis")

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Thursday, August 26, 2010

Useful idiots in Tel Aviv


Sarah Honig
Another Tack
25 August '10

Among my more esoteric possessions is an English-language translation of a forgotten volume, People and Portraits: A Tragic Cycle, published in 1966. It was authored by artist Georges (Yuri) Annenkov, innovator of grand scale settings for gargantuan Soviet parades and street extravaganzas. In 1921 he painted Lenin’s official portrait. Three years later, after Lenin had been dispatched to the great politburo in the sky, Annenkov was put to work illustrating books about the departed communist icon and was given access to his papers at Moscow’s Lenin Institute.

Annenkov claimed he had copied some of Lenin’s handwritten notes, including the following gem: “To speak the truth is a petit-bourgeois habit. To lie, on the contrary, is often justified by the lie’s aim. The whole world’s capitalists and their governments, as they pant to win the Soviet market, will close their eyes to the above-mentioned reality and will thus transform themselves into men who are deaf, dumb and blind … They will toil to prepare their own suicide.”

Essentially Lenin expounded on the theme of the “useful idiot,” ascribed variously both to him and to Stalin. Whether or not either of them actually coined the phrase, it entered the political lexicon to describe Soviet sympathizers in the West, who despite being ardent – if naïve – boosters of the communist cause, were in fact held in contempt by the very Bolsheviks who cynically exploited them.

THE USSR is gone, but not the useful idiots. Their latterday duplicates still support malevolent causes via gullible attempts to supposedly be a force for good. The progeny of old-time communists, along with fashionable new-recruit sidekicks, still willingly submit to manipulation by an unseen though powerful world force, characterized by radical political correctness and spouting human-rights slogans. Despite the moral superiority they claim, they’re in fact useful idiots in the service of political movements – from outright anarchists to jihadist terror-mongers.

They possess greater clout than the 20th century’s original useful fools ever achieved. They set the tone in the mass media and academia. They are the trendsetters who determine what’s acceptable and respectable. They mold minds. Anything they like is bon ton. Whatever they disapprove of is verboten.

Israel isn’t sanely immune to useful-idiot shenanigans. It’s in fact one of the most afflicted of democracies.

(Read full article)

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Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Obama Officials: Relax, We’re Just Trying to Break up Bibi’s Coalition


Noah Pollak
Contentions/Commentary
16 March '10

Jeffrey Goldberg spoke with White House officials today and posted this report.

So what is the goal? The goal is force a rupture in the governing coalition that will make it necessary for Netanyahu to take into his government Livni’s centrist Kadima Party (he has already tried to do this, but too much on his terms) and form a broad, 68-seat majority in Knesset…

Obama knows that this sort of stable, centrist coalition is the key to success. He would rather, I understand, not have to deal with Netanyahu at all — people near the President say that, for one thing, Obama doesn’t think that Netanyahu is very bright, and there is no chemistry at all between the two men — but he’d rather have a Netanyahu who is being pressured from his left than a Netanyahu who is being pressured from the right.

So here we have on record the Obama administration saying 1) that it is trying to topple the government of a democratic ally (if only we could try this in Tehran!) 2) that it believes it has such mastery of Israeli politics that publicly bludgeoning Bibi will result in such a shakeup, and that 3) even if the hoped-for new government is formed, the White House thinks it’s a good idea to go on record stating that the Prime Minister they will have to deal with is stupid.

This is pretty amazing. And it’s more evidence that not only is Obama ignorant of how Israel and the Middle East work, but that he refuses to do any on-the-job learning. He is pushing forward with his failed strategy of a year ago, only this time with a bigger hammer. He appears to be unconcerned with the importance to the Israeli public of his reversal on the terms of the settlement freeze, which the White House was praising just a few months ago. He clearly does not understand one of the basic lessons they teach in Peace Process 101 — that Israel does not take risks for peace when it feels threatened, especially not when it feels threatened by the United States. Obama clearly doesn’t understand this, although I remain skeptical that all of this is really about the peace process.

(Read full article)
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Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Why Israeli Arabs oppose land swaps


Fresnozionism.org
07 March '10

Nothing irritates Israeli Arabs more than talk of land and population swaps, and it’s interesting to see why.

The idea of a swap, promoted by Avigdor Lieberman’s Israel Beiteinu party, seems like a practical solution to a difficult problem.

Implementing a partition of the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean — the so-called two-state solution – by simply returning to the 1949 cease-fire lines would not be acceptable to Israel, and indeed very unfair. Since the Palestinians are not prepared to permit Jews to live in ‘Palestine’, all 350,000 Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria (for the purposes of this article, I’m ignoring the very difficult issue of Jerusalem) would have to be moved. Considering the difficulty and expense of evacuating 8,000 people from Gaza, this kind of population movement is unimaginable.

I am not going to belabor the irony that the Palestinians, who insist that Israel’s policy in the territories constitutes ‘racist apartheid’ find no difficulty themselves in proposing a racist apartheid state!

In any event, UN Security Council resolution 242, generally considered the legal foundation for the two-state solution, does not call for a reversion to the pre-1967 status quo. Rather, it says that in the framework of a peace agreement, Israel will return territories (but not all the territories — see here for interpretations by the original drafters of the resolution) to Arab control in return for an end of the conflict and “secure and recognized boundaries.” Since then many observers have pointed out that the 1949 lines are not at all secure.

(Read full post)
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Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Israel Derangement Syndrome in the British Press


Noah Pollak
Contentions/Commentary
22 February '10

At this point, the most interesting thing about the Dubai assassination isn’t what happened in that hotel room; it is a hysteria about the story in the British press that is bordering on mob lunacy.

Few new details are emerging, so the press is engaged in an increasingly unconvincing attempt at propelling the story along by self-generated outrage. Here is a perfect example from the UK Times. It begins ominously:
David Miliband will press his Israeli counterpart today to explain what his Government knows about the use of stolen British identities in the Mahmoud al-Mabhouh killing.

Avigdor Lieberman, the Israeli Foreign Minister, will meet separately with his British, French and Irish counterparts in Brussels, in a diplomatic showdown over Mossad’s use of fraudulent European passports.

The Israelis are in big trouble! Well, maybe not. Down at the very bottom we read:
Mr Lieberman’s meetings in Brussels with the British, French and Irish foreign ministers have been long planned.

(Read full post)
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Saturday, February 20, 2010

Citizen Mahmoud Abbas


Michael Freund
Opinion/JPost
17 February '10
Posted before Shabbat

This past Monday, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman raised an interesting point about Mahmoud Abbas that has not received the attention it deserves.

Speaking at a session of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Lieberman intimated that the chairman of the Palestinian Authority, who is also known as Abu Mazen, may very well be little more than a has-been – not just politically, but constitutionally as well.

“Abu Mazen does not represent the residents of Gaza because Hamas rules there,” Lieberman said, adding, “Seeing as elections in the PA have been postponed three times, one needs to ask whom does Abu Mazen represent. It is not clear that he can supply the goods in negotiations.”

To be sure, those in favor of talks with the Palestinians will dismiss Lieberman’s remarks as little more than rhetoric, viewing them as an attempt to minimize Abbas’s importance in order to justify ignoring him. But whether the critics like it or not, the fact is that Lieberman is correct: under Palestinian law, Abbas is no longer the lawful and legitimate leader of the PA.

Indeed, ever since January 24, the Palestinian chairman can no longer be said to be legally occupying his post. It was on that date, after all, that a new round of Palestinian balloting was supposed to be held to fill the post of chairman as well as elect a new Palestinian Legislative Council.

But because of disagreements between Fatah and Hamas, the vote never took place, leaving the Palestinian areas in a constitutional vacuum of epic proportions.

If you don’t believe me, just listen to what the Palestinians themselves have to say.

(Read full article)
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Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Something’s Rotten in the State of Israel’s Legal System


Evelyn Gordon
Contentions/Commentary
13 January '10

Something is deeply wrong with a justice system when mainstream journalists and politicians take it for granted that a suspect’s political views will affect the legal proceedings against him.

Consider the following sentence from a column that appeared Monday in Israel’s left-wing daily Haaretz: “If the attorney general decides to bring charges against Yisrael Beiteinu chairman Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister may decide that, in his bid to reach a plea bargain that will keep him out of prison, he is better off bringing down the government, and possibly even the Knesset, and disguising himself as a moderate in a government that has Kadima and Labor [two left-of-center parties] at its center.”

The author, Amir Oren, is no right-wing conspiracy theorist; he’s a veteran, left-of-center journalist and star columnist for a respected highbrow daily. And he considers it patently obvious that if Lieberman wants prosecutors to treat him leniently, he would be wise to swerve Left.

Nor is Oren alone in this belief. In 2007, after then prime minister Ehud Olmert appointed Daniel Friedmann, a well-known critic of the Supreme Court’s judicial activism, as justice minister, Yossi Verter wrote in Haaretz: “The justice system … has two alternatives for coping with this blow: hunkering down in its bunker and waiting for the government to change, or speeding up criminal proceedings against Olmert and working with greater vigor to topple him, which would also bring about Friedmann’s departure.”

Like Oren, Verter is a veteran left-of-center journalist and a star Haaretz columnist. And like Oren, he considers it self-evident that legal officials could and would use their prosecutorial powers to oust a politician whose policies they oppose.

(Read full post)
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Sunday, November 1, 2009

Abbas’s War Strategy


Evelyn Gordon
Contentions/Commentary
01 November 09

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman told Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Saturday that he is urging his government not to resume negotiations with the Palestinian Authority until the PA withdraws its international legal complaints over alleged Israeli war crimes in Gaza. The real question is why Lieberman is having trouble convincing his cabinet colleagues of this position.

These complaints have only one purpose: to hamstring Israel’s ability to defend itself against Palestinian terror by making it fear that any defensive military operation will land its political and military leadership in the dock. After all, as Col. Richard Kemp courageously told the UN Human Rights Commission last month, the Israel Defense Forces “did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare” during its operation in Gaza this past January. And Kemp, a former commander of British forces in Afghanistan who also served in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, and Iraq, is certainly in a position to make comparisons. Hence, if Israel’s actions in Gaza are deemed war crimes, there is no military action it could take against Palestinian terrorists that wouldn’t be. Avoiding civilian casualties entirely is not possible when terrorists operate, as the Palestinians do, from the heart of a civilian population.

Yet even as he seeks to abolish Israel’s right to self-defense, PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas is also giving his imprimatur to terror attacks on Israel: last month, he accepted a proposed reconciliation agreement with Hamas that not only did not require Hamas to halt anti-Israel terror but explicitly obligated the PA security services to “respect the Palestinian people’s right to resist.” Since “resistance” is the well-known Palestinian code word for anti-Israel terror, that translates as requiring PA forces “to respect the Palestinian people’s right to perpetrate anti-Israel terror” — or. in other words, not to interfere when they do so. (Hamas, incidentally, has not yet signed the document; it is still holding out for more concessions.)

How exactly does Israel talk peace with someone who seeks to cripple Israel’s ability to defend itself even as he endorses anti-Israel terror? That isn’t an act of peace; it’s an act of war. And while Abbas may have had little political choice about jumping on the Goldstone Report bandwagon, he can hardly plead that Goldstone forced his hand: the PA filed its own war-crimes complaint against Israel in the International Criminal Court in January — nine months before the Goldstone Report came out. It even signed a special cooperation agreement with the court to get around prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo’s initial objection that he lacked jurisdiction, since Israel is not a member of the court, and the PA, not being a sovereign state, cannot be.

In short, this looks remarkably like a deliberately strategy for war on Israel. And Israel should be calling Abbas on it rather than keeping up the pretense that he is a “partner for peace” with whom it is eager to negotiate.
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