The ongoing denial of reality

Isi Leibler
Candidly Speaking from Jerusalem
09 December '10

Were we living in a sane world, the events of the past few weeks, culminating with WikiLeaks, should have confirmed the veracity of our approach to the peace process. But, alas, much of the liberal global media has once again displayed its penchant for evading realities which are out of synch with their agenda.

The leaked documents provide further irrefutable evidence that Arab leaders speak with forked tongues when they publicly attack Israel’s attitude while privately urging the Americans to engage in military action to prevent the Iranians - whom they loathe - from becoming a nuclear power. In what can only be described as surrealistic, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah - from whence the principal global funding for al-Qaida and other terrorist groups emanates - called on the US “to cut off the head of the snake,” Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Zayed warned the Americans that “[Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad is Hitler” and virtually every Arab leader conveyed similar frenzied messages to the US.

In this context, the hypocrisy and cynical manipulation of the Israelis by President Barack Obama was simply unconscionable. We are now aware that he was knowingly lying when he said Israel must make further unilateral concessions to the Palestinians as a precondition to persuading the Arab states to support sanctions or endorse military action against Iran.

The new revelations also expose the absurdity of foreign affairs analysts and supporters of Obama’s Middle East policies (including Obama’s Jewish acolytes like J Street) who repeatedly claim that only the Israelis and the “neocon cabal” favor a military option against Iran.

WikiLeaks also disclosed that despite warnings from Arab leaders that Syria could not be persuaded to weaken its links with Iran, the US continued trying to appease President Basher Assad. Despite denials, the Americans were also aware that the Syrians were collaborating with the Iranians to provide lethal weapons to Hizbullah, even using ambulances to transport weapons to Lebanon.

(Read full "The ongoing denial of reality")

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Is Barack Obama “Good for the Jews”? (And How About Bill Clinton And Bush?)

Daled Amos
02 October '10

The attitude of any American president to Israel is a matter of concern because it affects our lives and security. Even this week, President Obama publicly exhorted Israel to extend the settlement freeze. Many Israelis found this interference insensitive and unwelcome. One would not ask if this president is a friend of Israel, because in his Cairo speech of 4 June 2009 he publicly revealed his preference. Just the same, one continuously asks whether Obama is “good for the Jews” (and Israel), even if the question is left unstated.

Normally, one would expect that any president first be good for America, but Obama has not convinced many Americans that this is the case. It is remarkable that a parallel questioning process is taking place in the U.S., where senior political commentators, such as Peggy Noonan, Dinesh D’Souza, Charles Krauthammer, Andy McCarthy, and Victor Davis Hanson, are also asking if the President is good for America, and they are not convinced. Their vantage point may be different, but if America and Israel share the same [Judeo-Christian] values, then the interests of the U.S. and of Israel should largely coincide. The historical record is mixed.

There is a need to examine the recent past, because the two previous American presidents who claim to be friends of the Jewish state have actually caused considerable harm.

(Read full post)

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Hands off Abbas

Sarah Honig
Another Tack
12 August '10

We have no tangible proof that the White House had indeed applied brutal pressure on poor Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority’s teeter-tottering Ramallah half. This remains unsubstantiated. American officials haven’t confirmed news reports and derivative innuendo from both Israeli and Palestinian sources. But if we set aside our skepticism and assume, for argument’s sake, that Obama and crew did indeed twist Abbas’s arms, we ought to be outraged.

The very notion of dragging an unwilling interlocutor to the negotiating table should be unthinkable, certainly no cause for glee among Israelis.

This is akin to a shotgun wedding. However, it’s even less likely to lead to harmony than forced nuptials are to result in matrimonial bliss. We’ve been there, seen this.

TEN YEARS ago Bill Clinton had dragged a kicking and screaming Yasser Arafat to Camp David, where he also leaned on then-PM Ehud Barak to make egregious offers to reward Arafat for his “cooperation.”

To the amazement of both American and Israeli wishful-thinkers, Arafat spurned the outstretched hand and Israel’s mad magnanimity.

Unlike the Americans and Israelis, Arafat wasn’t out to end the dispute. That was the last thing on his priorities list. Indeed right at the top of said list was perpetuating and escalating the dispute. No sooner did the Camp David powwow flop, than Arafat unleashed his premeditated second intifada.

(Read full article)

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The Only Thing Scarier Than An Obama Plan For Israel Is That He May Have No Plan At All

Daled Amos
11 April '10

Last month, Laura Rozen wrote at Politico:

Sources say within the inter-agency process, White House Middle East strategist Dennis Ross is staking out a position that Washington needs to be sensitive to Netanyahu’s domestic political constraints including over the issue of building in East Jerusalem in order to not raise new Arab demands, while other officials including some aligned with Middle East peace envoy George Mitchell are arguing Washington needs to hold firm in pressing Netanyahu for written commitments to avoid provocations that imperil Israeli-Palestinian peace talks and to preserve the Obama administration’s credibility. …

“He [Ross] seems to be far more sensitive to Netanyahu’s coalition politics than to U.S. interests,” one U.S. official told POLITICO Saturday. “And he doesn’t seem to understand that this has become bigger than Jerusalem but is rather about the credibility of this Administration.”

What some saw as the suggestion of dual loyalties shows how heated the debate has become.

At the time, Noah Pollak wrote about 3 things that could be learned from Rozen's report, the first being:

The administration has essentially been winging it, at least on the details. If senior officials are just now debating how to handle the crisis, it means that there wasn’t a particularly coherent or well-considered strategy in the first place — just a generalized desire to knock the Israelis around. Smart power.

(Read full post)
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US anger at Israel is misplaced, insulting

Fresnozionism.org
14 March '10

The American reaction to the announcement that Israel would continue to build in Jewish East Jerusalem puts several things in sharp focus. What does it tell us that Joe Biden ‘condemned’ it, Hillary Clinton found it ‘insulting’ and White House political advisor David Axelrod called it both an ‘affront’ and an ‘insult’?

Let’s look at both the substance and the tone of these remarks.

The substance: as many commentators have pointed out, Israel has been building in East Jerusalem since 1967, and negotiated with the Palestinian Authority for 15 years while building there. When Israel agreed to the Obama Administration’s demand for a settlement freeze in Judea and Samaria, it pointedly did not agree to include Jerusalem, which Israel has never considered a ’settlement’. At that time, the US praised Israel for taking a positive step to resolve the conflict. Israel has indicated that it would cede some Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem as part of a peace agreement, but has never accepted any prior limitation of its sovereignty over all of Jerusalem.

(Read full post)
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A Bill Clinton Promise (1999)

Today's Golden Oldie is a Dry Bones cartoon from December 1999. Ten years ago next month.

I've posted this Golden Oldie because the ex-President is here in Israel to share his "wisdom" with us. According to the Associated Press (as quoted by Haaretz)

Bill Clinton in Israel: There would be peace if Rabin were still alive
"Former U.S. President Bill Clinton said on Saturday that if former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin were still alive, a peace accord would have been reached between Israel and all of its neighbors." -more

The impeached President, who broke his promise to free Pollard ten years ago, is now telling us that the ongoing, continuous, and relentless genocidal quest to destroy the Jewish State is because of Israel's political leadership!!?!

The man pushes the limits of hutzpah!

* * *Ten years after Clinton's broken promise, Jonathan Pollard remains in Prison ... On November 21, 2009, Jonathan Pollard will enter his 25th year of a life sentence for his activities on behalf of Israel. The median sentence for the offense Pollard committed - one count of passing classified information to an ally - is 2 to 4 years. Pollard received his life sentence without a trial, as a result of a plea bargain which he honored and the U.S. government violated.

Palestinian Incitement (1999)

Today's Golden Oldie is a Dry Bones cartoon done in 1999.
Ten years ago this month.

Palestinian incitement has never stopped and Hillary's next campaign will probably not be a run for the Senate.

Clinton and the Stormy Weather (1998)

Today's Golden Oldie is a Dry Bones cartoon done in 1998.

I returned to Israel a few days ago in time to say hi and goodbye to the LSW (long suffering wife) who took off for a two week vacation and family visit in NYC and New Jersey.

My return coincided with the Clinton visit (Hillary, not Bill) and the sudden pounding of the country with violent rain storms. I've spent the past few days with my nose pressed to the window pane, watching the storm outside, and sipping a mug of hot coffee. Here in the Holy Land, rain is a blessing ...but highways and basements are being flooded.

There's something about Israeli rain storms that makes me feel closer to the land, and I just didn't feel very political. Which is why I searched for something about sudden storms for today's Golden Oldie . I found this 1998 cartoon about being hit by a sudden blustery storm ...strangely tho', it's also about meeting with Clinton (Bill not Hillary) and about demands for Israeli concessions!

Go figure.

Peace vs. the 'peace process'

Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
14 October 09

"WHOM THE GODS WOULD DESTROY," the late Irving Kristol once observed, "they first tempt to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict." Maybe "destroy" was putting it a bit strongly, but there is no denying that American presidents seem irresistibly drawn to the belief that they can succeed where others have failed and conjure a lasting peace between Israel and its Arab enemies. This diplomacy has gone by various names -- Oslo, the Roadmap, Camp David, and so on -- but time and again it has led not to the end of the conflict but to its intensification.

In his memoirs, former President Bill Clinton describes Yasser Arafat's refusal to accept the extraordinarily generous terms for a permanent settlement offered by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak at Camp David in 2000. That refusal led to a Palestinian terror war, the bloody Second Intifada, and when Arafat called Clinton in January 2001 to tell him what a great man he was, Clinton was bitter. "I am not a great man," he told Arafat. "I am a failure, and you have made me one."

Of course, if Clinton was a failure so were the two George Bushes. Each made it his goal to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict, each convened a grand international conference for that purpose (Bush 41 in Madrid, Bush 43 in Annapolis), and each left the situation worse than he had found it.

In his first nine months as president, Barack Obama has shown every sign of succumbing to the same temptation. Two days after moving in to the White House, he named George Mitchell, the former Senate majority leader, his special envoy to the region. He pressured Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu intoendorsing a "two-state solution." He declared that "the moment is now for us to act" to achieve peace in the Middle East.

Unlike his recent predecessors, Obama has gone out of his way to signal a distinct coolness toward Israel and its interests. At a White House meeting with the leaders of American Jewish organizations in July, he suggested that because there had been "no daylight" between Israel and the United States when George W. Bush was president, there had been "no progress" toward peace.

In fact, there had often been "daylight" between Washington and Jerusalem during the Bush years. There had been plenty of movement too, from the adoption of the Roadmap to the Israeli "disengagement" from Gaza to the final-status negotiations that followed the Annapolis conference.

Still: Obama was right when he said there had been no progress toward Arab-Israeli peace under Bush. Nor had there been any under Clinton. Nor, as things stand now, will there be any under Obama.

Why? Because the "peace process" to which all of them, their sharp differences notwithstanding, have been so committed is not a formula for ending the decades-long war in the Holy Land, but for prolonging it.

Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shake hands at the White House in September 1993, launching the Oslo "peace process." What resulted was not peace but an intensified war.

In an important article in the current Middle East Quarterly, Daniel Pipes reviews the terrible failure of the 1993 Oslo accords, and homes in on the root fallacy of the diplomatic approach it embodied: the belief that the Arab-Israeli war can "be concluded through goodwill, conciliation, mediation, flexibility, restraint, generosity, and compromise, topped off with signatures on official documents." For 16 years, Israeli governments, prodded by Washington, have sought to quench Palestinian hostility with concessions and gestures of goodwill. Yet peace today is more elusive than ever.

"Wars end not through goodwill but through victory," Pipes writes, defining victory as one side compelling the other to give up its war goals. Since 1948, the Arabs' goal has been the elimination of Israel; the Israelis', to win their neighbors' acceptance of a Jewish state in the Middle East. "If the conflict is to end, one side must lose and one side win," argues Pipes. "Either there will be no more Zionist state or it will be accepted by its neighbors."

Diplomacy cannot settle the Arab-Israeli conflict until the Palestinians abandon their anti-Israel rejectionism. US policy should be focused, therefore, on getting them to abandon it. The Palestinians must be put "on notice that benefits will flow to them only after they prove their acceptance of Israel. Until then -- no diplomacy, no discussion of final status, no recognition as a state, and certainly no financial aid or weapons."

So long as American and Israeli leaders remain committed to a fruitless Arab-Israeli "peace process," Arab-Israeli peace will remain unachievable. Let the newest Nobel peace laureate grasp and act upon that insight, and he may do more to genuinely hasten the conflict's end than any of his well-meaning predecessors.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.
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Obama to Israel and Palestinians: Make Peace Right Now Cause I Said So!

Barry Rubin

The Rubin Report

23 September 09

It is difficult to overstate the absurdity in context of President Barack Obama’s performance at the Israeli-Palestinian photo opportunity at the UN. The outstanding theme is his commandist style.

We will reverse man-made global warming, he has said. We will have a health-care bill. This is like the style of an Arab dictator, proclaiming that his will is all and that uttering words make something so. It is not the style of someone helping two parties solve a problem or of a mediator .

But let’s allow William Shakespeare to explain it:

“Why, man, he stands on top of the narrow world
Like the Colossus of Rhodes, and we little men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves disgraceful graves.”

Yet this thundering, you-will-do-this style is combined with an extraordinary weakness, equally self-willed. Giving orders when you are tough is scary; giving orders when you are weak provokes derision. If America won’t use force or be tough or face confrontations or define enemies as such, then the gap between such arrogance and weakness is a chasm into which U.S. foreign policy will fall.

This might wow them in elite salons of the United States but in lots of other countries, people have to lean against the wall to try to stop themselves from laughing.

Personal note: I don’t want to keep bashing Obama, it’s simply that he keeps saying and doing things that defy satire and beg for the harsh criticism and exposure of absurdities that he is not getting in the mainstream media.

But how can one do otherwise when confronted with these statements by him:

“It is past time to stop talking about starting negotiations; it is time to move forward,”
Arab-Israeli negotiations have been going on for sixty years but Obama really seems to believe they have just been waiting for him to give the go-ahead signal.

As I keep stressing the ONLY reason there have been no negotiations for six months—a point the media never points out—is that Obama introduced the demand that Israel freeze all construction on settlements. This issue had never prevented talks before but once Obama raised the anti, well the Palestinians couldn’t be less militant than America’s president.

Instead, the New York Times tells us rather vaguely: “[Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud] Abbas has in the past refused to return to peace talks unless Israel freezes settlement growth in Palestinian territories.” Really? In the past like before January 20, 2009?

"There is a way, I think,” said Obama in an interview with ABC, “to relaunch the peace process and not get bogged down with this question, because we've just wasted six months on this issue. We could waste another six months. I think that's not good. I want to move on to peace."

This could be called the stamping my little foot strategy. And incidentally I’d wager that Obama has no idea of any way to resolve the conflict quickly. Those questions he doesn’t want to get bogged down with are basic and existential ones. And, again, it is his fault that six months have been wasted (he’s also wasted six months on confronting Iran, but that’s another issue).

Instead, Obama wants to leap to permanent status. When was the last time that happened? Think back to 2000 when President Bill Clinton advanced to final status talks and that only after more than six years of preparation called the Oslo peace process. At Camp David the talks quickly fell apart and the Palestinians launched massive violence. And for the last nine years those involved have been saying that it was a mistake.

The best way to get the limited progress possible is not through grandstanding and demagoguery but finding solutions on small things that can strengthen the status quo and limit violence for the decades needed by the Palestinians to want to make real peace with Israel.

Yet perhaps Obama thinks he’s Alexander the Great who, when faced with the Gordian Knot, rather than untie it merely cut through it with his sword. Obama, who carries no sword, can’t do that with a dozen issues that could be listed at this point.

The fact that this man has no real experience in international relations is beginning to tell. No matter how good (or bad) the advisors are cannot fully make up for a president who hasn’t a clue of how to deal with an issue like this. I don’t want to be unfair but this seems literally to be true.

And then there’s his style. Obama makes it sound as if countries must do things not because it is in their interest to do so (with American help, pressure, and even threats being part of that interest) but because he wants it and it will benefit him.

"We cannot continue the same pattern of taking tentative steps forward and then stepping back," Obama said. "It is absolutely critical that we get this issue resolved."

But a man who knows more about these issues, Nahum Barnea, the left-of-center Israeli columnist put it this way: The Americans discovered that they want an Israeli-Palestinian agreement more than the leaders of both sides desire one.”

Barnea might have more accurately written, “Should have discovered” because evidently the president hasn’t yet found this out.

Instead, Obama stated, “It is time to show the flexibility and common sense and sense of compromise that’s necessary to achieve our goals.”

Flexibility? Common sense? Sense of compromise? What place is he talking about?

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Stuck in the Middle East

by Steven J. Rosen
Foreign Policy
September 17, 2009

Eight months into his presidency, Barack Obama is fast approaching his first real moment of truth on the Middle East. At the opening of the U.N. General Assembly session next week, the U.S. president will host a ceremonial summit between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in hopes of launching talks to achieve a final resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Then, a week later on Oct. 1, Undersecretary of State William Burns will join representatives of Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and China for the first talks with Iran's chief nuclear negotiator to see whether an agreement can be reached to curtail President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's nuclear weapons program.

This is the diplomatic offensive that Obama promised the U.S. public last year -- the investment in "soft power" that the president's supporters deemed lacking during the George W. Bush administration. But the White House is facing tough prospects on both fronts. All that fantastical thinking about the transformative power of diplomacy is now headed straight for the iceberg that is the Middle East.

One immovable object is Abbas, who has participated in hundreds of peace negotiations over 15 years with six previous Israeli governments -- all while Israeli settlement construction was proceeding at a brisk pace. Now, Abbas says that he won't accept the partial freeze that Netanyahu has declared; he'll wait to join peace talks until Israel bows to Washington's unprecedented demand for a total freeze on construction, including in Jerusalem. But that is a condition that no Israeli government is going to accept. Even if Abbas softens his stand and agrees to begin talks, negotiations will still be in their throat-clearing phase when the Palestinian president's term ends Jan. 10. With Hamas controlling Gaza there is no agreed electoral mechanism to empower a successor Palestinian president to make concessions on behalf of the Palestinians. Far from achieving transformative success, Obama will be lucky if he can just keep negotiations alive for more than a few weeks.

The Iranian talks look even more likely to end without resolution. On what seems like a daily basis, Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei reaffirm their determination to accelerate Iran's nuclear program and add to the rapidly growing stockpiles of low-enriched uranium. The talks are not likely to throw them off this path.

When both of these diplomatic initiatives grind down, then, and hopes for change fade, the U.S.-Israel relationship will face new strains. Obama can tolerate an impasse on the Iranian front for some time, but Netanyahu cannot. Although Obama and his advisors certainly do not want to see a nuclear-armed Iran, some find the prospect of an attack against the Islamic Republic even more frightening. As the countdown to a nuclear Iran draws ever near, many top Netanyahu advisors have a different view.

On the Palestinian file, the opposite is true: It is Obama who cannot live with an impasse and the Israelis who can. Since 2005, when Israel withdrew every soldier and 8,000 settlers from Gaza, only to be rewarded by a Hamas coup and thousands of Qassam rockets, Israelis have been skeptical that further Oslo Accords-type agreements can enhance their security. The idea of negotiating with the Palestinians to pull the Israeli army out of the West Bank, for example, doesn't inspire much public enthusiasm. Trouble is, many Americans do still believe in the Oslo idea. And a breakdown of Israeli-Palestinian talks would put enormous strains on Washington's relations with Arab countries like Saudi Arabia that need diplomatic movement to quiet domestic tensions. Allowing the talks to fail would also be unacceptable to the European Union and profoundly unsettling to important parts of Obama's own political coalition. Without a peace process, there will be more pressure for anti-Israel resolutions at the United Nations, leaving Obama with a bitter choice between using the U.S. veto to prevent them or allowing them to pass, imperiling an ally and inflaming demands for U.S. sanctions against Israel.

There is yet one more wild card in all of this: Obama's door is open to advisors who want to break with Israel. Many on the left of the Democratic Party believe that Israel is the obstacle to peace and that a breakthrough could be achieved if Obama just twisted Israel's arm. Of course, this was always the view of some of the storied Arabists in the State Department, but today, it comes more influentially from Jewish American critics of Israeli policy who depict themselves as pro-Israel and pro-peace. Faced with the reality that only the 3 percent of Israelis who vote Meretz share such views, and that the dovish camp led by Yossi Beilin has no prospect of winning an election in the actual Jewish state, the Beilinist Israeli left has moved to Washington. Their goal is to lobby the U.S. president to "save Israel from herself" by imposing terms on Israel that the great majority of Israelis would reject.

Obama is poorly positioned to reach over Netanyahu's head to persuade the Israeli people to embrace this agenda. A Sept. 12 poll put Bibi's approval rating at 65 percent, while similar polls by Haaretz and the Jerusalem Post found that only 12 and 6 percent of Israelis, respectively, think that Obama is pro-Israel. If elections were held today, Likud would gain five additional seats, and Bibi's coalition would grow at the expense of the left, which has already been decimated by a public rebuff.

Some Netanyahu advisors think that Obama is himself a man of the left and that top aides like Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod are closet J-Streeters in the White House. Instead, however, Obama and his top advisors are instinctively drawn to the center-left, like Bill and Hillary Clinton. He is more likely to take advice from the National Security Council's Dennis Ross than from more-leftist deputy Mideast peace envoy Mara Rudman or the ubiquitous peace pundit Daniel Levy.

In short, all that is clear is that Obama's big Mideast moment is coming. Now the world waits to see what kind of U.S. president he wants to be.

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Clinton's Global Initiative

27 September 2006 (I think it's a family issue)

Al-Jazeerah Reports

"New York, 22 September 2006: The International Crisis Group today launched a new global advocacy initiative designed to generate new political momentum for a comprehensive settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Major funding support for the initiative, to cost around $400,000 in its first year, was announced at the Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York."

The basic goal of the initiative is to empower the Arab States and a broad alliance of anti-Israeli leaders to campaign internationally to force a "solution" on Israel.
As the official report puts it:

"An international publicity campaign mobilising respected former presidents, prime ministers, foreign and defence ministers, congressional leaders and heads of international organisations around a statement of support for a comprehensive settlement, and a new process to achieve it, involving a possible international conference to kickstart negotiations, and the leadership role of the Quartet (U.S., EU, Russia, UN) being reinforced by greater participation from the Arab League and regional countries."

Read the whole thing here.

A Very Tough Last Question

Rick Richman
Contentions/Commentary
31 September 09

The State Department, which has yet to post the promised answer to the question of whether the Obama administration considers itself bound by the letter given to Israel in exchange for the Gaza disengagement, faced another puzzler today. Here is the colloquy with spokesman Ian Kelly:

QUESTION: The Jerusalem Post has a poll that showed that only 6 percent of Israelis actually support and think that the — President Obama is pro-Israel. Does that concern you at all?

MR. KELLY: Well, I think that our support for Israel and the President’s support for Israel is unwavering. I haven’t seen the results of that poll, but I think that the people of Israel know who stands with them.

QUESTION: Do you think that Secretary Clinton may think that a more balanced Mideast policy would be more appropriate?

MR. KELLY: You’re asking a very tough last question, I have to say. I’ll defer comment and – thank you very much.

Note that Kelly really did not answer the first question either, since the question was not whether Obama’s support is “unwavering” (he has already given his let-me-be-clear answer to that) but whether Obama is concerned that the percentage of Israelis who believe him is so far down that it approaches the margin of error.

At least Kelly only “deferred” his answer to the “very tough last question,” indicating that perhaps he’ll supply an answer after he checks — just as with the unanswered question about the shelf life of presidential letters.
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Re: This Is What Evenhandedness Looks Like

Jennifer Rubin
Contentions
06 August 09

Noah, you have it exactly right. One wonders when we are going to see the “recalibration” that the administration was planning for our Israel policy. There are a plethora of opportunities for the administration to comment on developing events. The leaders of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations released a statement on the ongoing Fatah conference, which reads:

Statements by Abu Allah praising suicide bombers who have killed dozens of people is wholly unacceptable and represents the true challenge to the chances for peace in the region. Statements by other Fatah officials urged the continuation of armed resistance and asserted that Fatah would not recognize the State of Israel. These declarations, made by the so-called ‘moderate’ Palestinian faction puts into sharp focus the question of the real beliefs of the party with whom Israel is to negotiate. Such rhetoric cannot be dismissed as it glorifies murderers and incites others to emulate their example. The U.S. has urged the Palestinians to address the issue of incitement, which is both an immediate and long-term obstacle to the prospect of meaningful negotiations. Too often such statements have been dismissed. But as history has shown, it is a serious impediment, not only undermining the confidence of Israelis, but exhorting this and future generations to violence and hate. The leadership of the Palestinian Authority must speak out against these actions to declare and take steps that all such incitement will be stopped.

During the conference, former PA Prime Minister Abu Alaa welcomed Khaled Abu-Usbah to the conference and referred to him and Dalal Mughrabi as Palestinian heroes for carrying out the bus hijacking in 1978, which killed 37 Israeli civilians, including 12 children. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said that Palestinians reserved the right to pursue the “resistance” against Israel and other top Fatah members have stated they will not give up the armed struggle. The Fatah party platform that was to be presented for a vote yesterday explicitly stated that Israel must not be recognized as a Jewish state. In addition, large posters featuring Palestinian children brandishing rifles decorated the conference hall.

Where is the condemnation from the White House? Is Hillary Clinton otherwise occupied with brow-beating Michael Oren over the latest housing dispute in Jerusalem? The absence of any response is striking. What we need is some “daylight” between the U.S. and the Palestinian extremists. That’s what would enhance the U.S.’s credibility with Israel as an honest broker.