Israel, the Middle East and coalitions that are built on shifting sand dunes - by Dr. Mordechai Kedar

Middle East coalitions are also built on shifting sand dunes, and once again I warn those who make the decisions in Israel and outside it to steer clear of a love affair with the present-day stars in the constellation, from basing any long term policy on Middle East "coalitions" and especially from paying in hard currency - such as land - for a piece of paper just because the word "peace" is written on it.

Dr. Mordechai Kedar..
Israelnationalnews.org..
28 October '16..
H/T Sally Zahav
Link: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/19674

A little over two years ago, in mid-August, I ended my weekly article with the following sentence:

"The Middle Eastern see-saw is leaning heavily towards the Saudi-Egyptian axis, but it is not at all clear whether that coalition will continue to direct the Middle East in another year or two. Israel must not be tempted to align its security and future with a temporary constellation, no matter how good it appears to be. Israel must always base its policy on long term planning that gives priority to Israel and its territorial possessions and not to agreements resting on the shifting sands of the Middle East."

Unfortunately, for the last two years Israelis and many others have been talking about the importance of a treaty between Israel and the so-called "coalition of moderate Sunni nations" - to wit, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, The United Arab Emirates, and the Palestinian Authority - all of them united against the Iranian threat and ISIS which threaten the stability and welfare of their regimes. There are even those who accuse Israel's government of not being wise enough to make use of the present situation in the Middle East to forge a peace agreement with the Arab and Islamic world on the basis of the Saudi Peace Plan adopted by the Arab League.

The foundation of the "moderate Sunni coalition" was the close cooperation between Egypt and Saudi Arabia, that began when King Abdullah, all heart and outspread hands, supported General Sisi, who in July 2013 ousted elected president Mohammed Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, this in sharp contrast to the will of the US government and Europe. The Saudi billions saved Egypt from bankruptcy, and the cooperation between the two countries reached the point where Egyptian soldiers came to the aid of the Saudis in their struggle against the Iranian and Houthi forces in Yemen.

Except that since then, the sand dunes on which the aforementioned "coalition" was built have shifted in the wake of the north winds coming from the battlegrounds of Syria, putting paid to the bets on what seemed like a winning hand just a short while ago.Today the relations between Egypt and the Saudis are a far cry from cooperation and Egypt is now in close cahoots with Saudi Arabia's enemies, headed by Iran.

How did the turnabout happen?

Doable and Being Done. Decoupling Diplomacy from ‘Peace’ - by Evelyn Gordon

...When you add in the fact that Israel already has strong bases of support in the West – even in hostile Europe, as activist Ariel Bolstein discovered on a recent tour of British pubs – there’s no reason to think Israel’s relations with the West will remain hostage to the Palestinian issue forever. The real mistake would be for Israel to throw up its hands and insist no improvement is possible rather than preparing to take advantage of new opportunities if they arise. And that, based on its record, doesn’t seem like a mistake this government will make.

Evelyn Gordon..
Analysis from Israel..
27 August '16..
Link: http://evelyncgordon.com/decoupling-diplomacy-from-peace/..

In a world where entire countries are collapsing, it’s not surprising that the collapse of a decades-old diplomatic axiom has been largely ignored. This axiom holds that Israel’s international relations are dependent on the fate of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Relations will improve if the government makes progress toward peace and worsen if the peace process stalemates. Yet Israel today, under a government widely (though wrongly) deemed its “most right-wing ever” and equally widely (though equally wrongly) blamed for the nonexistent peace process, has been expanding and deepening its diplomatic relationships at a dizzying pace, as the past week once again shows.

On Monday, on the way home from a visit to Guinea–a Muslim-majority country with which Israel resumed relations this summer after a 49-year hiatus–Foreign Ministry Director General Dore Gold stopped off in another African country with which Israel still has no formal ties. According to Haaretz, no Israeli diplomat has ever before been invited to this country. That same day, Kazakhstan’s defense minister came to Israel to meet with his Israeli counterpart prior to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s planned visit to this Muslim-majority country later this year. According to the Jerusalem Post, that will make Netanyahu the first sitting Israeli premier ever to visit Central Asia. And while Nigerian opposition has apparently stalled a bid by several African countries to invite Netanyahu to this year’s summit of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the president of Togo has announced that he will host a meeting between Netanyahu and ECOWAS leaders next spring, in yet another first. Nor are such developments unusual these days; just last month, I wrote a post listing several other such firsts.

Granted, the main impetus for this change has nothing to with Israel; rather, it’s the global upsurge in Islamist terror, which has spurred more and more countries to seek to benefit from Israel’s unhappily vast experience in combating such terror. Nevertheless, it’s no accident that these blossoming diplomatic ties are happening specifically under a “right-wing” government.

Netanyahu and his cabinet have been able to exploit this opening to the fullest precisely because they never bought the diplomatic axiom so beloved of the Israeli left. Had the government actually believed diplomatic success depended on progress in the peace process, it wouldn’t have invested much effort on trying to expand Israel’s ties with the traditionally pro-Palestinian non-Western world at a time when the peace process was stalemated because it would consider such efforts doomed to failure. And in fact, before Netanyahu took office in 2009, Israeli diplomacy did focus almost exclusively on the West.

But Netanyahu and certain other key cabinet ministers (most notably former foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman) have toiled for years to improve ties with non-Western countries. Thus when changing geopolitical circumstances provided an opportunity, they were fully prepared to seize it, with a skill that won admiration even from diehard critics like Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit.

French (and other) follies - by Michael Kuttner

...Do you discern now why direct talks are doomed? Obviously the French and others enthusiastically peddling this tainted package of goods do not get it or more likely do not want to accept the stark truth even when it hits them in the face.

Michael Kuttner..
J-Wire.com..
6 February '16..

From the country which falsely accused Alfred Dreyfus of treason and whose Vichy collaborationists enthusiastically rounded up and transported Jews to their deaths, we now await another Gallic gesture of ill will heading in our direction.

Despite domestic problems greater than the Eiffel Tower and a resurgence of Judeophobia unparalleled since the Shoah, the French Foreign Minister and his Government have decided that the only problem menacing world peace is the lack of yet another dysfunctional terror State in Israel’s midst. Their recipe for curing this alleged problem is to convene an international conference whose sole purpose would presumably be to impose some sort of pre-ordained plan. Ostensibly the idea is to get the Palestinian Arabs and Israelis talking again with a view to removing every obstacle which until now has prevented any sort of peace arrangement coming to fruition.

There is only one major fatal flaw. Well, actually there are several.

Abbas and friends have been avoiding talks because they know that one on one negotiation will require concessions. That’s the first fatal flaw because for nearly seventy years they have refused to contemplate any such gesture. In fact during this time they have fed their constituents a daily diet of lies which amongst other things includes a denial of any Jewish legal or historical right to exist in our land. This combined with promises that the original 600,000 refugees, who have since multiplied thanks to UNRWA’s policies to many millions, will all be able to return to places which either no longer exist or are Israeli towns and cities. Made permanent refugees by the rejectionist policies of their own leaders these unfortunates languish in miserable camps. As there is no prospect whatsoever that these refugees will ever be resettled in their host countries (unlike Jewish refugees from Arab countries who were absorbed in Israel) there is no chance that any talks would resolve this issue.

Another insurmountable obstacle is the poisoning of children’s and adults’ minds via a daily dose of hate, incitement and jihadist education. Only someone totally detached from the realties of what goes on in this part of the Arab world would harbour any sort of optimism that talks based on unattainable objectives could succeed.

For all the above reasons every time direct talks have been attempted they have failed. Seventy years of lies and incitement mean that Abbas cannot make any gestures which contradict the fables and falsehoods which have become part and parcel of Palestinian Arab society.

The "Run Over Intifada" - The Same Futile Aim

...But, as they have demonstrated consistently since the time of the mufti, what they want to shake off is not the supposedly oppressive rule of Israel (which, as even Rudoren notes, allows a Palestinian prosperity that makes many of them reluctant to contemplate another destructive and pointless war), but the presence of the Jews altogether and intolerance for their presence. Once again a new generation of Palestinians are taking up gasoline bombs and even using cars as weapons in order to kill or injure Jews to further that same futile aim and in the name of this ancient hatred.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
06 October '14..

In the wake of the latest acts of terror against pedestrians in Jerusalem, Palestinian public opinion is again reacting with the same sensitivity that it displayed back in June when a popular campaign mocked the plight of three Jewish teenagers who were kidnapped and murdered by Hamas terrorists. Support for the “run over intifada” is endemic on Palestinian social media in much the same way as it cheered the prospect that the lives of the three boys might be bartered for the freedom of captured terrorists. But instead of pondering whether support for the spate of attacks is, as the New York Times speculates today, a new intifada “for the 21st Century, foreign observers would do well to understand that this violence is merely a symptom of the same refusal to accept Israel’s legitimacy that has fueled the conflict for many decades.

Though she recycles Palestinian myths about the reasons for the outbreak of the first two intifadas (including the infamous lie that it was Ariel Sharon’s walk on the Temple Mount rather than a calculated response by Yasir Arafat to Israeli peace moves), Times Jerusalem Bureau chief Jodi Rudoren didn’t find many who thought this outbreak was likely to result in a repeat of the carnage of the second intifada that took thousands of lives on both sides. Indeed, she did her readers a service by reminding them that the security fence built to stop suicide bombers makes a return to the horror of that episode problematic for the architects of terror.

But if she really wanted to explain the origins of the current round of violence revolving around Palestinian anger about the efforts of a minority of Israeli to reverse the ban on Jewish prayer on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount — the holiest site in Judaism as well as the home of the Al-Aksa Mosque — she would do well to go back further in history than 1987 or 2000. Conspiracy theories about Jews planning to blow up the mosques on the Temple Mount go back to the efforts of Haj Amin el-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem and Nazi ally who led the Palestinians throughout the 1920s, 30s and 40s, to foment anti-Jewish pogroms long before there was a State of Israel, let alone an “occupation.”

Though Rudoren quotes Palestinian Authority Leader Mahmoud Abbas as saying that he doesn’t want another intifada, she fails to mention his efforts to follow in the mufti’s footsteps by urging his people to resist Jews by any means and calling a terrorist who attempted to murder a Jewish activist rabbi, a martyr who went straight to heaven. Yet it’s true that Abbas doesn’t want an intifada since a collapse of security cooperation between Israel and the PA might result in a Hamas coup that could cost him life or at least his control of the West Bank. Despite his incitement of violence, it is still he Israelis who guarantee his personal security. What Rudoren also fails to note is that it is Hamas that wants an intifada for the same reason it rained down thousands of missiles on Israeli cities this past summer even though it created more destruction for Palestinians in Gaza. Their goal is keep Palestinians focused on “resistance” — a synonym for endless war that won’t be solved by Israeli territorial concessions or even greater sensitivity for Muslim desire to deny Jews rights in Jerusalem.

The return of Palestinian unilateralism

...It’s increasingly clear, however, that the mood in the world’s democracies is shifting. The view that Israel must be cajoled and bullied into giving Abbas what he wants is spreading. And that could turn out to be just as dangerous as a Hamas missile campaign from the Gaza Strip.

Ben Cohen..
J-Wire..
28 October '14..

It sometimes seems as if the see-saw debate about the true intentions of Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian Authority has been with us for an eternity.

One day, we’ll be saying that Abbas is genuinely a moderate, that he really is committed to a two-state solution, that perhaps he’s the guy upon whom the cautious, unsentimental Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should risk a bet. The next day, we’ll encounter yet another inciting, spiteful Abbas soundbite and it’s back to the drawing board.

I don’t think that Abbas is the Machiavellian demon some believe him to be. Equally, the idea that the Palestinian leader is a transparently uncomplicated moderate is absurd. David Pollock of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy summarized the Abbas dilemma elegantly in a interview I conducted with him for the latest issue of Fathom, a magazine covering Middle East affairs.

“Shortly after the kidnapping of the three Israeli teenagers who were later murdered in the West Bank, at a meeting of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, Abbas made quite a conciliatory speech, defending the need to cooperate with Israel against terrorism,” Pollock told me. “But then at other times Abbas does or says things that point in the opposite direction. He meets with terrorists whom he released from prison and praises them. He allows his spokesmen to continue to glorify terrorism in official media. It’s equivocal, it can be seen as hypocritical, and it’s just not particularly credible, because it’s not consistent.

Still, for all of Abbas’s failures, you have to credit him with shrewdness on this front: he’s persuaded most of the world that there’s a deal to be made if only Netanyahu would abandon his “Greater Israel” doctrine. He therefore gets away with the kind of incendiary rhetoric that, over the last few months, has involved comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany, accusations of Israeli “genocide,” and a bloodcurdling appeal to stop Jews (whom he described as a “herd of cattle”) from praying at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem “by any means.”

So, if Abbas is being indulged on the rhetorical front—even when that rhetoric contributes dramatically to Palestinian violence that has raged in Jerusalem during the last week, claiming the life of a three month-old Jewish infant—you can hardly blame him for seeking to up the ante when it comes to political strategy.

The PA is now dusting off its unilateralist playbook, which means that it seeks to impose recognition of a Palestinian state upon Israel through international pressure. It’s a method that has won only symbolic victories so far:

The Real Price of Wasting Time and Energy

...It’s worth asking why this administration – and others before it – wasted so much time and energy for so long on an issue in which, as Indyk acknowledged, America has no “strategic interest.” It’s also worth asking whether, since Indyk is still advising Kerry on the Middle East, his statement means the administration has finally wised up to its mistake, or only that he himself has sobered up. But the most important question is when this realization will finally become accepted foreign-policy wisdom

Evelyn Gordon..
Commentary Magazine..
29 August '14..

Martin Indyk’s interview with Foreign Policy this week contained many interesting nuggets, but one statement in particular shocked me: “It’s very hard to make the argument that America now has a strategic interest in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Indyk said. “It’s just one of many conflicts and it’s not the most important and it’s not the most difficult.” What’s shocking about this statement isn’t that it’s false; indeed, it’s admirably clear-eyed. But it bears no relationship to the policy actually followed either by Indyk himself or the administration he served.

Until he resigned this spring, Indyk was Secretary of State John Kerry’s special envoy to the Israeli-Palestinian talks. In other words, he spent nine months devoting all his time and energy to a problem he himself says America has no “strategic interest” in solving. Moreover, he wasn’t doing so to free up his boss for more strategically important issues; Kerry also devoted more time and energy to this issue – by a large margin – than to anything else on Washington’s foreign policy agenda.

In fact, President Barack Obama and other administration officials repeatedly cited the issue as a top foreign policy priority. In his address to the UN General Assembly last September, for instance, Obama named the Arab-Israeli conflict as one of “two particular issues” American policy in the Middle East and North Africa would focus on, declaring that while it isn’t “the cause of all the region’s problems,” it has “been a major source of instability for far too long,” and resolving it could “help serve as a foundation for a broader peace.” Back in 2010, he went even further, terming Israeli-Palestinian peace “a vital national security interest of the United States.” Susan Rice, then UN ambassador and now Obama’s national security adviser, also termed Israeli-Palestinian peace “a vital U.S. interest,” while Vice President Joe Biden deemed it “fundamentally in the national security interest of the United States.” Kerry himself hyperbolically declared it the most important issue in the world, asserting that no matter what country he traveled to, it was always the first thing he was asked about.

Such statements were always ludicrous. As I wrote more than a year ago, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict wasn’t even the most important in the Middle East; that title belonged to Syria’s civil war – a fact some Westerners belatedly woke up to after ISIS emerged from Syria to gobble up large swathes of Iraq. Since then, a few other unimportant little conflicts have erupted as well, like Russia’s invasion of Crimea and now, apparently, eastern Ukraine.

Mr. Kerry, Is The Arab-Israeli Conflict Really About Economics?

...After all, Palestinians are by far the world’s largest per capita recipients of international foreign aid, having received more than $12 billion over the past 15 years. Through UNRWA the international community, meaning mostly the U.S. and the European Union, also provides another $500 million a year to support Palestinian health, education and welfare services.

Alexander Joffe/Asaf Romirowsky..
Forbes.com..
26 June '13..

Is the Arab-Israeli conflict really about economics? U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry recently claimed “People in Israel aren’t waking up every day and wondering if tomorrow there will be peace because there is a sense of security and a sense of accomplishment and of prosperity.”

This was echoed by New York Times reporter Ethan Bronner, who recently took Israelis to task for their economic success; they have “moved on” from the conflict with the Palestinians which still looms like an “iceberg” in front of their “Titanic.”

Presumably the flip side to Israeli prosperity is Palestinian poverty. But this is a harder claim to make. After all, Palestinians are by far the world’s largest per capita recipients of international foreign aid, having received more than $12 billion over the past 15 years. Through UNRWA the international community, meaning mostly the U.S. and the European Union, also provides another $500 million a year to support Palestinian health, education and welfare services.

But, as a new report from the World Bank notes, Western largesse has predictably bred Palestinian dependence and under-development rather than prosperity. For example, there is a huge construction and services bubble in Ramallah, the seat of the Palestinian Authority, but the rest of the West Bank economy remains under-developed. The public sector is the largest employer, and it includes Palestinian terrorists in Israeli jails. Vast amounts of money continue to disappear into the bank accounts of the Palestinian Authority leadership and their cronies. How much of the over $12 billion has actually reached Palestinians is unknown, since Western donors prefer not to know.

The Hands of Time and Palestinians

...Instead of trying to move the clock ahead to a time when Palestinians will have finally rejected the politics of hate and war, Erekat and Abbas continue to appear more interested in turning it back to a moment when there was not a single Jew living in the West Bank, Eastern Jerusalem or the Old City. It is no small irony that there was not only no peace when there were no settlements but also no Palestinian independence.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary/Contentions..
05 June '13..

This week marks the 46th anniversary of the Six-Day War and it cannot be said that the Palestinian Authority has neglected to remember the occasion. Earlier this week the PA’s chief “peace negotiator” Saeb Erekat schlepped a group of foreign journalists to Latrun, the crossroads town that once served as the choke point for the 1948 siege of Jerusalem to remind them—as well as Palestinians and Israelis — that what he is asking for is not negotiations for peace but an attempt to turn back the hands of time and return the region to the moment in history before the Israeli victory in 1967 changed the strategic balance in the region. As the New York Times reported:

“I am sure many of you are asking why is Saeb Erekat bringing you to this point,” Mr. Erekat said to a group of diplomats and reporters as he stood against a backdrop of green fields, a reservoir and an Israeli settlement of red-roofed houses in the valley below. 

“It is not because I want to demarcate the maps or finalize the negotiations,” he said, referring to the intensive efforts of Secretary of State John Kerry to get the Israelis and Palestinians to return to peace talks. “I just want to stand here and say, ‘It is 46 years later.’ ”

Erekat’s candor is in a sense quite commendable. Latrun is a potent symbol of the nature of the Israel that existed in those halcyon days before the obstacle to peace was the presence of Jews in the West Bank and in which a small state with indefensible borders and a capital that could be isolated with ease stood on the precipice of destruction as Arab armies began to mass on its borders. Erekat was sending a clear message to Israelis that if they thought the PA would ever accept the fact that the world had irrevocably changed in those 46 years they could just keep dreaming.

Wants U.S. Cash, Not Peace - Any Guesses?

...In other words, the Palestinians say thanks for the cash but no talks except those that guarantee they get everything they’re asking for while giving nothing in return and even then there’s no guarantee they won’t continue the conflict as their insistence on the “right of return” — which is tantamount to calling for Israel’s destruction — indicates.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary/Contentions..
28 My '13..

Secretary of State John Kerry and some Israelis, notably President Shimon Peres, had high hopes for the latest initiative to improve the Palestinian economy. Kerry arrived at the World Economic Summit in Jordan with his usual unrealistic high hopes for the value of his diplomacy but he did not go there without offering serious incentives to the Palestinian Authority to quit its boycott of peace negotiations that has been going on since before Barack Obama became president of the United States. The United States offered a $4 billion plan that was supposed to both boost the Palestinian economy as well as give PA leader Mahmoud Abbas a tangible benefit for cooperating with Washington’s new plan to restart talks with Israel. But the Palestinian answer wasn’t long in coming. Anyone who has paid attention to Palestinian responses to the various ways that President Obama has tried to tilt the diplomatic playing field in their direction or the way they answered various Israeli peace offers in the last 20 years knows that it was the usual one word reply: no.

As the Times of Israel reports:

Slapping down the notion that the PA might be appeased by Kerry’s focus on economic improvements, President Mahmoud Abbas’s economic adviser, Mohammad Mustafa, said ”The Palestinian leadership will not offer political concessions in exchange for economic benefits.” He added, in a statement reported by the Palestinian Ma’an news agency: “We will not accept that the economy is the primary and sole component.”

Mustafa, who also heads the Palestine Investment Fund, said the PA’s priorities are not economic but rather a political framework for the creation of Palestinian state based on the 1967 lines, with East Jerusalem as its capital, that also ensures the rights of refugees and a political compromise, the Palestinian news agency added.

Investors are nonetheless more than welcome to “come to Palestine,” the statement added.

In other words, the Palestinians say thanks for the cash but no talks except those that guarantee they get everything they’re asking for while giving nothing in return and even then there’s no guarantee they won’t continue the conflict as their insistence on the “right of return” — which is tantamount to calling for Israel’s destruction — indicates.

While this is another humiliating setback for Kerry, it’s actually far more significant than that. It exposes the fallacy at the heart of most efforts to create peace between Jews and Arabs for the last century.

Almost from the beginning of the Jewish return to their ancient homeland, many Zionists as well as their foreign friends thought the Arabs inside the country as well as those in neighboring lands would be won over to the new reality once they realized that the Jews brought development and prosperity with them. The influx into the country created tremendous growth even as the conflict escalated over the course of the first half of the 20th century. Throughout this era, Labor Zionists who combined a desire to rebuild the Jewish presence with socialist ideology believed Arab rejectionism was a function of the exploitation of the masses by an elite that profited from conflict. They thought once it was understood that all would benefit from peace and reconciliation, Palestinian Arab workers and peasants would welcome the Jews. Even hardheaded pragmatists like David Ben Gurion thought this way for a long time. They were wrong.

Not the faintest understanding of what is and isn’t important

Evelyn Gordon..
Commentary/Contentions..
28 May '13..

While visiting Israel this weekend, Secretary of State John Kerry said that everywhere he goes – Europe, the Gulf States, China, Japan, even New Zealand and Brazil – the first thing he is asked about is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Perhaps his hosts are simply demonstrating tact by starting off with the only issue Kerry shows any real interest in. But if this is truly their number-one concern, we should all be afraid: It means the leaders and diplomats entrusted with managing global crises don’t have the faintest understanding of what is and isn’t important.

Even if we disregard some pretty major problems elsewhere on the planet – for instance, the adventurism of nuclear North Korea, or the serious instability in another nuclear power, Pakistan, where Islamic extremists slaughter thousands of their own countrymen every year – there’s a Middle Eastern problem right next door that’s infinitely more important than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I am talking, of course, about Syria.

It’s not just that the Syrian conflict has already killed five to 10 times as many people in a mere two years – anywhere from 80,000 to 120,000, depending on whose estimate you believe – as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has in the entire 65 years of Israel’s existence (about 15,000). It’s that unlike the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Syrian conflict is rapidly destabilizing all its neighbors.

Over the last 25 years, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has manifested itself in two intifadas and two Hamas-Israel wars. Not one of them resulted in refugees fleeing to other countries, fighters pouring in from other countries, or violence inside other countries. The Syrian conflict, however, has produced large quantities of all three.

The PA’s bankruptcy is as much moral as it is financial.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary/Contentions..
12 January '13..

As I noted yesterday, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is on the road this week attempting to persuade Arab countries to give him money. Unfortunately for Abbas, his upgrade at the United Nations last month hasn’t made his panhandling act any more popular with those who voted to upgrade his status at the world body. In fact, the Palestinian Authority is broke. Though this isn’t the first time the PA has had cash flow problems, the current shortage is especially acute and enough to provoke a stern editorial from the New York Times blaming the problem primarily on Israel. But while Israel has withheld some tax revenue from Abbas, the problem in the West Bank goes a lot deeper than the current dispute between the Netanyahu government and the PA.

The Times is right that it is in no one’s interest that the PA collapse, but its call for more money from Israel, the United States, the Arab world and the international community to be poured into Abbas’s coffers misses the point about what is going on in the West Bank. No amount of foreign aid can fix a government and a society that is completely dysfunctional. The issue of the PA’s insolvency is directed related to its steadfast refusal to make peace. Though a Palestinian government that isn’t a basket case is needed to make a two-state solution to the Middle East conflict work, the issue here isn’t just that the PA is corrupt and incompetent. It is corrupt and incompetent in large measure because the political culture of Palestinian society is still more interested in perpetuating the conflict with Israel than in building a state.

Though the Arab and Muslim states that profess to support the Palestinians have done little to help them, throughout the nearly 20 years of its existence, the PA has been the recipient of vast sums of aid from Israel, the United States and the international community. For the most part, this money has been either stolen or wasted. The portion of it that did filter its way down to the Palestinian public was often spent on backing terrorist groups or on a vast scheme of public employment. That did little to develop the economy of the West Bank but it did serve to solidify the loyalty of those getting no-show or no-work jobs to first Yasir Arafat and then his successor Abbas.

In recent years, as the Times notes, there has been an effort by PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad to actually serve his people and to foster development as well as good government. The problem is that as much as the Americans and Israelis would like to help Fayyad, his efforts are still the exception to the rule. The unpopular Fayyad has little real influence over the PA’s future. He will also be sidelined if the Fatah-Hamas merger ever is brought to fruition.

More importantly, the failure of the West Bank economy is due to the refusal of Abbas to talk or make peace with Israel. Had he done so in 2008 when Ehud Olmert offered him statehood, things would be very different today. That is also true of Arafat’s refusal of Ehud Barak’s peace offers in 2000 and 2001. The second intifada that he launched ruined the West Bank’s economy.

The plain truth is that there is no assurance that the money that the United States, Israel or the Europeans are asked to hand over to Abbas will do anything more than prop up a failed regime. It may be that subsidizing failure is a better alternative than the chaos that would ensue if the PA completely collapsed, but it is not the answer to the problem.

What the PA really needs is not so much a handout as a sea change in its culture that would allow Abbas or a successor to end the conflict and to start the business of building a stable society that is not obsessed with violence against Israel. So long as that doesn’t happen, the Palestinians will continue to be beggars and the Israeli public will never support a withdrawal that might lead to the West Bank becoming a terrorist launching pad the way Gaza has become since 2005.

The PA’s bankruptcy is as much moral as it is financial. Until the Palestinians and those like the Times who want to help them realize this, aid to them will continue to be a case of throwing more money down the rabbit hole.

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Coexistence of the blind

Seth J. Frantzman..
Terra Incognita/JPost..
27 November '12..

In Israel almost every person who talks about coexistence presents a false and ill-conceived plan whose results will produce no change whatsoever. The reason that almost all coexistence programs are doomed to fail is that they are often predicated on creating a false reality for one half of the coexistence pie. This usually takes the form of mandating that Jewish people in Israel embrace coexistence, a rosy picture of the “other,” the Arabs, that rarely involves any immersion in the other’s society.

Consider Roger Cohen’s description of Parent’s Circle, which “brings together Israelis and Palestinians who have lost family in the conflict.” Israeli Robi Damelin’s son, who was a soldier at the time, was killed by a Palestinian sniper in 2002. Her reaction was to say that Israel “may not kill anybody in the name of my son” and become involved in Parent’s Circle. According to Cohen, “Damelin has written to the imprisoned killer of her son...she plans to meet him through a mediator one day.” Parent’s Circle “gives talks to high school students, mainly Israelis. In general these Israeli kids have never met a Palestinian. They have no way to know the conflict is a two-sided story.”

A similar story was related by Douglas Alexander, the British Shadow Foreign Secretary for Labor in the UK. He writes about visiting the Eshkol regional council bordering the Gaza Strip and meeting a Jewish teacher who educates for coexistence.

“She told me that her job was to teach [Jewish] children the curriculum, but she felt impelled to try and teach them something else...her ambition was that no child leave her classroom believing that the Palestinian children on the other side of the border were the enemy.”

See, these Israeli children get the wrong idea from the missiles that fall on their kibbutzim – they feel Gaza is a place that breeds hatred and murder. But in fact, as the Israeli coexistence-monger wants to show, those on the other side are not enemies.

Marquadt- Bigman - Think Progress on preconditions for negotiations

Petra Marquadt-Bigman..
The Warped Mirror..
20 May '12..



A recent piece on the ThinkProgress blog offers a very critical take on the views expressed by US Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) about the negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program. Graham had declared in a Fox News interview that he would like the US to “tell the Iranians, no negotiations, stop enriching, open up the site on the bottom of the mountain, a secret site. Then we will talk about lifting sanctions. You are not going to get to enrich uranium any more, period.”

Ali Gharib, national security reporter for ThinkProgress, characterized this as a “curious take on what it means to negotiate” and argued: “Graham’s position prompts one to ask: What’s the alternative to negotiations, since Graham is proposing pre-conditions that Iran would never meet?”

It is not clear if this is always Gharib’s view when it comes to preconditions for negotiations. A few days before he posted the piece on Graham, he wrote about the EU condemnation of Israel’s settlement policies. While he also noted that Palestinian Authority President Mahmood Abbas had “rebuffed” Israeli offers for talks without preconditions and was insisting on an Israeli settlement freeze, he didn’t highlight the continued Palestinian insistence on preconditions as particularly problematic. Indeed, since the piece concluded by noting that the “international community and the U.S. consider the settlements ‘illegitimate’” and that there had been many calls for “halting settlement activity,” the implication was that the Palestinian insistence on preconditions was ultimately justified.

The persistent obsession with the barely two percent of West Bank territory taken up by Israeli building beyond the so-called “Green Line” since 1967 has long been skillfully fed by the Palestinians and their supporters, who understand very well that the myth of the “ever-growing settlements” is an easy sell to audiences around the world eager to blame Israel for the lack of a peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Schanzer - The New Palestinian Strategy

Jonathan Schanzer..
Commentary/Pundicity..
April '12..

One word went unspoken in an interview President Barack Obama gave to journalist Jeffrey Goldberg in late February. In their 45-minute discussion, devoted exclusively to the subject of Israel, the president did not utter the word Palestinian. For the first time since 1991, when Iraqi Scud missiles hit Israel during the Gulf War, the Palestinian problem is not at the top of the U.S. agenda when it comes to its relations with the Jewish state.

That is due, in some respects, to developments beyond the West Bank and Gaza that have weakened the Palestinian hand. With Bashar al-Assad continuing to slaughter regime opponents in Syria, the leaders of the Palestinian terror group Hamas—which controls Gaza—announced in early 2012 that they were leaving Damascus, where they had been based since the mid-1990s. This news came after reports that the group had lost funding from its longtime Iranian patrons. Iran found itself compelled to economize due to international economic sanctions imposed in response to Tehran's nuclear aspirations. Israel's most dangerous Palestinian adversary was suddenly partially homeless and strapped for cash.

But the reduced circumstances of Hamas have not saved Israel from dangerous Palestinian irredentist trends. Quietly but distinctly, the Palestine Liberation Organization has been inching toward a new approach that would combine the rejection of U.S.-led diplomacy seeking a two-state solution with an effort to forge a united front with its rival, the terrorist Hamas. This is in addition to the distressing worldwide campaign to delegitimize the Jewish state using the populist anti-Israel sentiment of the Arab protest movements and the institutionalized sentiment of the United Nations. Most disturbing, there also appears to be a "resistance" component to this strategy that could ignite a new wave of Palestinian-Israeli violent conflict.

Gordon - Abbas’ Revealing Statement

Evelyn Gordon
Commentary/Contentions
07 September '11

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/09/07/abbas-palestinians-statement/#more-766823

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is routinely lauded as a “moderate” and a peace-seeker, because unlike Hamas, he generally refrains from openly calling for Israel’s destruction. But anyone who believes he doesn’t share this goal should pay close attention to what he told a group of journalists and Israeli intellectuals on Monday. Amid all the soothing bromides about continued security cooperation and the importance of negotiations was one highly revealing sentence: When the Palestinians seek UN recognition as a state later this month, “We are going to complain that as Palestinians we have been under occupation for 63 years.”

For anyone who needs reminding, Israel’s “occupation” of the West Bank and Gaza began 44 years ago, in 1967. What happened 63 years ago was Israel’s establishment – in the pre-1967 borders. In other words, as far as Abbas is concerned, the problem isn’t Israel’s “occupation” of the West Bank, it’s Israel’s very existence: Even pre-1967 Israel constitutes an “occupation.”

Nor is this position uncommon among Palestinians: A Pew Global Attitudes poll in 2007 found that fully 77 percent of Palestinians think “Palestinians’ rights cannot be taken care of if Israel exists.”

The charitable might say Abbas was simply referring to the Palestinians’ 63 years without a state: At the same time Israel was established, in 1948, Jordan and Egypt occupied the West Bank and Gaza, respectively. But in reality, there has never been an independent Palestinian state; Palestinians have always lived under someone else’s rule. Before 1948 came the 31-year British occupation; before that came the 400-year Turkish occupation; before that came various Arab caliphates that ruled “Palestine” from Damascus; and so forth.

In short, 63 years doesn’t mark the start of Palestinian life under occupation –unless you think Israel’s very existence, and only that, constitutes an occupation. And in fact, that’s precisely what Palestinians do think. That’s why the PLO was founded in 1964, three years before Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza, with the explicit goal of eradicating pre-1967 Israel; that’s why Palestinians never demanded an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza during the 19 years when Jordan and Egypt controlled these areas; that’s why Palestinians rejected the UN partition plan in 1947 and every subsequent offer of statehood; that’s why Palestinians still demand millions of “refugees” be relocated to Israel under any peace agreement, thereby eliminating the Jewish state demographically (see here, here, here, for instance); that’s why the PA systematically denies the truth of Judaism’s historical ties to this land; and that’s why Abbas still refuses to grant that a “Jewish” state – as opposed to an “Israel” that could be Palestinian-majority via an influx of refugees – has any right to exist.

Abbas, of course, is faithfully reflecting his people’s views – the views of that majority who think “Palestinians’ rights cannot be taken care of if Israel exists,” who see a two-state solution as a mere stepping-stone toward Israel’s eradication. And as long as that remains true, any possibility of an Israeli-Palestinian peace is a pipe dream.

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Ettinger - Preemption, not retaliation

Yoram Ettinger
Israel Hayom
22 August '11

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=375


The recent surge in Palestinian terrorism forces Israel to revisit the fundamentals of counter-terrorism.

For example, the most effective defense against terrorism – operationally, financially and morally – is not retaliation and a limited, surgical offensive, but a comprehensive, decisive, sustained, disproportionate and preemptive ground offensive, which aims to obliterate terror infrastructures and capabilities, bringing the enemy to submission. A decisive defeat of terrorism requires a victory over – and not coexistence or ceasefire agreements with – terrorism. We need to uproot – not just stop – terrorism.

Any response to terrorism that falls short of devastating the ideological, political, financial, logistic and operational terrorist infrastructures only serves to reassure terrorists that they are immune to annihilation. Moreover, it nurtures their hope-driven terrorism. They hope to destroy Israel’s defiance, wreck Israel’s steadfastness, and sustain the momentum of sweeping Israeli ideological and territorial retreats between the years 1993-2011.

Furthermore, a limited response to terrorism exacerbates wars of attrition – the terrorists' dream and the nightmare of democratic societies. The limited-retaliation response to terrorism adds fuel to the fire of terrorism, feeding the self-defeating assumption that there is no military solution to terrorism, thus eroding Israel’s deterrence.

Contrary to that self-defeating assumption, Palestinian terrorism was curtailed by 90 percent when, in 2002, Israel's military took over the Palestinian breeding grounds of terrorism in Beit Jallah, Bethlehem, Hebron, Ramallah, Jenin, Nablus and other major towns in Judea and Samaria. Israeli military re-engagement with these areas – rather than the security fence or wall – reasserted Israel's steadfastness in the battle against Palestinian terrorism.

The more defensive and retaliation-driven the Israeli response to terrorism, the more emboldened Palestinian terrorists become, and the less confidence Israelis have in their government’s ability to safeguard personal and national security. As a result, the country's mental fatigue becomes more taxing, and Israelis become less convinced of their cause.

The addiction to a defensive posture and limited response has been embraced by Israel since the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accord, in an effort to resuscitate the “peace” process, which has triggered far more hate-education, terrorism and non-compliance than the pre-Oslo reality. Two-hundred and fifty Israelis were murdered by Palestinian terrorism in the 15 years prior to Oslo, but over 2,000 have been murdered in the 18 years since.

Limited response has also been implemented in order to soothe international public opinion - which is never satisfied with Israeli concessions - thus recklessly subordinating national security to public diplomacy considerations. Sometimes it yields a false sense of security and enhances short-term tactical popularity. However, limited response always undermines long-term strategic interests and international respect towards Israel, unleashing more pressure on Israel, radicalizing Palestinian terrorism and distancing the region from peace.

Will Israel’s response to the current wave of Palestinian terrorism perpetuate the terrorist-preferred war of attrition? Or will it be a milestone on the road to reclaiming the pre-Oslo Israeli status as a role-model of deterrence, defiance of the odds, determination and gumption in the battle against terrorism, which paved the road to the 1948 Declaration of Independence, the 1967 Six Day War, the 1970 deterrence of the Syrian invasion of Jordan, the 1976 Entebbe Operation and the 1981 bombing of Saddam’s nuclear reactor?

Rather than retreating toward the pre-1967 ceasefire lines, Israel should take charge of the breeding ground of terrorism, which would enhance Israel's power of deterrence, human-intelligence and interception capabilities. It would reduce the Palestinian ability to conduct hate-education, to incite, to recruit, train, manufacture and smuggle terrorist and military hardware, to plan, maneuver and perpetrate terrorist activities. It would reduce Palestinian terrorism by 90%!

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Why is the status quo unsustainable?

Elder of Ziyon
22 May '11

Twice this week we have heard President Obama declare, as if it is self-evident, that "the status quo is unsustainable."

It is worthwhile to examine exactly why the President believes that.

These seem to be the reasons he gave Sunday:

First, the number of Palestinians living west of the Jordan River is growing rapidly and fundamentally reshaping the demographic realities of both Israel and the Palestinian territories. This will make it harder and harder – without a peace deal – to maintain Israel as both a Jewish state and a democratic state.

This is an old argument, and I cannot say that I am expert enough to say how true it is. But it is worth mentioning that this is hardly a universal view, and that there is much evidence that shows otherwise. As with everything else, the truth needs to be determined outside of politics.

Second, technology will make it harder for Israel to defend itself in the absence of a genuine peace.

A genuine peace is one where Israel's neighbors do not even fantasize about attacking Israel. Not one where they are coerced into not attacking by an ephemeral government, not one where they do not attack because of the military consequences - but one where they simply have no desire to, as I imagine most nations in Western Europe and the Americas are.

This will never happen in the Middle East. There will never be that level of peace, just as there wasn't between Israel and Egypt. The best we can ever hope for realistically is a detente where the weaker party has no desire to stir things up, even if it covets everything owned by the other.

This means that the best that Israel can hope for is a "Palestine" that keeps a short leash on its terrorists out of fear. Not love, not friendship, but fear. Just as Israel is not currently overly concerned about rocket attacks from Egypt, because it knows that Egypt will work to stop any such attacks, that is the best that Israel can want from a Palestinian Arab state.

And this is exactly the status quo today.

(Read full "Why is the status quo unsustainable?)

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Israel Will Never Have Peace

Bret Stephens
Wall Street Journal
17 May '11
H/T The PostWest*



(While written 2 days prior to Pres. Obama's speech, and  factually not conforming to the current White-House agenda, this is where the attention must be turned. YH)

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703421204576327094275297416.html

This weekend's border-crossing demonstrators believe, like Hamas, that the Jewish State has no right to any territory from the river to the sea.

No doubt it is true, as the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported on Sunday, that among the Palestinian protesters seeking to force their way into Israel there were some with humbler aims than reclaiming “historic Palestine.” “We’ve crossed the border in order to stay with our families, away from all the killing in Syria,” the paper reported one of the infiltrators as saying. “We ask the powers that be in Israel to help us stay and not send us back.”

No doubt it is also true, as White House spokesman Jay Carney noted yesterday, that the attempted breach was an effort by Damascus “to distract attention from the legitimate expression of protest by the Syrian people.” The border between Israel and Syria has been quiet for 37 years; it’s no accident, comrades, that the embattled regime of Bashar Assad, perhaps advised by Iran, would choose this particular moment to shift violent energies toward a more opportune target.

But here’s something about which there should also be no doubt: People don’t scamper over barbed wire, walk through mine fields and march toward the barrels of enemy soldiers if they aren’t fearless. And if they aren’t profoundly convinced of the rightness of what they are doing.

For many years it has been the conventional wisdom of Arab-Israeli peace processors that the conflict was, at heart, territorial, and that it could be resolved if only Israel and its neighbors could agree on a proper border. For many years, too, it has been conventional wisdom that if only the conflict could be resolved, other distempers of the Muslim world—from dictatorship to terrorism—would find their own resolution.

If the Arab Spring has done nothing else, it has at least disposed of the latter proposition. From Tehran to Tunis to Tahrir Square, Muslims are rising against their rulers for reasons quite apart from anything happening in Gaza, the West Bank or the Golan Heights. This isn’t to say they’ve abandoned their emotional commitments to Palestinians, or their ideological ones against Israel. It’s simply to say that they have their own problems.

But just as the West has consistently misunderstood the Muslim problem, so too has it failed to grasp the Palestinian one. And what it has failed to grasp above all is the centrality of Palestinian refugees to the conflict.

The fiction that is typically offered about the refugees by devotees of the peace process is that Palestinian leaders see them as a bargaining chip in their negotiations with Israel, perhaps in exchange for the re-division of Jerusalem. But listen in on the internal dialogue of Palestinians and you will hear that the “right of return” is an inviolable, inalienable and individual right of every refugee. In other words, a right that can never (and never safely) be bargained away by Palestinian leaders for the sake of a settlement with Israel.

In this belief the Palestinians are sustained by many things. One is the mythology of 1948, which is long on tales of what Jews did to Arabs but short on what Arabs did to Jews—or to themselves. Another is the text of U.N. resolution 194, written in 1948, which plainly states that “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.” A third is UNRWA, the U.N. agency that has perpetuated the Palestinian refugee problem for generations when most other refugees have been successfully repatriated. A fourth is their ill treatment at the hands of their Arab hosts, which has caused them to yearn for the fantasy of a homeland—orchards and all—that modern-day Israel succeeds in looking very much like. A fifth is the incessant drone of Palestinian propaganda whose idea of Palestinian statehood traces the map of Israel itself.

Other things could be mentioned. But the roots of the problem are beside the point. The real point is that a grievance that has been nursed for 63 years and that can move people to acts like those witnessed on Sunday is never going to allow a political accommodation with Israel and would never be satisfied by one anyway.

No wonder Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s prime minister, can say he would be prepared to accept the 1967 borders—but that establishing those borders will never mean an end to the conflict. The same goes for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who praised Sunday’s slain protesters as martyrs who “died for the Palestinian people’s rights and freedom.” This from the “moderate” who is supposed to acquaint his people with the reality and purpose of a two-state solution.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is due in the U.S. soon to deliver what is being billed as a major policy address. What should he say? I would counsel the same wisdom that sailors of yore used to tattoo to their knuckles as a reminder of what not to forget on the yardarms of tall ships in stormy seas. Eight easy letters: H-O-L-D F-A-S-T.

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The Israeli-Palestinian Streetlight

Peter Wehner
Commentary/Contentions
28 April '11

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/04/28/israeli-palestinian-streetlight/


In a recent Financial Times op-ed, Brent Scowcroft writes, “The nature of the new Middle East cannot be known until the festering sore of the occupied territories is removed.”

This is an absurd claim. Whatever one thinks of the settlements, the Arab Spring has shown that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not—as people like Scowcroft, who served as national security adviser to Presidents Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush, have been arguing for years now—at the core of the troubles plaguing the Arab Middle East. The so-called “occupation” is not the obstacle to free and flourishing Arab societies. It is not the irritant that is causing unrest within Arab societies. In fact, what is striking about the revolution sweeping the Arab world is how totally beside the point Israel is. The uprisings in Iran, Syria, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and elsewhere are driven not by animus toward Israeli or solidarity for the Palestinian cause; they are a reaction against Arab despotism. What is happening in the Middle East, in fact, utterly undermines Scowcroft’s thesis. But Scowcroft is wed to a theory he embraced long ago and has hermetically sealed off from evidence. Bad theories, like bad habits, die hard. Maybe harder.

I’m reminded of the joke about the police officer who finds a drunk man late at night crawling on his hands and knees on a sidewalk under a streetlight. When confronted by the police officer, the drunk tells him he’s looking for his wallet. When the police officer asks if he’s sure that he dropped the wallet under the streetlight, the man replies that he thinks he more likely dropped it across the street. The puzzled officer asks why the man is looking for the wallet under the streetlight. “Because the light’s better here,” the drunk man replies.

For Brent Scowcroft and those who think like him, the light is always better around the Israeli-Palestinian settlements streetlight, even if the truth lies elsewhere.

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What the Saudis Understand - and We Don't

Shoshana Bryen
Senior Director for Security Policy
JINSA Report #1081
April 21, 2011



Who would have thought that we would find ourselves agreeing with the Saudi approach to events in the Middle East, while thinking our own government needs a "reset"?

National Security Council Advisor Tom Donilon visited Saudi Arabia and Saudi King Abdullah brought three of his advisors to the meeting: Director of General Intelligence Prince Muqrin bin Abdulaziz; Secretary-General of the National Security Council Prince Bandar bin Sultan; and Saudi Ambassador to the United States Adel Jubeir. David V. Dafinoiu of the Global Intelligence Center describes Muqrin as focused on Iran, Yemen, Libya and al Qaeda; Bandar on foreign military relations other than the United States; and Jubeir having the U.S. portfolio. All, according to the Dafinoiu, are "Hawks and live wires."

That looks about right - Iran, Yemen, Libya and al Qaeda are where the action is; Saudi Arabia is buying military equipment from China as well as the United States; and well, it was an American envoy, so Jubeir was there. Notice what did notappear to be on the agenda - Israel, Israeli occupation, Palestinians or Palestinian independence.

Perhaps King Abdullah believes Iranian attempts to destabilize the Gulf and al Qaeda in Libya and Yemen are real threats to the future of the Kingdom. Perhaps he believes Saudi Arabia needs to prepare for the coming confrontation with Iran. And perhaps he believes the United States should be doing its utmost to undermine the Iranian and Syrian regimes in hopes of ensuring Saudi and Egyptian (Sunni) hegemony in the region because that would better preserve Saudi oil producing interests - and would better preserve American/Western oil consuming interests as well.

We hope Mr. Donilon took the message.

But the Obama Administration seems fixed on "solving the Palestinian problem," which, in their lexicon means creating a Palestinian state come hell or high water. Secretary of State Clinton told the U.S.-Islamic World Forum (an offshoot of the Brookings Institution and the Government of Qatar) in Washington last week, "The status quo between Palestinians and Israelis is no more sustainable than the (Arab) political systems that have crumbled in recent months." She didn't mention that the crumbling (Arab) regimes look very much like the Palestinian Authority - corrupt and authoritarian - and their successors bear more than a passing resemblance to Hamas - corrupt, authoritarian and religious.

The Los Angeles Times reports, "American and European diplomats are continuing to prod Netanyahu to lay out his vision for restarting peace talks and ending the occupation of the West Bank. If he does not, diplomats warned, the so-called Mideast quartet - the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations - may attempt to jump-start the process by formally endorsing, for the first time, the creation of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital."

Talk about rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

As a small matter, they appear to be interested in "ending the occupation of the West Bank" with no mention of Gaza, but all the talk about a Palestinian state includes "the '67 borders" (which are not borders, but armistice lines) including Gaza. Does that mean they are prepared to give Abu Mazen control of Gaza, or Hamas control of the West Bank? Or does it mean, "Never mind that iceberg; put the chairs where I tell you"?

As a large matter, Israel, the only Western and pro-Western democracy from the eastern Mediterranean around to Australia, sits amid conflagration, and the Quartet led by the United States, can think only of birthing another anti-Semitic, a-historical, Islamic, anti-Western kleptocracy allied with all the wrong people. If they think Hamas and Fatah, which will fight each other to the death over the new Palestinian entity, are friends of anything the West used to treasure, they are mistaken. And if they think pressuring Israel to come up with a plan for its own destruction will make the Saudis happy, they are mistaken twice.

The Saudis appear, for the moment, to have aligned their priorities correctly and are worried about precisely the right thing. How odd that the United States is so far behind a country still working its way through the 10th Century.

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