Actually, Israel's Goodwill Gestures Send Wrong and Quite Often Fatal Messages - by Bassam Tawil

...The Palestinian line is that Israel's steps are "insufficient" and "unhelpful." Its concessions are regarded as gestures of a terrified people and as the rightful reward for terrorism. Far from satiating the appetite of the terrorists, such steps prompt them to step up their attacks against Israelis. The next time Americans and Europeans think of asking Israel to cede yet more to the Palestinians, let them consider what Israel might be receiving in return, other than the spilling of more Jewish blood.

Bassam Tawil..
Gatestone Institute..
02 June '17..

The West suffers under a major misconception concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: that "goodwill gestures" and territorial concessions on the part of Israel boost the prospects of peace in the Middle East. The facts, suggest that precisely the opposite is true.

Last week, Israel's Channel 10 television station reported that the U.S. administration was pushing Israel to transfer parts of Area C -- areas under full Israeli security and civilian control in the West Bank -- to the control of Mahmoud Abbas's Palestinian Authority (PA). According to the report, the U.S. believes that the transfer of the territory to the PA would be a "goodwill step" towards the Palestinians, paving the way for the revival of the stalled peace process with Israel.

This assumption, of course, has already proven wrong. The experiences of the past few decades have shown clearly that Israeli concessions have always sent the wrong message to the Palestinians.

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Israelis Think No Concession Will Ever Satisfy the West

Evelyn Gordon
Contentions/Commentary
21 December '10

A newly released WikiLeaks cable quotes Ron Dermer, a top adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, telling a U.S. diplomat of Israelis’ frustration with the peace process. Surprisingly, however, Dermer didn’t focus primarily on Palestinian behavior. Rather, he charged, “the Israeli public is skeptical regarding the benefits of returning to negotiations” because “all the GOI [government of Israel] has received in return for its efforts [to date] was a ‘slap-down from the international community.’”

Dermer didn’t offer evidence to support his claim about Israeli frustration with the “international community,” but the data are shocking: according to the August Peace Index poll, fully 77 percent of Jewish Israelis think “it makes no difference what Israel does and how far it may go on the Palestinian issue; the world will continue to be very critical of it.” And in fact, Israelis have good reasons for this belief.

For instance, when Hezbollah continued attacking Israel even after Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, the world, far from condemning Hezbollah, excoriated Israel when it finally responded to these attacks in the 2006 Second Lebanon War. Moreover, after having certified the withdrawal as 100 percent complete in 2000, the UN Security Council then rewarded Hezbollah’s aggression in 2006 by voting to remap Lebanon’s borders, “especially in those areas where the border is disputed” by Hezbollah, with an eye toward forcing Israel to quit additional territory.

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The death of a frog

As the parable of the amphibian goes, will Israel reach the lethal boiling point where it has made one concession too many?

Martin Sherman
Op-Ed/JPost
29 November '10

“…if you place [a frog]… in a pot of tepid water…, it will float there quite placidly. As the water gradually heats up, the frog will sink into a tranquil stupor …and before long, with a smile on its face, it will unresistingly allow itself to be boiled to death.”
– Daniel Quinn, The Story of B

For anyone concerned with the fate of the nation-state of the Jews, there is a grave caveat in this citation from a well-known American author. It is a caveat that will be ignored only at great peril, and one that is becoming increasingly pertinent – especially in the light the ever-more perceptible signs of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s readiness to embrace measures that he promised to eschew (such as a renewed building freeze); and the growing friction between him and ministers in his government (such as Moshe Ya’alon and Silvan Shalom) who are insisting that he in fact honor the promises he made.

In recent years, Israel has back-pedaled repeatedly on positions it has taken, continuously “adapting” to situations that expose it to ever-greater security risks and consenting to circumstances that would have seemed inconceivable in the not-too-distant past.

An appropriate point of departure to illustrate the severity of this disturbing phenomenon, and to gauge just how drastically Israel has allowed its positions to be eroded with the passage of time, is Yitzhak Rabin’s last address to the Knesset. On October 5, 1995, exactly one month before his assassination, Rabin sought Knesset ratification of the Oslo II agreements (or to give their full title “The Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip”) that were signed two weeks previously.

Restoring public awareness of this erosion – and the comprehension of its significance – is crucial, particularly since the median age of the Israeli population is just over 28. This means that roughly half of all Israelis were not yet in their teens in the “Oslo period” and thus have no real personal recollection of the events that took place during those fateful days – other than what was provided by the misleading and distorted coverage in a biased press, both at home and abroad.

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Many possible Israeli concessions would be suicidal

George F. Will
The Washington Post
22 August '10

JERUSALEM 'Twas a famous victory for diplomacy when, in 1991 in Madrid, Israelis and Palestinians, orchestrated by the United States, at last engaged in direct negotiations. Almost a generation later, U.S. policy has succeeded in prodding the Palestinians away from their recent insistence on "proximity talks" -- in which they have talked to the Israelis through American intermediaries -- and to direct negotiations. But negotiations about what?

Idle talk about a "binational state" has long since died. Even disregarding the recent fates of multinational states -- e.g., the former Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia, the former Czechoslovakia -- binationalism is impossible if Israel is to be a Jewish state for the Jewish people. No significant Israeli constituency disagrees with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu: "The Palestinian refugee problem will be resolved outside Israel's borders."

Rhetoric about a "two-state solution" is de rigueur. It also is delusional, given two recent, searing experiences.

The only place for a Palestinian state is the West Bank, which Israel has occupied -- legally under international law -- since repelling the 1967 aggression launched from there. The West Bank remains an unallocated portion of the Palestine Mandate, the disposition of which is to be settled by negotiations. Michael Oren, now Israel's ambassador to the United States, said several years before becoming ambassador:

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The Solace of Poor U.S.-Israel Relations

Daniel Pipes
National Review Online
13 April '10

Mr. Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.

Things are not always as simple as they seem; the current crisis in U.S.-Israel relations has a silver lining.

Four observations, all derived from historical patterns, prompt this conclusion:

First, the "peace process" is in actuality a "war process." Diplomatic negotiations through the 1990s led to a parade of Israeli retreats that had the perverse effect of turning the middling-bad situation of 1993 into the awful one of 2000. Painful Israeli concessions, we now know, stimulate not reciprocal Palestinian goodwill but rather irredentism, ambition, fury, and violence.

Second, Israeli concessions to the Arabs are effectively forever while relations with Washington fluctuate. Once the Israelis left south Lebanon and Gaza, they did so for good, as would be the case with the Golan Heights or eastern Jerusalem. Undoing these steps would be prohibitively costly. In contrast, U.S.-Israel tensions depend on personalities and circumstances, so they go up and down and the stakes are relatively lower. Each president or prime minister can refute his predecessor's views and tone. Problems can be repaired quickly.

More broadly, the U.S.-Israel bond has strengths that go far beyond politicians and issues of the moment. Nothing on earth resembles this bilateral, "the most special" of special relationships and "the family relationship of international politics." Like any family tie, it has high points (Israel ranks second, behind only the United States, in number of companies listed on NASDAQ) and low ones (the Jonathan Pollard espionage affair continues to rankle a quarter century after it broke). The tie has a unique intensity when it comes to strategic cooperation, economic connections, intellectual ties, shared values, United Nations voting records, religious commonalities, and even mutual interference in each other's internal affairs.

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