Gold - The incredible myth machine

Dore Gold..
Israel Hayom..
11 May '12..

Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was interviewed last Friday by CNN's Christiane Amanpour. In the interview, Olmert tried to give the impression that he had been on the verge of a historic peace agreement with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in 2008, and it was only the outside funds brought in by American individuals that scuppered it.

Whatever his political motives, Olmert was feeding the international myth machine, perpetuating the story that Israelis and Palestinians had been close to a historic breakthrough, which needed to be bridged by muscular American diplomacy.

Putting aside his dramatic accusations about millions of dollars that were transferred from what he called "the extreme right wing" in the U.S. to hamper his peace initiative, Olmert was not even close to a final agreement, as he implied to the CNN audience. In fact, a careful examination of Olmert's secret talks with Abbas serves as even more proof that the maximum concessions made by an Israeli prime minister did not meet Abbas' minimum requirements for an agreement.

This was not the first time that the myth of an impending Israeli-Palestinian breakthrough, that never happened, was widely disseminated. At the end of the Taba talks in January 2001, the Israeli and Palestinian negotiators issued a joint statement saying: "The sides declare that they have never been closer to reaching an agreement." Yet when then-Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben Ami repeated this to an Israel Radio reporter, Fatah strongman Mohammed Dahlan issued the immediate response of "kharta barta" (slang for baloney). The EU representative, Miguel Moratinos, even wrote in his internal report on Taba that "serious gaps remain" between the parties.

Good News: Israel 6-Hour Peace Negotiation Is Successful! (But The Meeting Was With The US)

Daled Amos
11 November '10

Netanyahu and Hillary Clinton spent 6 hours discussing resuming peace negotiations

"The Prime Minister and the Secretary agreed on the importance of continuing direct negotiations to achieve our goals," the joint readout said.

And to think it only took 6 hours for the two of them to agree on that!
So, does this joint statement mean that the meeting was a success?

"Absolutely," former U.S. peace negotiator Aaron Miller told POLITICO. "Six hours means negotiations; that means that they're ironing out differences between the U.S. and Israel on a formula for resumption."

Hey, aren't you forgetting someone?

"The question is whether the Palestinians and Arabs will buy it," he added.

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The Rubicon crossers

The assumption that Israeli willingness for far-reaching concessions suffices to bring peace to Israel has been proven false twice in the past decade.

Ze'ev Binyamin Begin
Haaretz
15 October '10

Has he crossed the Rubicon? And if he has, has he done so only intellectually or also mentally? Is it already possible to number Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu among the good guys? And how will we know?

This political-media debate in Israel, endlessly repeated, suffers from a basic weakness: It relies, deliberately, on a baseless assumption that is never explicitly stated - that Israeli willingness for far-reaching concessions suffices to bring peace to Israel.

This assumption was tested twice in the past decade, and both times it proved false: Two Israeli prime ministers, from different parties, in 2000 and in 2008, offered far-reaching concessions to the leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which rejected their offers. So to dispel the harsh impression left by the string of failures that has followed the Oslo concessions, the professional peace processors offered localized excuses: Just give them another round of concessions, and everything will be fine.

But the heads of the PLO feel no need for excuses. In the months after the negotiations with prime minister Ehud Olmert failed, they offered a number of substantive reasons for this failure, which Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen ) summed up with cruel simplicity: "The gaps were wide" (Washington Post, May 5, 2009 ).

A somewhat more detailed explanation was provided recently by United Arab List-Ta'al MK Ahmed Tibi (Haaretz, September 7, 2010 ): "[T]he maximum Olmert could offer in his day did not reach the minimum Abu Mazen and the Palestine Liberation Organization can accept." And knowing the PLO's positions, it is clear that these diplomatic observations are accurate and valid.

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We Won't Let Terrorism Stop Us From Appeasing the Terrorists

Daniel Greenfield
Sultan Knish
06 September '10

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu arrived in Washington D.C. over the bodies of four of his citizens and one unborn child, murdered by Islamic terrorists. The media had spent a busy two days worrying that the murders might in some way interrupt the latest phase of the tragic farce euphemistically referred to as, "The Peace Process". Luckily for the terrorists, who are the sole and only beneficiaries of these and all other negotiations, killing Israelis did not prevent the Israelis from showing up at the negotiating table anyway.

The media however doesn't think much of it, with multiple stories arguing that Netanyahu really doesn't want peace. Time Magazine took it further with a cover story arguing that Israel Doesn't Want Peace. Which is an inevitable assumption given that over the last two decades, Israel has turned over territory, weapons, houses, factories and cold hard cash to the terrorists. In exchange the terrorists have occasionally agreed to show up at the negotiating table, denounce Israel and demand more-- in between calling for a Jihad. Clearly Israel doesn't want peace.

Of course when it comes to walking across the bodies of his own dead citizens in order to shake the hand of a terrorist and a murderer, Netanyahu is a piker. Past Prime Ministers have shown up to negotiate after bus bombings with two digit casualties. They have sat across from Arafat, even as that greasy thug's henchmen were busy firing their AK-47's into the air in Ramallah to celebrate the last batch of arms and legs strewn across a shopping district by another martyr for Allah, Al Quds and Palestine. Perhaps when the terrorists manage to do more than kill four people, an unborn baby, wound a Rabbi, his wife and 12 year old girl-- and the Prime Minister of Israel still shows up ready to give away the store to the terrorists, then the US government and the media will be convinced that Israel is absolutely serious about peace.

Not that there's anything to actually negotiate. Abbas is an unelected dictator being propped up by the Obama Administration, and doesn't represent anyone. Also Abbas has announced that he will make no concessions to Israel whatsoever. He also announced that he absolutely refuses to recognize Israel. Naturally you won't find mention of this in the media. Certainly not in Time Magazine. There won't be any covers reading, "Why the Terrorists Don't Want Peace", just as you won't see any Time covers reading, "Why is Islam Bigoted?" The terrorists always get a pass. Their victims always get the shaft.

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The Nakba Obsession

Sol Stern
City Journal
Vol. 20 No. 3
Summer '10

A specter is haunting the prospective Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations—the specter of the Nakba. The literal meaning of the Arabic word is “disaster”; but in its current, expansive usage, it connotes a historical catastrophe inflicted on an innocent and blameless people (in this case, the Palestinians) by an overpowering outside force (international Zionism). The Nakba is the heart of the Palestinians’ backward-looking national narrative, which depicts the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 as the original sin that dispossessed the land’s native people. Every year, on the anniversary of Israel’s independence, more and more Palestinians (including Arab citizens of Israel) commemorate the Nakba with pageants that express longing for a lost paradise. Every year, the legend grows of the crimes committed against the Palestinians in 1948, crimes now routinely equated with the Holocaust. Echoing the Nakba narrative is an international coalition of leftists that celebrates the Palestinians as the quintessential Other, the last victims of Western racism and colonialism.

There is only one just compensation for the long history of suffering, say the Palestinians and their allies: turning the clock back to 1948. This would entail ending the “Zionist hegemony” and replacing it with a single, secular, democratic state shared by Arabs and Jews. All Palestinian refugees—not just those still alive of the hundreds of thousands who fled in 1948, but their millions of descendants as well—would be allowed to return to Jaffa, Haifa, the Galilee, and all the villages that Palestinian Arabs once occupied.

Such a step would mean suicide for Israel as a Jewish state, which is why Israel would never countenance it. At the very least, then, the Nakba narrative precludes Middle East peace. But it’s also, as it happens, a myth—a radical distortion of history.

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