The US Embassy Move to Jerusalem vs. The "Peace Process". What "Peace Process"? - by Denis MacEoin

...Meanwhile, Western leaders, including religious figures such as the Pope, are enchanted with the fantasy that a peace process exists, and forever chant the mantra that nothing must be done to interrupt it. President Trump's decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel is the first time any world leader has stood up to the threats of anger and violence.

Denis MacEoin..
Gatestone Institute..
19 December '17..

On December 6, US President Donald Trump fulfilled a promise that was made by Congress on November 28, 1995 in its Jerusalem Embassy Act -- to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of the State of Israel and to mark this by moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to the ancient city. That move, according to the Act itself, was to "be established in Jerusalem no later than May 31, 1999". Trump's declaration that the US will now implement the Act has been a historical démarche. So why has it taken so long to act on this agreement?

For more than two decades, this clear expression of the will of Congress had, in effect, been held in abeyance following an amendment (section 7) that introduced a waiver that allowed presidents to "suspend the limitation set forth in section 3(b) for a period of six months if he determines and reports to Congress in advance that such suspension if necessary to protect the national security interests of the United States". Since then, every president who followed (including Trump, six months earlier) exercised this waiver.

Over the years, implementation of the Act was caught up in increasingly complicated legal and diplomatic issues that made deferment appear judicious and necessary in the belief that stalling it might help the so-called "peace process" between Israel and the Palestinians: according to Time Magazine:

"though both the Clinton Administration and Israeli government 'support the move to Jerusalem in principle, they would prefer to see the peace process more stabilized before confronting the explosive issue of Jerusalem'."

Clinton's naïve, but at the time understandable, belief that movement was being made towards Israeli-Palestinian peace was only shattered five years later when Palestinian Chairman Yasser Arafat walked away from a major round of agreements at Camp David and some months later started the Second Intifada (the so-called al-Aqsa Intifada) that lasted from 2000 to 2005, and led to the deaths of thousands on both sides. So much for that peace process.

On his return to Israel after the failure at Camp David Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, wisely commented:

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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The peace process that Greenblatt is here to reincarnate died 17 years ago - by Caroline Glick

...Rabin believed that Israel would emerge stronger from his decision to recognize the PLO, one way or another. Either Israel would achieve peace. Or Israel would get the Americans and the Europeans off its back once the PLO made clear that it was lying about wanting peace. Rabin was wrong. Israel paid gravely for Rabin’s error in judgment.

Caroline Glick..
Carolineglick.com..
117 March '17..

There are iron rules of warfare. One of the most basic rules is that you have to know your enemy. If you do not know your enemy, or worse, if you refuse to act on your knowledge of him, you will lose your war against him.

This basic truth appears to have eluded Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

This week we have been beset by the bizarre and sudden appearance of Jason Greenblatt, President Donald Trump’s negotiations chief.

Greenblatt’s mission is apparently to reinstate the mordant peace process between Israel and the PLO.

The peace process that Greenblatt is here to reincarnate died 17 years ago.

In 2000, PLO chief and Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat killed the peace process when he initiated a massive terrorist war against Israel, right after he rejected peace and Palestinian statehood at the Camp David peace conference.

In rejecting peace, the architect of modern terrorism made clear that his claim seven years earlier that he was willing to reach a compromise with Israel, based on partition of the Land of Israel between a Jewish and an Arab state, was a lie.

(Continue to Full Article)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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Know why he’ll get the ambassador he wants? Because he will be the president. - by Jonathan Tobin

...Suffice it to say that if you believe the current Israel-Palestinian impasse is a stain on Israel’s moral position in the region, you are free to feast on your own self-righteousness, but your perspective is astoundingly askew. Just to take this week alone, there’s a genocide going on about 300 miles to Israel’s northeast, a nightmarish pseudo-caliphate is enslaving women another 200 miles to the east of that, and a barbaric theocracy with a “destroy the Jewish state” doctrine is amassing power another 400 miles further east of that. The idea that Israel, by comparison to its region, is morally compromised is nothing less than unworldly preening.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
16 December '16..
Link: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/foreign-policy/middle-east/israel/david-friedman-ambassador-has-left-the-building/

“Personnel is policy.” That’s one of the great cliches of Washington staffing, and we have an example of its truth in Donald Trump’s nomination of the New York bankruptcy lawyer David Friedman to be his ambassador to Israel.

Much will be made of the blunt Friedman’s very harsh words about left-wing Jewish groups and about President Obama, and these will be used in an effort to derail his nomination. Friedman wrote an op-ed earlier this year likening JStreet to the kapos—the Jews who worked for the Nazis policing their own people. It was wrong of him to do so, but it’s something in the heat of a rhetorical moment I myself have done in relation to a disgusting Jewish cartoonist who uses images out of Der Sturmer to portray Israelis he doesn’t like, so I can appreciate Friedman’s emotional impulse. That impulse comes from a deep sense of anger at Jews who use their Jewishness as a shield and weapon simultaneously to delegitimize the democratic actions of a democratic Jewish state. It is about defending your people against those who you believe are siding with your people’s enemies. In the case of JStreet, Friedman’s feelings are merited even if his analogy was wrong. (And just as I apologized for my use of the term “kapo,” he’d probably do himself some good if he said he’d gone too far in that case—which would, by the way, give him a second shot at explaining why JStreet is egregious in front of a far larger audience.)

Other arguments will be advanced against his nomination, like the fact that Friedman has no diplomatic experience. This is disingenuous. Every administration appoints ambassadors with no diplomatic experience, and aside from generalized bitching, official Washington accepts the practice without complaint. Besides which, one of the ways people get diplomatic experience is to become appointed diplomats. What this really means is that Friedman is neither a member of the foreign service or of the foreign-policy establishment. Well, big deal. Trump is the president and he need not find his Israeli ambassador from the ranks of the permanent State Department bureaucracy or from the membership list of the Council on Foreign Relations. And unlike many ambassadorial appointments, he’s not being rewarded for his financial support.

Decades of Concessions and Withdrawals - Why Palestinians Reject Peace by Jonathan Tobin

...After two decades of concessions and withdrawals on Israel’s part, Palestinians now routinely speak of all of Israel—including liberal, cosmopolitan Tel Aviv, where terrorists struck last week—as “occupied” territory. So, despite the emphasis on settlements and Netanyahu’s supposedly hardline personality, Israel’s willingness to do what Shipler and peace activists advised had the opposite effect on the Palestinians than they thought.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
14 June '16..
Link: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/foreign-policy/middle-east/palestinians-reject-peace/

As the New York Times’ Jerusalem bureau chief from 1979 to 1994, David Shipler was was the focus of a great deal of justified criticism about the paper’s bias against Israel. He wrote a 1987 book titled Arab and Jew, which was the recipient both of a Pulitzer and full-throated and passionate criticism for its pure moral equivalence. But an interview with Shipler in the Times of Israel reveals a change in his thinking that tells us something about the way the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians has changed since his reporting days.

The conventional wisdom about Israeli society in most of the mainstream international media holds that the Jewish population has become more intractable and opposed to peace. Shipler provides a far more nuanced view, derived from conversations with young people conducted for a new edition of his book. They display a diversity of thought that is surprising to him. Whereas as late as 1993, the time of the signing of the Oslo Accords, almost all Israelis saw themselves as the sole victims of the long war for their independence, now they provide a variety of answers—with many recognizing the Palestinian narrative of suffering or seeing “everybody” in the region as victims of the conflict.

The contrast with Palestinians attitudes is what’s so striking. At the time of the publication of his book, Palestinians merely wanted to “turn back the clock to 1967” with an Israeli withdrawal from the territories. Today, Shipler says, things are very different.

But in speaking to people now, I understood that the time frame has become 1948 for the Palestinians. … Now Israelis are seen only as colonialists. There is no recognition of Jewish history in the Land of Israel, of the Holocaust, and the real reasons for the creation of history.

Just as important is that he says that, whereas there was a wide gap between what Palestinian leaders and their people were saying in the 1980s, now there is no daylight between the sort of incitement that is spewed by Hamas and Fatah and the conversations he had with ordinary Arabs.

When Shipler was actively reporting on the conflict, he was an exponent of the idea that peace could only come when both sides would be able to see the justice in the claims of the other side. By that definition, it’s clear that one side has moved toward peace, the other has not.

Shipler’s assertion that most Israelis no longer view themselves as the sole victims in this conflict is unquestionable. It is also unquestionable that Palestinian attitudes have gone in the other direction. Indeed, Shipler’s impressions reinforce research conducted by Daniel Polisar demonstrating that support for terror and opposition to peace was mainstream Palestinian opinion and not merely the views of a small group of violent extremists.

It’s not about peace - by Jonathan Tobin

What will begin tomorrow (Friday) in Paris won’t lead to diplomatic progress but it must be considered as the start of an effort whose certain failure will serve as an excuse for imposing dangerous terms on Israel.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
02 June '16..
Link: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/foreign-policy/middle-east/israel-foes-will-always-paris/

Tomorrow (Friday) 28 foreign ministers will gather in Paris to start deciding how to solve the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. But neither Israel nor the Palestinians will be present. Nor, based on the way they blew up the negotiations sponsored by Secretary of State John Kerry in 2014 and their subsequent refusals to resume talks with Israel, are there reasons to think the Palestinians will be any more willing to make peace with Israel now than they were before. Do they have any real hopes of finding a new formula that will satisfy both sides or any real hope of a positive outcome? If not, what is motivating the French and the rest of the Europeans to start a new process? The answer tells us more about what is wrong with international diplomacy in the 21s century than the obstacles to peace that the diplomats think they are trying to overcome.

The reason why optimism about the Paris conference is in short supply outside of the Quai d’Orsay is not exactly a secret. As veteran peace processor Aaron David Miller noted today in the Wall Street Journal, there is no reason to expect much that is good from this event. Without support from both of the parties or the enthusiastic backing of the United States, no Middle East negotiation is likely to succeed.

This is, as Miller correctly writes, a moment of transition. There will be a new American president taking office in January, and it’s pointless to expect anything to be accomplished before then even if there was a path to success and a will to push for it in Washington. President Obama may be itching for another confrontation with the Israeli government, and he may get one before he leaves office by laying down demands that he wants to serve as the parameters for future talks that Jerusalem will reject. But he won’t act on that impulse during the presidential campaign because to do so would hand Donald Trump a stick with which he could beat Hillary Clinton.

The difference in attitudes toward the Paris conclave from Israel and the Palestinians also tell us why it won’t succeed. The Palestinians like the idea of an international conference for two reasons. One is that it allows them to avoid direct negotiations where they would likely have to either accept or reject peace plans. The other is that they correctly believe that a conference where a gaggle of governments that are hostile to Israel’s government are present will further isolate the Jewish state and place minimal pressure on them to do what they have never done which is to actually accept terms of peace that would end the conflict for all time. By contrast, the Israelis keep saying that they will negotiate but only if it involves direct talks and not in a conference where the Europeans will gang up against them.

Leaving aside diplomatic strategies, the notion that the time is ripe for an agreement also ignores the basic fact that even if the Palestinian Authority and its leader were ready for peace, the Palestinians are hopelessly divided. So long as Hamas operates an independent state in all but name in Gaza that they use as a launching pad for terrorism, peace is on permanent hold. That’s because so long as Hamas is a factor, a further Israeli retreat from the West Bank and Jerusalem to create a sovereign Palestinian state is out of the question. That’s because it might mean allowing that area to become a repeat of Israel’s 2005 Gaza withdrawal experiment. Under those circumstances, it’s no surprise that the majority of Israelis think such a policy wouldn’t be so much a mistake as it would be insane.

With such poor prospects, why then is France bothering?

It’s likely that no one in Paris, let alone the capitals of the other 28 countries that will participate really thinks what they’re doing will be the first step toward an agreement. They all know that without the Israelis buying into it and the Americans backing it up, it’s a non-starter. But to ask those questions and get, as Miller observed, the obvious negative answers, is to misread the purpose of this event. It’s not about peace. It’s about setting a tone for future diplomacy in which Israel will no longer be given a say in its fate but presented with diktats that it can’t resist.

Some Thoughts Concerning Kerry, Rabin, the PLO, and the “Peace Process”

...Rabin would have been completely familiar with the lies, the incitement, and the terrorism we now see, having experienced all of them. His own daughter said years ago that he wasn’t a “blind man” and would have reacted to it all. We honor Rabin by honoring his dedication to Israel’s security, not by appropriating his name for administration policy at a moment when Israel is once again facing exactly the conduct from which he spent his life defending his country.

Elliott Abrams..
Pressure Points..
05 November '15..




Marking the anniversary of the death of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin this week, Secretary of State Kerry said this:

Former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin devoted his life to defending Israel. Today, on this solemn anniversary, we express our profound appreciation for his contribution to the cause of peace. And we honor his vision that would create a better future for both Israelis and the Palestinians: two states living side-by-side in peace and security….Rabin is gone, but his legacy endures as a challenge and an inspiration to us all. Recent events and violence in the region underscore the urgency of advancing Rabin’s vision: a two-state solution that provides the security for Israelis and Palestinians to live their lives in peace, dignity and prosperity.

Actually, it is quite uncertain whether Rabin would have pushed forward to the two-state solution under the conditions that existed when he was assassinated, or would today.

Consider these words several years ago from the Jerusalem Post and from his own daughter Dalia:

In fact, Rabin may have been close to calling-off the Oslo process, according his daughter Dalia. Three years ago, she told Yediot Aharonot (October 1, 2010) that “many people who were close to father told me that on the eve of the murder he considered stopping the Oslo process because of the terror that was running rampant in the streets, and because he felt that Yasser Arafat was not delivering on his promises.”

“Father after all wasn’t a blind man running forward without thought. I don’t rule out the possibility that he was considering a U-turn, doing a reverse on our side. After all he was someone for whom the national security of the state was sacrosanct and above all,” former deputy defense minister Dalia Rabin said.

Why might Rabin have made such a decision were he prime minister now? First, because terror is once again “running rampant” in Israel’s streets. And then there is the question of PLO conduct. Consider the most recent move by the PLO ambassador to the United Nations:

Seriously. Does It Really Matter Who the Next Palestinian President Is?

...Arafat is gone, but his spirit lives on over the region. Abbas may go, but his legacy, like that of Arafat, will not.

Khaled Abu Toameh..
Gatestone Institute..
08 September '15..

The recent talk about Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas's intention to quit political life has left many wondering whether his departure would bring about real changes for the Palestinians and the "peace process" with Israel.

During the past few weeks, the 80-year-old Abbas has been telling his aides and friends that he is tired and wants to spend more time with his family.

It is not clear at this stage whether Abbas is serious about his intention to step down. His critics argue that he is just bluffing, while some of his Fatah and PLO colleagues maintain that this time his threat to resign is real.

The real question, however, is not whether Abbas is serious or not about retiring. Rather, it is what impact, if at all, his departure from the scene would have on Palestinians and future relations with Israel.

Several senior PLO and Fatah officials already see themselves as potential successors to Abbas. As the chances of holding presidential elections are zero to none (mainly due to the ongoing dispute between the PA and Hamas), the PLO and Fatah will elect the new president.

This means that the next Palestinian Authority president will be a senior PLO or Fatah official. Recently, the names of several potential candidates have been floated. They include Saeb Erekat, the veteran Palestinian chief negotiator who was recently elected as PLO Secretary-General -- a move that has boosted his chances of succeeding Abbas.

But neither Erekat nor any other PLO or Fatah officials would be able to bring about real changes in the post-Abbas era -- certainly not in the "peace process" with Israel.

When Yasser Arafat died in 2004, there was hope that whoever succeedeed him would adopt a new policy – one that would lead to a final peace agreement between the Palestinians and Israel.

However, it was obvious from day one that Mahmoud Abbas would not be different from his predecessor. In fact, Abbas has, during the past decade, repeatedly vowed to walk in Arafat's footsteps. Abbas has since kept his promise by rejecting a number of Israeli offers, simply because they do not comply with 100% of his demands. To this day, Abbas continues to insist that Israel withdraw from all the land it captured in 1967, including east Jerusalem.

Abbas is not the only one who is demanding from Israel 100% of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem. This has been -- and continues to be -- the official policy of the PLO and Fatah.

That is why it is hard to understand why some Westerners believe that Abbas's departure could boost the prospects of peace between Israel and the Palestinians. To many Palestinians, it is perfectly clear that the PLO or Fatah official who replaces Abbas will not be able to make any concessions to Israel. Any Palestinian leader who dares to make the slightest concession to Israel will be denounced as a traitor and will be lucky if he or she stays in power or stays alive.

What the West needs to understand is that no Palestinian leader is authorized to make concessions to Israel for the sake of peace. Neither the PLO nor the Fatah leaderships would ever approve of such concessions. And then, of course, there is Hamas, which also will never accept any peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. The only peace agreement that Hamas will ever accept is one that leads to the destruction of Israel and the establishment of an Islamic empire in the region.

In both cases, guess who pays the price: Israel

...Sometimes, if you smash two stories together, you end up with something interesting; sometimes you get something worrisome. This is one of the latter.

Shoshana Bryen..
Gatestone Institute..
10 June '15..

Sometimes, if you smash two stories together, you end up with something interesting; sometimes you get something worrisome. This is one of the latter.

The first story is about France, a member of the P5+1 negotiating a deal with Iran on nuclear capabilities. The French government has expressed increasing concern that the emerging deal is flawed -- perhaps fatally. Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius reportedly told the French Parliament, "France will not accept [a deal] if it is not clear that inspections can be done at all Iranian installations, including military sites." He added, "Yes to an agreement, but not to an agreement that will enable Iran to have the atomic bomb. That is the position of France, which is independent and peaceful."

The French Ambassador to the United States, Gerard Araud, told an American audience "the most worrying aspect of the agreement" is that Iran will become a "one-year breakout state." He expressed concern that if Iran becomes a nuclear state, other countries in the region will also seek to become nuclear powers.

The French position creates a problem for President Obama because the deal has to be agreed on by the P5+1, not the "P4+1-with-one-vote-in-opposition."

The second story is also about France. With historic ties to the Middle East, but extremely limited military capabilities there (or anywhere), France is trying to be a diplomatic power broker. Christian Makarian, deputy editor of L'Express, wrote recently that after Assad used chemical weapons against his people, France wanted to intervene in Syria but was dissuaded by President Obama. "Hollande and... Fabius frequently made reference to last year's backtracking on military intervention in Syria, which they consider one of their greater policy failings." This, he postulates, accounts for French willingness to support military action in Iraq.

Influence can come from arms sales, and here the French excel. From 2005-2010, France was the third largest supplier of arms to the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region, after the U.S. and Russia. MENA now accounts for nearly half the orders from the French military. Saudi Arabia, Morocco, UAE, Qatar, Oman, Tunisia and Algeria are clients, and this year, 5.2 billion euros in orders from Egypt. It amounts to a 17.3 percent increase in total arms sales abroad for 2014 over 2013.

Influence also comes from diplomacy -- and this is where the stories begin to collide.

The Real Issue is Kerry’s Incompetence, Not Israeli Manners

...The point here isn’t that Kerry is foolishly picking quarrels with Israel but that he has demonstrated his unfitness for office at a time when the United States is once again engaging in a conflict with a dangerous Islamist foe. President Obama has allowed Kerry to embark on a futile effort to revive the dead-in-the-water peace process thinking that there would be few consequences for another failure. But Kerry’s incapacity to focus on the ISIS threat presents a bigger problem for the president. If he is truly serious about building a coalition against ISIS, the president needs to stop letting his administration pick pointless fights with Israel. Kerry needs to be fired.

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

On Friday, the U.S. State Department rejected criticisms from Israeli Economic Minister Naftali Bennett that Secretary of State John Kerry had sought to blame the rise of ISIS on Israel. Spokesperson Marie Harf said Kerry’s remarks a day earlier were “taken out of context” for “political reasons” by Bennett and other Israelis who cried foul. That in turn set off criticisms of Bennett by his Cabinet colleague and rival, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who said the Jewish Home Party leader should keep his mouth shut about the United States. But while most observers seemed to focus on the Israeli political dimension of the controversy or the chances that the spat would worsen the already shaky relations between Israel and the U.S., what escaped notice was the fact that in claiming that the failure to broker peace between Israel and the Palestinians was helping ISIS, Kerry was actually contradicting President Obama.

On September 24, in his speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations, Obama said the following:

Leadership will also be necessary to address the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis. As bleak as the landscape appears, America will never give up the pursuit of peace. The situation in Iraq, Syria and Libya should cure anyone of the illusion that this conflict is the main source of problems in the region; for far too long; it has been used in part as a way to distract people from problems at home. And the violence engulfing the region today has made too many Israelis ready to abandon the hard work of peace.

Leaving aside Obama’s willingness to blame Israel for not working for peace when, in fact, all they are reacting to is the consistent refusal of their supposed Palestinian peace partners to accept repeated offers of independence and peace, this statement represented genuine progress in the president’s thinking. Obama had in the past repeatedly embraced the notion that ending the Arab-Israeli conflict would solve all the problems in the region but the rise of ISIS had sobered him up a bit. The willingness of many Arab regimes to make common cause with Israel against both ISIS and radical Islamists such as Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood illustrated the obvious fact that conflict within the Arab world is a function of the division among Muslims, not discontent about Israel’s existence or the failure of peace negotiations.

This was a remarkable departure for a president who had spoken of Western and Israeli guilt for Muslim grievances in his address to the Muslim world in Cairo in June 2009, seemingly having finally woken up to the fact that no amount of apologizing or engagement will make radical Islam go away. But for some reason Kerry is still sticking to the old playbook in which Israelis can be scapegoated for the existence of bloody conflicts in which Jews play no part.

Kerry was, no doubt, playing to his audience of Muslims when he told a State Department ceremony honoring the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha that resentment about the Arab-Israeli conflict was fueling recruitment for ISIS. Since Kerry has consistently and wrongly blamed Israel for the collapse of his peace initiative, it didn’t take much imagination to see that what he was doing was blaming the Jewish state for the fact that ISIS terrorists have overrun much of Syria and Iraq while beheading Westerners. But while the Arab leaders he cited may pay lip service to anti-Israel sentiment by referencing the alleged “humiliation and denial and lack of human dignity” suffered by the Palestinians, ISIS’s popularity is based on promoting hatred of all Westerners and non-Muslims, not just Israelis. Which is to say that Bennett wasn’t off target or taking things out of context when he said, “When a British Muslim decapitates a British Christian, there will always be someone to blame the Jew.”

More Like "From the River, to the Sea"

...This is not what those who have made a career out of blaming Israel for every problem in the Middle East, if not the world, want to hear. But if they want to know what’s really going on, they should listen to the Palestinians. If they do, they will understand that there is nothing Israel can do to end this conflict so long as Palestinians are committed to their destruction.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
26 June '14..

For more than 20 years since the Oslo process began, those urging Israel to make more and more concessions to the Palestinians have based their views on the belief that both peoples supported a two-state solution to the Middle East conflict. But a new poll of Palestinian public opinion shows that an overwhelming majority opposes any goal other than eliminating the State of Israel.

The poll, conducted by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, showed some interesting and, in part, contradictory results. Only 27.3 percent of Palestinians support a two-state solution. By contrast, more than two-thirds see the restoration of all of historic Palestine to Arab control as the only legitimate national goal for their people. Interestingly, of those who back the elimination of Israel, only one out of seven and 10.1 percent overall think it ought to be replaced by a single democratic state in which Jews and Arabs would have equal rights. What the other 60.3 percent who say that “reclaiming” all land from the river to the sea for the Arabs would do with the six million Jews who live there is left unclear.

Just as interesting is the answer to the question as to what Palestinians should do if a two-state solution were somehow to be achieved by their leadership. Only 31.6 percent say that should mean the end of the conflict while 64 percent believe that even after that the struggle against Israel “should continue until all of historic Palestine is liberated.” Asked the same question in a slightly different way, 65.2 percent of the Palestinians think that if their leadership were to negotiate a two-state deal, “that would be part of a ‘program of stages’ to liberate all of historic Palestine later.”

However, just because the Palestinians don’t want to make peace with Israel or live beside it in a separate, independent state doesn’t mean that most of them want to fight it, at least not right now. More than 60 percent think that Hamas should maintain a cease-fire with Israel in the West Bank and Gaza. Although Gaza is home to the Islamist terror movement, not surprisingly more Gazans (70 percent) support the cease-fire than West Bankers (55 percent).

As to whether Hamas should abide by Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas’s statement that it should recognize Israel and abide by past peace agreements (something that his own Fatah hasn’t done), opinion is divided. Overall, a bare majority—50.7 percent—agrees with that position. But there is a clear split between the West Bank and Gaza. Gazans, who clearly want an end to the violence, support the demand by a margin of 57.3 to 37.6 percent. But on the West Bank, where Abbas’s supposedly more moderate Fatah Party dominates, Palestinians are split down the middle with 46.8 percent opposing forcing Hamas to stand down while 45.7 percent support the idea.

Other questions show that while Palestinians are leery of another terrorist war of attrition against Israel, they want “popular resistance” against the Jewish state to continue. While that phrase might be interpreted as support for non-violent means of protest, in the Palestinian lexicon it appears to represent something different. In this context, popular resistance means mass protests conducted by violent means with rock throwing and firebombs rather than peaceful sit-ins or demonstrations.

Hillary's "Hard Choices" and Recent Conversion

...According to her, the freeze made PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas's position more entrenched, and led him to reject the talks, demanding an official freeze in eastern Jerusalem as well. So, when did Hillary Clinton become a hard-line, right-wing conservative?

Michael Lumish..
Israel Thrives..
11 June '14..





Ari Yashar, writing in Arutz Sheva, tells us:

Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has some biting words for President Barack Obama in her new memoir, saying his push for a construction freeze in Judea and Samaria was a mistake.

Speaking about the 2009 building freeze that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu submitted to, Clinton wrote "in retrospect, our early, hard line on settlements didn't work." The book, entitled "Hard Choices," was received by AP ahead of its release on Tuesday.

Clinton added that the pressure to freeze building exerted by the Obama administration was "one mistake of many" by the US, Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the talks.

According to her, the freeze made PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas's position more entrenched, and led him to reject the talks, demanding an official freeze in eastern Jerusalem as well.

So, when did Hillary Clinton become a hard-line, right-wing conservative?

I was making almost precisely that argument 5 years ago, as it was happening, but was suddenly and eerily dismissed as one of those conservative bad people from the other side of the tracks.

This is what I published on December 17, 2009, in a piece entitled, The End of the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process:

Obama’s big mistake, if he was hoping to actually bring about peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, was calling for a total settlement freeze in both the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The demand for total settlement freeze, even within blocs that would likely end up as part of Israel, has resulted in a number of negative consequences that undermine even the slim possibility of a negotiated settlement.

The first negative consequence is that by calling for a total settlement freeze, Obama placed a precondition on negotiations at a time when he should have avoided any move that might decrease the likelihood of the two sides sitting down at the negotiating table. When Obama called for total freeze, Abbas took it as an opportunity to avoid negotiations and insisted that the Palestinians would never sit down with the Israelis until Israel met that demand.

The biggest recent mistake that the diaspora Jewish community has made was in throwing people such as Yosef and Melody to the wolves, not to mention the Fogels.

Because almost all of us believed in the two-state solution as the only viable solution, and because the Arabs complained about a Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria, we agreed that what we called "settlement activity" in the "West Bank" had to end.

I certainly thought so all the way through the Oslo process until quite recently.

One of the main differences, I suppose, between myself and other western-left diaspora Jews on this issue is that I have come to the conclusion that we are essentially playing a rigged game. What the Jewish people in the Middle East want more than anything is to simply be left the hell alone to create their computer software and to litigate against one another.

The Arabs, however, since the time of that Muhammad Guy, have been hell-bent-for-fury in opposition to Jewish sovereignty from the beginning of all of this nonsense. They opposed Jewish sovereignty on Jewish land in the seventh century, just as they oppose Jewish sovereignty on Jewish land today. Nothing much has changed, really. The great Arab majority despised the tiny Jewish minority for theocratic reasons in the seventh century, just as they do so today for precisely those same reasons.

Still Prisoners and Hostages of the Oslo Accords?

...There’s always the chance that a confluence of ideas like what took place at Herzliya will change the calculus–that if left, right, and center all push for a grand rethinking of the peace process it might happen. But that’s not been the case in recent years. And the dedication to the status quo, which ignores changes on the ground and keeps policymakers of the future glued to discredited ideas of the past, negates critical thinking and discourages creative solutions. If that doesn’t change, Oslo will continue to be associated with preventing peace, not presaging it.

Seth Mandel..
Commentary Magazine..
11 June '14..

One of the striking aspects of the last two decades of Shimon Peres’s long career in Israeli public life is how much of a prisoner he was to his own near-success. Peres was a driving force behind the Oslo peace process and the crucial negotiations that led to the Declaration of Principles before the agreement melted under the hot lights of reality. Yet in many ways the deal trapped him, having to carry its banner and defend the possibility of its fulfillment for the rest of his time in office.

Peres was on the Israeli left, sure, but his career had been marked–as so many of his contemporaries in both generations–by partisan fluidity. The AFP analysis Jonathan mentioned yesterday illustrates this: it says Peres was once considered a hawk because, in part, he ordered the shelling of Lebanese territory in 1996. Yet that was after Oslo. By such an accounting, Peres was a pragmatist. But with Oslo only mostly dead, he was never really able, aside from a token move to leave Labor for Kadima under Ariel Sharon, to get out of its shadow.

This is hardly surprising considering the fact that Oslo has trapped, to a large extent, Peres’s country on the whole, including Israeli politicians who don’t support or defend it. Consider the Herzliya conference in Israel this week. While former ambassador Michael Oren’s “Plan B” idea for a new direction in the peace process–something akin to a coordinated unilateralism–has been discussed for months, BuzzFeed reports that Herzliya has seen something of a parade of alternative peace plans.

Finance Minister Yair Lapid, former settlers’ advocate Dani Dayan, and Economy Minister Naftali Bennett have all offered their ideas. Here’s the crux of Dayan’s:

He wants to ignore the peace process entirely and to loosen restrictions on Palestinians and improve their daily lives without waiting for a negotiated solution. Dayan, an advocate of one shared state for Palestinians and Israelis, is pressing the Israeli government to remove the separation barrier — a looming symbol of Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank — that separates Israeli and Palestinian communities. Israelis and Palestinians should be allowed to live wherever they want, he argues, and travel into one another’s territories. …

Many of Israel’s right-wing leadership, including Danny Danon, the deputy defense minister, have also thrown their weight behind the plan.

“In general I think that we should try to find ways to make the lives of the Palestinians easier,” Danon said. “That’s something I support.”

The plan has also been well-received by former Israeli defense officials. Moshe Arens, a former defense minister, has publicly backed the plan.

Mistaken and Misleading Middle East Symbolism

...Any prayer service of act of advocacy on behalf of Middle East peace that ignores this key question is part of the problem, not the solution. While we respect Pope Francis, like his misguided recent trip to the Middle East that bogged him down in dangerous acts of moral equivalency between terrorists and the victims of terror at Israel’s security barrier, this event was a mistake.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
08 June '12..

On Sunday, Pope Francis made good on his pledge to convene a summit of Israeli and Palestinian leaders for a prayer service in Rome. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was there along with Israel’s President Shimon Peres. Along with Francis, both made speeches calling for peace and listened as clergy from the three major faiths spoke of symbolic acts of reconciliation that were, as a number of commentators noted, supposed to show that at the very least, religion can be a uniting factor rather than the engine that drives separation and hostility. Even though no one is pretending that a few speeches or prayers in Rome will change the facts of a stalemate between the two sides in the peace talks, the gesture will reinforce the pope’s reputation as a man intent on healing the world.

Given the pope’s evident good will, it’s hard to argue with the idea that his summit will do no harm and might cause the two sides to think about working harder for peace. But this piece of conventional wisdom is misleading. Though no one should question the pope’s intentions, the event at the Vatican is more than empty symbolism. This piece of grandstanding on the part of the church will not only did nothing to advance the cause of peace that was torpedoed by the Palestinian unity pact that brought the terrorists of Hamas into the PA along with Abbas’ Fatah. By lending the moral authority of a man who is rightly respected around the world for his probity and earnest desire to help others to a stunt that treats the partner of Islamist terrorists as a peacemaker, the event undermines any effort to pressure the PA to make a clear choice between peace with Israel or one with Hamas.

In fairness to the pope, his foolish even-handed approach differs little from that of the Obama administration which has decided to continue to send aid to the PA despite the involvement of the Hamas terrorists in its administration following the signing of the unity pact. Together with the European Union, the United States has effectively given its stamp of approval to a PA government that is making peace impossible. Palestinian unity has not brought Hamas into a government bent on creating an agreement based on coexistence and an end to violence. Rather, it signifies the joint position of the two main Palestinian factions that proclaims their refusal to ever recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders would be drawn.

Seen in that context, the ceremonial symbolism in Rome is not just a distraction from the reality of a PA that refused Israeli offers of independence and peace three times between 2000 and 2008 and also refused to negotiate seriously in the last year of American-sponsored talks that amounts to a fourth such refusal. So long as the world refuses to place the same kind of brutal pressure on the Palestinians to give up their war on Zionism and accept a two-state solution that it puts on Israel to withdraw from the West Bank, peace will remain impossible for the foreseeable future.

Bullying, Temper Tantrum Tactics and the Peace Process by Sarah Honig

...The truth is that neither Abbas, his newfound bedfellows in Gaza nor the masses in both Palestinian Authority halves, remotely desire co-existence side-by-side with a Jewish state. Their aim is the piecemeal Arabization of the de facto entity temporarily called Israel (which is why they won’t concede Jewish-state legitimacy) or its vanquishment as al-Daana anticipates.

Sarah Honig..
Another Tack..
05 June '14..

When preschoolers don’t get their way, they sometimes attempt to intimidate us into giving in. They throw terrifying temper tantrums, some more frequently and frighteningly than others. The rule of thumb is that the more spoiled a kid is, the worse the whining, crying, screaming, kicking, hitting, rolling on the floor and breath-holding.

According to the preeminent Jewish psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut, the tantrum-thrower’s “core is likely to contain a self-centered, grandiose-exhibitionist part,” and the outbursts represent “narcissistic rages at the blow to the inflated self-image.” Therefore, various refusals, “regardless of their justifications, will automatically provoke fury since they offend the child’s sense of omnipotence.”

In most individuals such shock and awe antics abate over the years. But not always. When immaturity – irrespective of chronological age – coincides with privilege and a sense of entitlement, it’s liable to produce adult petulance and a proclivity for spiteful rants.

This should sound abundantly familiar to anyone who heard of the “nasty” anti-Israel “tirade” by Martin Indyk, US Secretary of State Kerry’s chief envoy to the misnamed Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. According to the Washington Free Beacon, Indyk lost his cool for a full half-hour at the bar of a Ritz Carlton Hotel shortly after delivering an address to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Although predictably denied by the State Department, Indyk’s reported tantrum was quite in sync with his boss’s reactions. Kerry’s self-centered, grandiose plans to super-swiftly impose peace on Israel and its genocidal enemies didn’t quite garner him the glory he envisaged. Not only did he fail to engineer in nine mere months – as per his cocky timetable – the miracle solution to a century-old conflict, but the sides couldn’t even agree on talks about the talks.

The bigger Kerry’s initial pretension, the greater was his resultant humiliation.

And Kerry unleashed all his frustration on Israel – like the child who acts out before those most likely to cave in. He threatened us with BDS ostracism, new spates of terror and apartheid-state stigma. No matter how he later attempted to explain away his cantankerous conniptions, he had done us damage; he knows he had and he meant to. Some slung mud always sticks.

Kerry’s crabbiness was equally expressed in his jarring failure to rebuke Ramallah figurehead Mahmoud Abbas for scuttling the process by seeking state-status in UN forms, by gumming up the works with nonstarter extortionist demands (not for ending the dispute but for restarting the moribund talks) and, most of all, by aligning himself with the jihadist Hamas - a move the US officially no longer opposes, i.e. it no longer opposes doing business with Hamas.

The subtext is clear – Abbas can do no wrong and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu willfully refuses to do right (by Obama Administration definitions).

And just in case we failed to understand the undertones, an unnamed “highly-placed source” in Kerry’s entourage (perhaps none other than Indyk) blasted Netanyahu, empathized with Abbas and warned that, whether Israel likes it or not, Palestine shall arise – as if this is humanity’s great last hope.

We can safely bet our bottom shekel that neither Kerry nor Indyk would be much perturbed by what the Palestine they so passionately prescribe would be like. If they at all gave a hoot, they might have already noticed a few troubling spoiler alerts.

Ramallah recently announced that if Israel really wants recognition of Jewish-state legitimacy, then it should withdraw not just to the June 4, 1967 lines (which are in fact the 1949 armistice lines) but to the lines drawn by the UN’s Partition Resolution (General Assembly resolution 181, adopted on November 29, 1947). That resolution specifically speaks of a Jewish state.

Ah, but there’s the rub.

Betraying Peace, Embracing of Hamas, All In A Day's Work

...By allowing American taxpayer dollars to flow to a government controlled in part by Hamas, Obama is violating U.S. law. But he’s also signaling that the U.S. has no intention of ever pressuring the Palestinians to take the two-state solution they’ve been repeatedly offered by Israel and always rejected. For a president that is obsessed with his legacy, that’s a mistake for which history ought never to forgive him.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
02 June '14.

When Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas chose to scuttle peace talks with Israel this spring by deciding to conclude a pact with Hamas rather than the Jewish state, he was taking a calculated risk. In embracing his Islamist rivals, Abbas sought to unify the two leading Palestinian factions not to make peace more possible but to make it impossible. Since Palestinian public opinion–indeed the entire political culture of his people–regards any pact that would recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state as a betrayal of their national identity, bringing Hamas back into the PA fold illustrated that he would not take the sort of risks that peacemaking required.

But given the PA’s almost complete dependency on the United States and Europe for the aid that keeps its corrupt apparatus operating, there was a genuine risk that the unity pact would generate a cutoff of assistance that could topple his kleptocracy. U.S. law mandated such a rupture of relations, as did the officially stated policy of the Obama administration that rightly regards Hamas as a terrorist group, not a legitimate political player. But there was a chance that Washington would accept a Palestinian deception in which technocrats would be appointed to rule in the name of the Fatah-Hamas coalition in order to pretend that the terrorists were not in charge.

In the weeks since the unity pact was concluded it wasn’t clear which way the U.S. would jump on the question of keeping the money flowing to Abbas, though at times Secretary of State John Kerry made appropriate noises at the PA leader about the danger of going into business with Hamas. But today’s press briefing at the State Department removed any doubt about President Obama’s intentions. When asked to react to today’s announcement of a new Fatah-Hamas government in Ramallah, spokesperson Jen Psaki said that the U.S. would accept the Palestinian trick. As the Times of Israel reports:

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said on Monday that Washington believes Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has “formed an interim technocratic government…that does not include members affiliated with Hamas.”

“With what we know now, we will work with this government,” Psaki said. She did, however, warn that the US “will continue to evaluate the composition and policies of the new government and if needed we’ll modify our approach.” She later added that the administration would be “watching carefully to make sure” that the unity government upholds the principles that serve as preconditions for continuing US aid to the Palestinian Authority.

In recognizing the fig leaf of a “technocratic” government that is meant to distract the world from the reality that Hamas is now in full partnership with Abbas, the Obama administration may think it has put Israel’s government—which publicly called for the world not to recognize the Palestinian coalition—into a corner. But by discarding its own principles about recognizing unrepentant terror groups, Obama has done more than betrayed Israel. He has betrayed the cause of peace.

It would be a mistake to waste much time debating whether the cabinet Abbas has presented to the world is not really affiliated with Hamas. The people he has appointed are nothing but stand-ins for the real power brokers in Palestinian politics—the leaders of Fatah who lord it over those portions of the West Bank under the sway of the PA and the Hamas chieftains who have ruled Gaza with an iron fist since the 2007 coup in which they seized power there. Just like Abbas’s previous attempt to swindle the West into thinking that the PA intended to embrace reform during Salam Fayyad’s ill-fated term as prime minister, the “technocratic” cabinet isn’t fooling anyone. Americans and Israelis may have lauded Fayyadism as a path to a responsible Palestinian government that would eschew corruption and try to actually improve the lives of its people. But Fayyad was a man without a political constituency and, despite the support he had in Washington, was thrown overboard by Abbas and the PA went back to business as usual without a backward glance.

Nor is there any use arguing about whether it is Hamas that has been co-opted by Abbas and Fatah rather than the other way around. The two rival parties have very different visions of Palestinian society with Hamas hoping to eventually install the same kind of theocratic rule in the West Bank that it established in the independent Palestinian state in all but name in Gaza. But at the moment there is no fundamental difference between the two on dealing with Israel. Despite its unwillingness to recognize Israel even in principle and its refusal to back away from its charter that calls for the Jewish state’s destruction and the slaughter of its people, Hamas doesn’t want an open war with Israel anymore than Fatah. But by the same token, Fatah has demonstrated repeatedly over the last 15 years that it is as incapable of making peace with Israel, even on terms that would have gained it sovereignty over almost all of the West Bank and a share of Jerusalem, as Hamas. The two parties are genuinely unified in their desire to keep chipping away at Israel’s international legitimacy and to avoid peace at any cost.

Admitting this would be a bitter pill for an Obama administration that has invested heavily in Abbas, a man they have wrongly portrayed as a peacemaker even as they have vilified Netanyahu as an obstacle to a deal. So rather than honestly assessing their policy and owning up to the fact that five and a half years of attempts to appease Abbas and tilt the diplomatic playing field in his direction have done nothing to make him say yes to peace, the administration will go along with the PA’s deception.

That’s a blow to Israel, which now finds itself more isolated than ever. But the real betrayal doesn’t involve Obama’s broken promises to the Jewish state or to pro-Israel voters. By buying into the myth that Hamas isn’t involved with the new PA government, the president is putting a spike into the last remote chances for a peace deal in the foreseeable future. So long as the Palestinians are allowed to believe that there is no price to be paid for rejecting peace, there will be no change in their attitudes. By allowing American taxpayer dollars to flow to a government controlled in part by Hamas, Obama is violating U.S. law. But he’s also signaling that the U.S. has no intention of ever pressuring the Palestinians to take the two-state solution they’ve been repeatedly offered by Israel and always rejected. For a president that is obsessed with his legacy, that’s a mistake for which history ought never to forgive him.

Link: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2014/06/02/obamas-embrace-of-hamas-betrays-peace-palestinians-us-aid-fatah/

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Tzipi Livni as Netanyahu’s Uncomfortable Fig Leaf?

...Some may think she is serving as a fig leaf for Netanyahu, but if they thought more seriously about her role in the peace process over the past year they would realize that her presence in the government did nothing to ease criticism from Washington or from the usual suspects who like to bash the Jewish state. Instead, she proved her theories and those of other Netanyahu critics wrong by trying and failing to get the Palestinians to take yes for an answer. If she stays in the government, and given her history of rank opportunism and love of office, there’s no reason to think she won’t, it will be to continue to serve as a warning to Netanyahu’s detractors that their accusations of Israeli intransigence are without a factual basis. That isn’t a particularly comfortable role for her or Netanyahu. But it does illustrate how foolish those who still laud Abbas as a man of peace really are.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
22 May '14..

Israel’s far-left Meretz Party doesn’t often offer much in the way of insight about either the Middle East peace process or the country’s government, but today the group’s leader Nitzan Horowitz spoke at least a partial truth when he referred to Justice Minister Tzipi Livni as nothing more than a “fig leaf” for Prime Minister Netanyahu. In an interview with the Times of Israel’s David Horovitz, the head of what is left of the once dominant “peace camp” decried Livni’s continued presence in the Cabinet. Horowitz’s evaluation of Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas as a man of peace and willingness to place a good deal of the blame for the collapse of the peace process on Netanyahu is divorced from the facts and explains why his party and its allies retain only a small sliver of support from the Israeli public. But his comments were generally on target with respect to the anomalous position of Livni inside the government of the man who has been her nemesis.

An earlier Times of Israel report documented the blowback inside the country’s government about Livni’s decision to meet with Abbas in London last week even though Netanyahu had suspended negotiations with the PA after its alliance with Hamas. Reportedly, Netanyahu was livid at her insubordination and wanted to fire her. But after calming down, the prime minister realized that if he made Livni and her small parliamentary faction walk the plank, she would generate a coalition crisis that would leave him with only a small majority in the Knesset. That would put him at the mercy of his right-wing partner/antagonist Naftali Bennett, the head of the Jewish Home Party, who used Livni’s excursion to both call for her resignation and to posture at the prime minister’s expense to the voters.

In the end, Livni accomplished nothing with her mission to Abbas. He is no more willing to budge an inch toward peace now than he was throughout the long months of negotiations during which his representatives stonewalled the eager Livni, who headed Israel’s delegation. But the dustup involving the prime minister and the woman who has always thought that she, and not Netanyahu, should be leading the country is interesting because it illustrates just how wrongheaded the critics who bash Israel’s government as inflexibly right-wing really are.

Americans who buy into the mainstream media’s reflexive dismissal of Netanyahu as “hard-line” (a word that many readers may think is his first name) and intransigent need to understand that the term tells us nothing about his policies. He began his current term in office in 2013, by offering Livni a major Cabinet post (the Justice Ministry) and the portfolio for peace talks with the Palestinians. Doing so was more or less the equivalent of President Obama choosing Mitt Romney to be secretary of state. Such alliances are, of course, less unusual in parliamentary systems, and especially so in Israel where no party has ever won an absolute majority in the Knesset. But it should be understood that Livni campaigned in the last election as a critic of Netanyahu’s peace policies and was then given an opportunity to prove him wrong by being handed the chance to strike a deal with Abbas. While the failure of the initiative championed by Secretary of State John Kerry is rightly considered to be his fiasco, the unwillingness of the Palestinians to come even close to satisfying Livni—the one Israeli that the Obama administration thought was most likely to make peace—tells us everything we need to know about the Palestinians’ responsibility for the collapse of the talks.

Letting go of Abbas by Caroline Glick

Alarmists argue that without Abbas, Israel will go broke having to finance the Palestinian budget. But this is ridiculous. Once you subtract the hundreds of millions of dollars that go missing every year, and you take into account that Israel managed to govern the areas for 24 years, you realize that this is just one more empty threat – like the demographic threat — made by people who have no political existence without the façade of a peace process. Abbas is not an asset. He is a liability. It is time to move past him.

Caroline Glick..
Our World..
19 May '14..

What makes PLO chief and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas tick?

In 2008, when Abbas rejected then prime minister Ehud Olmert’s expansive offer of Palestinian statehood, he did so for the same reason that Yassir Arafat rejected then prime minister Ehud Barak’s expansive offer of Palestinian statehood at Camp David in 2000.

In both cases, the PLO chiefs believed that if they waited, they could get everything they demanded from Israel – and more – without giving anything away.

As Abbas and Arafat both saw it, eventually either the Israeli Left would successfully erode Israel’s national will to exist, or the Europeans and the US would join forces to coerce Israel into giving up the store. Or both. So there was no reason for the PLO to give up anything.

To get everything in exchange for nothing all they had to do was continuously escalate the PLO’s political warfare against the legitimacy against Israel internationally, and escalate its subversion of Israeli society through political intrigue and terrorism.

Back then, Abbas and Arafat looked forward to the day when they could frame Israel’s unconditional surrender and nail it to their wall.

But things have changed.

The rise of the revolutionary forces in the Islamic world since December 2010 has transformed the political landscape.

The Syrian civil war, the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, the resurgence of al Qaeda franchises, the US’s abandonment of its traditional Arab allies in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood and President Barack Obama’s aspiration to reach a meeting of the minds with the Iranian regime have completely upended the political calculus of all regional actors, including the PLO and Abbas.

As Palestinian affairs expert Reuven Berko wrote in an article published by the Investigative Project on Terrorism last week, if in the past Abbas wouldn’t make a deal with Israel because he could get more by saying no, today Abbas cannot make a deal with Israel.

Any deal he concludes will lead to his overthrow.

Noting that Abbas was recently threatened by al Qaeda chief Ayman Zawahiri who called him, “a traitor who is selling Palestine,” Berko explained, “The threats, veiled or not, by radical Islamists… and a quick look at Arab-Muslim world, especially Syria, have made it clear to the Palestinians what the future has in store for them, and it now appears that in the meantime, they prefer the status quo to the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.”

As Berko sees it, Abbas’s primary problem is the residents of the UN refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and beyond. Israel’s unwillingness to accept a so-called “right of return,” which would enable millions of foreign Arabs residing in terrorist-controlled UN-run refugee camps to immigrate to a post-peace agreement Israel means that in an era of peace, they will move to the newly created state of Palestine.

Berko rightly notes that these immigrants will not regard Abbas as their savior, to the contrary.

Farce, negotiations and the nefarious pharaohs of our time

...After two millennia of exile, we have finally merited to be, in the words of “Hatikva,” a “free nation in our land,” and with that freedom also comes the heavy burden of sovereign responsibility. But we can do it! Passover, which is all about hope and new beginnings, empowers us to rise up against the slavery of bad ideas and their Pharaoh-purveyors. This Passover, after the failure of yet another round of negotiations, and before the onset of yet another one, let us proclaim loudly: “Let my people go!” Go forward, that is.

Yishai Fleisher..
Eye on Zion/JPost..
17 April '14..

This latest round of so-called “peace negotiations” has been one giant farce. Every one of the actors is just going through the motions. As though anyone thought Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was going to give up more than former prime minister Ehud Olmert was willing to. As though Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was going to recognize a Jewish state. As though US Secretary of State John Kerry was going to come up with a maverick idea to end the conflict. The whole thing was hopeless and stank from the onset.

So why enter into this pointless cycle yet again? Maybe the festival of Passover can shed some light on the conundrum. Passover is the holiday of national liberation from Egyptian bondage.

Yet slavery back then was not only physical, it was also psychological. After hundreds of years of servitude and oppression, the Jews had a hard time accepting the grand idea of liberty when the opportunity presented itself. According to lore, many Jews chose to stay behind in Egypt precisely because they weren’t ready to leave.

Indeed, being locked into any paradigm, even when it is harmful, is a very human trait.

Therefore, the exodus was not only the physical emergence of the Children of Israel from under the hand of Pharaoh – that part was easy.

Rather, it was also a long process of weaning the Jews off of a slave mentality which was drilled into them over time.

Every generation has its Pharaoh. In our time, we have been told over and over again that there is only one way to move past the Arab-Israeli conflict. That is, of course, the two-state solution.

Like a mantra, it has been repeated relentlessly by world leaders, professors and in the press. The two-state mantra has now become our mental bondage, our Pharaoh, and we keep returning to our two-state Pharaoh when our slavish minds refuse to come up with an alternative formula to the one to which we have been conditioned.

By following the suggestions of the stubborn two-state Pharaoh, we have felt the brunt of the Ten Plagues on our own flesh: the plague of the second intifada; the plague of Hamas in Gaza due to the disengagement; the plague of neo-Nazi education of Palestinian children; and the Plague of the creation of a Palestinian narrative in which Israel, the most bona fide of states in the region, is actually the only country challenged as to its very legitimacy.

These plagues are the direct offspring of the stubborn two-state Pharaoh who refused to reverse course even as evidence poured in that the Oslo Accords had created a Palestinian Authority which was a repressive regime to its own people and certainly hostile to Israel.

But the shackles of our bondage are beginning to loosen.

From an American Who Prevented Peace In The Middle East

...As someone that grew up during the second intifada in Israel I know how nasty the conflict between the two people can get. I know what it’s like to be scared to get on a bus or go to a movie because of fear of an attack. There is nothing I want to see in the world more than peace- but peace will not come with a “poof”, it will come when both sides can coexist side by side. If a Judenfrei Jerusalem is needed for “peace” it is more than insanity to think that the peace will be a lasting one.

Ron Feingold..
Times of Israel..
10 April '14..

Watching the peace process unfold between the Palestinian Authority and the Israelis could be described as something along the lines of a romantic comedy combined with serious tragedy. There is really no other way to define a situation where The Secretary of State of the most powerful democratic country in the world says things like “Unfortunately, prisoners were not released on the Saturday they were supposed to be released” (all the prisoners have blood on their hands). A situation where the chief negotiator for the for the Palestinian Authority says things like “The meeting was long and difficult contrary to our expectations”- after meeting with the Israelis and Americans to discuss solving what is arguably one of the more complex conflicts the past nearly 70 years. We also heard Israeli leaders such as Isaac Herzog call right wing parties in Israel “fascist” in front of the largest Pro-Israel lobby in the world (AIPAC), in a speech that attempted to emphasize Israel’s diversity. Really, watching the interaction between those that claim to be lovers of peace the last few months has been nothing short of amusing.

However, this entertaining round of talks came virtually to an end this week after the sides seemed to have reached a stalemate. As John Kerry put it,

700 settlement units were announced in Jerusalem and, poof, that was sort of the moment. We find ourselves where we are.

After reading our Secretary of State’s statements and after getting over their poetic nature, I stopped, took a breath, and realized that apparently I, Ron Feingold, was directly responsible for the lack of peace in the Middle East.

Why the Peace Process Went Poof - A Tale of Two Letters

...The peace process went “poof” not because of 700 units in Jerusalem, but because–for the third time in three years–the Palestinians violated the foundational agreement of the process, which obligates them not to take “any step” outside bilateral negotiations to change the status of the disputed territories. For the third time, the Palestinians went to the UN; for the third time, there was no American response; for the third time, there was no penalty for the violation; and on April 8, there was not even an honest assessment of the situation by the secretary of state.

Rick Richman..
Commentary Magazine..
13 April '14..

Last week Zbigniew Brzezinski, joined by five other foreign-policy experts from the past, issued an open letter entitled “Stand Firm, John Kerry,” calling for “clarity” on “the critical moral and political issues” in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The letter castigated Israeli settlements and proposed “halting the diplomatic process” to “help stop this activity.” At “Pressure Points,” Elliott Abrams dismantled the letter, noting that, among other things, it ignored history.

As it happens, tomorrow is the 10th anniversary of one of the more important items of history the Brzezinski group ignored: the April 14, 2004 letter from President George W. Bush to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. In Tested by Zion: The Bush Administration and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Abrams recounts how the letter went through “many drafts, as words, phrases, and paragraphs came in and out,” ending with a “headline” that was clear: “There would be no return to 1967 and Israel could keep the major settlement blocks.” In her own memoir, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recounted spending three hours on the letter with Sharon the night before it was issued, and described the agreement to apply a “Google Earth test” for settlements: no new ones, no expanding the boundaries of them, but allowing building within existing settlements, since that would not reduce the land available for a Palestinian state. In his recent biography of Sharon, David Landau writes:

The American-Israeli diplomacy culminated in a hugely significant exchange of letters between Bush and Sharon in April 2004. In his letter, Sharon committed to carry out the [Gaza] disengagement. In his response, President Bush committed to back Israel on two vital issues: the Palestinian refugees would not return en masse to the State of Israel; and – by clear implication – the large settlement blocs on the West Bank, close to the 1967 line, would remain part of Israel in a final status agreement. Sharon regarded the exchange of letters as his most salient achievement as prime minister. He was probably right.

Last year, as Secretary Kerry was in Israel seeking to restart peace negotiations, an Israeli reporter asked him about “a guarantee from the past”–“telling that blocs of settlements can stay.” His question was straightforward: “does [the guarantee] exist?” Kerry responded: “I remember that commitment very well because I was running for president then, and I personally have supported the notion that the situation on the ground has changed.” Indeed, four days after the Bush letter was issued, Kerry was asked directly about it on Meet the Press:

MR. RUSSERT: On Thursday, President Bush … said that Israel can keep part of the land seized in the 1967 Middle East War and asserted the Palestinian refugees cannot go back to their particular homes. Do you support President Bush?

SEN. KERRY: Yes.

MR. RUSSERT: Completely?

SEN. KERRY: Yes.

The 2004 Bush letter was not simply a statement of policy; it was a negotiated deal, on which Israel relied in carrying out the Gaza disengagement, dismantling every settlement there and four others in the disputed territories as well. Sharon made the Bush letter part of the formal disengagement plan submitted to the Knesset for its approval. The U.S. Congress also endorsed the letter, in joint resolutions by the Senate (95-3) and House (407-9). The letter was endorsed in unambiguous terms by the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, who in 2013 as secretary of state correctly called it a “commitment.”