Kerry’s Peace Negotiations, Jew-Hatred and the Lethality of the Hamas-Fatah Unity Pact

...If Secretary Kerry wonders why the negotiations between the Palestinians and the Israelis suddenly went “poof,” as he put it, it might be useful for him to consider whether the problem lies with the building of some apartments for Jews in the capital of the Jewish state or with a genocidal ideology which is already intent on inculcating a new generation of shahids dedicated to slaughtering the residents of those new apartments simply because they are, in fact, Jews.

Richard Cravatts..
Times of Israel..
24 June '14..

The disheartening, though not entirely surprising, breakdown of talks between Israel and the Palestinians marked yet another failure by the two sides to come closer to an agreement that would usher the way for a Palestinian state. Yet, no sooner had the talks collapsed than blame was being assigned by both Secretary of State John Kerry and chief U.S. negotiator Martin Indyk—and naturally it was Israel that bore the brunt of their criticism. Echoing the sentiments of Palestinian leadership itself, Kerry and Indyk pointed to the dreaded settlements as the principal sticking point of the talks, with Indyk suggesting that Israel’s approval of new housing units in the Gilo neighborhood Jerusalem would, as he put it, “drive Israel into an irreversible binational reality.”

Secretary Kerry had the same complaint, insisting that Prime Minister Netanyahu’s refusal to release the final third of Palestinian prisoners, coupled with the provocative new building plans, were the Israeli actions that blew up the nine months of negotiations.

On one development even the State Department was less than enthusiastic: the reconciliation agreement reached by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, announced at the end of April, which State’s spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, deemed “disappointing” and the timing “troubling.” Even diplomats have to face certain truths, and Ms. Psaki had to begrudgingly admit that, in her words uttered with breathtaking understatement, “It’s hard to see how Israel can be expected to negotiate with a government that does not believe in its right to exist.”

Diplomacy involving Israel and the Palestinians invariably reaches this point—the thorny and slippery intersection of the politically possible and the diplomatically desired, with the inevitable result being that it is Israel made to be seen as the guilty party in having talks collapse, regardless of the actual events leading up to such a failure. Without even the barest amount of self awareness of how the inability to hold the Palestinians responsible for any major acts of concessions for strategic negotiation, U.S. diplomacy is continually based on the assumption that it is Israel—and only Israel—that is going to make negotiation move forward, and that it is Israel, and only Israel, that has the will and ability to make changes in policy and any concessions necessary to satisfy the Palestinian’s maximalist demands.

As a result, and as the Palestinians have cleverly figured out, Israel is made to release terrorist prisoners, agreed to land swaps, or to deliver any number of other painful concessions, just to further engage the Palestinians and keep them at the bargaining table.

While it may be comforting and diplomatically expedient for Secretary Kerry to insist that it is Israel’s fault when things go awry, or that Israel alone has the ability to do things and make concessions for peace, the idea that it is the settlements, or the number of murderers released to the Palestinians, or any other of the various issues of which Israel is always accused that is actually causing the logjam in the peace talks is simply naive and overlooks some far more lethal, pernicious, and ideologically-driven, far more intractable issues underlying negotiations between the Jewish state and its Palestinian foes.

What any honest observer of the history of conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors knows well, the Palestinians have been strident and inflexible in their maximalist demands, not to mention their intractability on such non-starters as the so-called “right of return,” the division of Jerusalem, and the proclaimed requirement that the Palestinian state will be judenrein, that, as Mahmoud Abbas himself has repeated, not one Jew will be allowed to live in the new Palestinian state.

But the unity pact between Fatah and Hamas brings to the surface a far more pernicious aspect, something that neither Prime Minister Netanyahu, Secretary Kerry, nor any other diplomat is likely to finesse in negotiations in Jerusalem, Ramallah, or Washington. While the State Department is quick to condemn the building of new apartments in Gilo, or hector the Israelis for not releasing Arab murderers in exchange for the possibility of continued talks, its seems to have been wilfully blind in not recognizing that the foundational document by which Hamas was established—the 1988 Hamas Charter—is animated with genocidal Jew-hatred, replete with a global strategy to extirpate Israel and murderous tactics based on millennial dreams of apocalyptic jihad.

Can you imagine? Arabs No Longer Take Obama Administration Seriously

...The extension of the peace talks means only one thing: that Abbas will be able to use the new time given to him to try to extract further concessions from the U.S. and Israel, while all the time bearing in mind that Obama and Kerry are willing to do almost anything to avoid a situation where they are forced to admit that their efforts and initiatives in the Middle East have failed.

Khaled Abu Toameh..
Gatestone Institute..
28 March '14..

The communiqué issued by Arab heads of state at the end of their summit in Kuwait this week shows that the Arab countries do not hold the Obama Administration in high regard or even take it seriously. The Arab leaders also proved once again that they do not care much about their own people, including the Palestinians.

The Arab leaders, at the end of their two-day meeting, announced their "total rejection of the call to consider Israel a Jewish state." This announcement came despite pressure from the Obama Administration on the Arab leaders to refrain from rejecting the demand.

A top Arab diplomat was quoted as saying that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry contacted Arab leaders on the eve of their 25th summit in Kuwait to "warn" them against rejecting Israel as a Jewish state.

Kerry, according to the diplomat, asked the Arab leaders completely to ignore the issue of Israel's Jewishness and not to make any positive or negative reference to it in their final statement.

Kerry did not want the Arab heads of state to repeat the same "mistake" that the Arab League foreign ministers made on March 9, when they too issued a statement declaring their refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. The Arab leaders, however, decided to ignore Kerry's warning and went on to endorse Palestinian Authority [PA] President Mahmoud Abbas's refusal.

Tzipi Livni’s boycott bogeyman

...The menace of BDS is being deliberately overstated. It is largely an artificial threat manufactured by the Israeli Left, and echoed by Kerry. Israel’s Left is deliberately prophesying doom and gloom to scare the Israeli public into retreat and withdrawal.

David M. Weinberg..
A Citadel Defending Zion..
07 February '14..

Not a day goes by without our chief peace negotiator, Tzipi Livni, lamenting the looming Western boycott of Israel. Every day, almost every hour, she howls and wails about our impending isolation. According to Livni, Israel is about to be hit with unprecedented diplomatic, economic and academic chill, with severe repercussions for business and prosperity.

All this bad karma is coming down the pike unless Israel snaps quickly to Livni’s tune of withdrawal from the West Bank, and concedes a state to the Palestinians.

Finance Minister Yair Lapid has chimed in too with a shabbily-concocted report that “confirms” Livni’s premonitions. The pocketbook of every Israeli is going to be hit hard, Lapid warns, by Western BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) activity, unless Israel scurries to US Secretary of State John Kerry’s camp and hurries to cut a deal with the Palestinians.

In fact, the “threat” of a global boycott against Israel is so obsessively being talked about these days by the political Left that you would think it a real threat; indeed, a greater threat than the growth of Global Jihad on our borders.

This is, of course, manifest nonsense. The menace of BDS is being deliberately overstated and wildly overestimated. It is largely an artificial threat manufactured by the Israeli Left and magnified a thousand times over by repetition and Livni-style moralizing.

It is no wonder that John Kerry and other Western leaders have taken to cautioning Israel about the consequences of a breakdown in the Palestinian negotiations. Surprise, surprise, says Kerry, if things don’t proceed his way, Israel could be squeezed by spiraling boycott and isolation.

But Kerry is just echoing what he is hearing from Livni, Lapid and other leftist friends.

Unfortunately, this has been the modus operandi of the Israeli political Left for some years now: Create a bogeyman with which to scare the Israeli public into retreat and withdrawal.

Having utterly failed to convince the Israeli public that establishment of a Palestinian state is a good idea that will bring peace and security to Israel, the Left is left with frightening us into withdrawal nevertheless. Otherwise we’ll lose some benefit or another.

The counterproductive panicking over talks with the Palestinians failing

...It could very well turn out that Avigdor Liberman's return to the Foreign Ministry can serve as a catalyst for a sea change in Israeli discourse – shifting from what appears to be efforts to panic the public into accepting dangerous concessions to laying the groundwork so that the Jewish State can weather the consequences of being true to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s adage that “no deal is better than a bad deal.”

Dr. Aaron Lerner..
IMRA Weekly Commentary..
06 November '13..




It seems that each day someone else tries to throw us into a panic over our negotiations with the Palestinians.

#1. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's outgoing national security adviser, Yaakov Amidror, warned Sunday that Israel could face international boycotts - and worse - if the talks with the Palestinians fail.

#2. Justice Minister Tzipi Livni suggested in a live interview on Israel Radio's noon news magazine the next day that the international atmosphere in the event the talks failed would make it difficult for Israel to engage in military operations to defend itself.

#3. President Shimon Peres then opined for the umpty-umpth time that there simply is no alternative to making a deal with the Palestinians creating a sovereign Palestinian state.

What is the operative conclusion from the above warnings?

That the Jewish State should cut a deal at any price?

This is patently absurd.

Failure Would Be Refreshing

Jennifer Rubin
Contentions/Commentary
24 August '10

We are about to begin — if it doesn’t end before it starts — another round of the endless talks between the Palestinian Authority and Israel. The sense of unreality pervades; all but the most obtuse observers understand this charade is futile. Mahmoud Abbas threatens to break off talks if Israel doesn’t extend a settlement ban which it has said it won’t extend. The notion that Abbas is ready to surrender those things that he must surrender to obtain a state and make a binding peace deal is laughable. As one of the canniest observers remarks, a Palestinian state becomes reality only if:

… its citizens can renounce once and for all the creeping Islamism that would sooner see them suffering the miseries and oppression of twelfth-century religious and cultural practice than thriving in a modern society; if they can cast off at last the self-strangling mythology of their own victimhood; and if they can shed their century-old yearning to set the blood of their Jewish neighbors flowing in the streets.

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No American Troops Should Die Protecting Israel

Marty Peretz
The New Republic
12 April '10

(Certainly a catchy title)

Almost before the celebrants at Barack Obama’s inauguration had gotten over their hangovers some 15 months ago, the president designated George Mitchell as his special envoy in the Middle East. I wrote then and several times since that he would be a flop, poor man. After all, it’s not the case that he had been a great success in any of his other high-minded missions, including the investigation into steroid use by baseball heroes. In his latest tussle with the now-almost-ancient struggle between Jews and Arabs over Palestine, he was also shackled by his boss’s stubbornly defective history of the region, which, of course, morphed into equally stubborn and defective formulae for fixing that history.

My guess is that this could be Mitchell’s final voyage to the Holy Land, and he may begin saying his goodbyes. Unless he is such a glutton for punishment that he can’t bear to leave. Senator, better take my advice. God bless and good riddance.

Maybe the Palestinian Authority will yet agree to participate in the “proximity talks” on which the president has staked so much. You need to keep in mind that it is the Palestinians--not the Israelis--who are rejecting these low-status negotiations. And not because they want higher-status talks. But because they want to extract concessions from Jerusalem as a precondition for participating even in this remote model for contact between the parties. Then, of course, they’ll try to extract more substantial concessions for attending direct talks. Maybe this is Obama’s plan as well.

But even he may be tiring of these prevaricative tactics. So, pushed by his (what should be) desolating failure even to get indirect contacts going, Obama may be tempted to spring his more-or-less detailed peace plan upon the world. As you surely have grasped, I am far from convinced that any such design will succeed. And it is not, as many in the media seem to assume, because Israel is intransigent. For that matter, I do not think one should blame the ongoing failures of diplomacy on the intransigence of the Palestinians, obstinate though they are. The real impediment to successful Israeli-Palestinians talks, even to unsuccessful talks, is that Palestine is a failed society.

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