Perilous times, but Israel is not alone nor without options - by Jonathan Tobin

...Though this alliance of convenience should, like ties with Russia, not be mistaken for a relationship based on common values and trust, it is nevertheless a fact. Saudi Arabia, as well as nations like Jordan and Egypt, understand that they need Israel as a bulwark against the unfolding chaos in Syria and an Iran that has been enriched and empowered by Obama’s nuclear deal. With growing ties with Moscow and Arab countries that pay lip service to the Palestinian cause but won’t risk their security for it, Israel is not alone nor without options.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
07 June '16..
Link: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/foreign-policy/middle-east/israel/how-isolated-is-netanyahu-paris-moscow/

After the much-anticipated French-sponsored Middle East peace conference ended last Friday with a whimper rather than a bang, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s critics were quick to point out that he shouldn’t be celebrating. They were right in that the event may be just the prelude to more such initiatives whose sole intent was to isolate the Israelis and perhaps set up one more climactic confrontation with the Obama administration this fall after the presidential election. It’s possible that at that point the United States might not oppose a new push for recognition of a Palestinian state without requiring it to first requiring it to make peace with Israel. If so, any satisfaction of the clear failure of the Paris conference would be premature. But as Netanyahu soon proved with a visit to Russia that highlighted Israel’s increasingly warm ties with the Putin regime, his nation is not as isolated as the prime minister’s domestic critics and foreign foes think.

Despite the French boasts about their plans to convene a conference that would establish a framework for Middle East peace without the presence of Israel or the Palestinians, nothing was accomplished in Paris. Nothing, that is, other than the usual bloviating by the French hosts and various Third World foreign ministers that were allowed to make speeches. If critics of the Obama administration can glean any satisfaction from this farce, it is that Secretary of State John Kerry was forced to sit through all of it for the sake of amity with Paris even though he was clearly put out by the futility of the effort and the indignity of having to attend. The platitudes issued at the end of the gathering could have just as easily been put out without the expense and inconvenience of the summit which left the world farther from a resolution of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians than it had been before it started. The only thing it accomplished was to encourage the Palestinians to continue to refuse to negotiate directly with the Israelis because such conferences make them think the international community will bludgeon and isolate the Jewish state into concessions at no cost to themselves.

Moreover, those counseling that danger lies ahead, specifically from an Obama administration that, despite only having seven months left in office, still feels it has a score to settle with Netanyahu. The Palestinians torpedoed every administration Middle East initiative over the past seven and a half years even though each one sought to tilt the diplomatic playing field in their direction. But the White House continues to rail at the Israelis while largely giving the Palestinians a pass for their ongoing refusal to make peace.

That pattern reasserted itself this week when National Security Advisor Susan Rice addressed the American Jewish Committee and, though promising military aid and saying that Israel wouldn’t be abandoned, also blasted Israeli government policies on settlements. Rice drew an analogy between the presence of Jews in places that are not only part of Jewish history but also decades old, and Palestinian incitement and violence. In this view, the mere act of a Jew living in the West Bank or Jerusalem is morally equivalent to a Palestinian murdering a Jew. Whatever one’s views about the wisdom of the settlements, this is offensive.

What to worry about far more than a meaningless gesture by the French - Jonathan S. Tobin

...Pundits may think the president would refrain from any move that could antagonize Jewish voters during the fall election campaign. But if such a resolution were to come up for a vote after Election Day in November there would be no political impediment to a U.S. move that would be the logical conclusion to an eight-year effort to delegitimize Israel’s negotiating stance and to create more “daylight” between the U.S. and Israel. That’s a scenario Israel and its friends ought to be worried about far more than a meaningless gesture by the French.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
31 January '16..

At first glance, the announcement on Friday by French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius that Paris will recognize Palestine if a new round of peace talks it has proposed fails, isn’t that alarming. As the Times of Israel points out in an analysis, such a move would make it the 137th nation to recognize a state of Palestine that is, as of the moment, a legal fiction rather than an actual sovereign country. Similar declarations from other European nations have done nothing for the Palestinian people and have, as Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu pointed out again, only hurt the cause of peace. But as numbingly familiar as the ritual of endorsing Palestine might be, this gesture may present a serious danger to Israel’s international position in 2016. The French gesture is not just an indication of how detached from the reality of the Middle East that Western nations have become. It could also set the stage for the last great struggle between the Obama administration and Israel and do lasting damage both to the Jewish state and its alliance with the United States.

Any sensible person that has paid even the slightest attention to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians would know that a proposal for a summit and new talks right now is absurd. The Palestinians have refused repeated offers of statehood and independence that would have involved major Israeli withdrawals in the last 15 years. At every stage, they have walked away and often answered plans for a land-for-peace exchange with terrorism.

Though international observers are obsessed with the concept of an Israeli pullback from the West Bank and parts of Jerusalem as the magic formula for peace, the Palestinians have never shown any interest in such schemes. Though Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas has talked at times to Western and Israeli audiences as if he supports the two-state solution, he sings a different tune to his own people. Like the overwhelming majority of Palestinians, Abbas is unwilling to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders would be drawn.

Just as troubling is the fact that the putative leader of the Palestine the Europeans seek to recognize has become a leading voice fomenting terror and hatred of Jews and Israelis. His role in starting the current “stabbing intifada” when he broadcast lies about Israeli plans to harm the Temple Mount mosque has been matched by the applause terrorists who kill random Jews have gained from the PA once the current offensive started.

Abbas’s stance is motivated in part by his own rejectionism but it is also an indication of how much he fears his Hamas rivals. The mythical state of Palestine is, after all, still divided between two entities. Abbas’s Fatah kleptocracy runs the day-to-day affairs of the West Bank with Israeli security assistance that ensures his safety as much as it is intended to help suppress terrorism. Meanwhile Hamas continues to run Gaza as an independent Palestinian state in all but name. That Gaza was converted into a terrorists launching pad after Israel withdrew every settler and soldier in 2005 stands as a warning that the majority of Israelis heed. Repeating that experiment in the West Bank would be madness, not a step toward peace. That’s why even the head of Israel’s Zionist Union opposition party has given up on the two-state solution for the foreseeable future.

Given these facts, one has to ask what the French or anyone else could possibly think another attempt at a summit would accomplish? More than that, their statement that failure would result in recognition without forcing Abbas or Hamas to first make peace with Israel is merely a guarantee of continued Palestinian intransigence. They believe saying no will eventually lead to United Nations resolutions that will demand Israeli withdrawal without peace and ultimately an international boycott of the Jewish state that will bring them one step closer to the goal of its elimination.

That’s where the lame duck Obama administration comes in.

The Old Three No's - The New Three No's

...Notice, of course, that two of three of Abbas's "No's" are identical to the "No's" issued by the Arab League in Khartoum in 1967. No peace and no recognition. The third "no" is a little different. Abbas is willing to sit across a table from Jews if it means the release of murderers and if he can blame his own intransigence on the Israelis for the purpose of undermining support for both the Jewish people and the Jewish State.

Michael Lumish..
Israel Thrives..
27 March '14..

In 1967, meeting shortly after the 6 Day War in Khartoum, Sudan, the Arab League issued its famous "Three No's." When it came to the Jews of the Middle East there would be no peace, no recognition, and no negotiations. This is hardly surprising given the fact that for thirteen hundred years, from the time of Muhammad until the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the Jews were a second and third class non-citizenry living under the submission of Islam. Naturally the Arab League refused peace, recognition, and negotiations, because to do otherwise would be to recognize that Jews have rights to autonomy within their own homeland, a notion that directly contradicts al-Sharia.

Nothing much has changed in recent decades. As we read in the Times of Israel:

Abbas rejected Netanyahu’s demand that he recognize Israel as a Jewish state. He also refused to abandon the Palestinian demand for a “right of return” for millions of Palestinians and their descendants — a demand that, if implemented, would drastically alter Israel’s demographic balance and which no conceivable Israeli government would accept. And finally, he refused to commit to an “end of conflict,” under which a peace deal would represent the termination of any further Palestinian demands of Israel.

How exciting!

These are the New Three No's!

Notice, of course, that two of three of Abbas's "No's" are identical to the "No's" issued by the Arab League in Khartoum in 1967. No peace and no recognition.

The third "no" is a little different. Abbas is willing to sit across a table from Jews if it means the release of murderers and if he can blame his own intransigence on the Israelis for the purpose of undermining support for both the Jewish people and the Jewish State. So, he is willing to negotiate in the sense that some of his people show up some of the time to speak mainly with Americans and others, rather than the hideous Jews.

Abbas's third "No" is his insistence on a Palestinian-Arab "right of return" for the purpose of undermining Israel's very reason to be.

But it's not as if we did not see this coming:

UNESCO Fiasco the Classic Example of Why the Talks Will Always Fail

...But the American decision to distance itself from the project sent an unmistakable message that the Obama administration views any talk about Jewish ties to the land as too controversial to warrant its involvement. So long as the Palestinians are enabled by both the UN and the U.S. to continue denying Jewish history, the peace process that both Bokova and the State Department claim to take so seriously has no chance of success.

UNESCO's Director General Irina Bokova poses
with the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Rabbi Marvin Hier
and a poster for the exhibit on the Jewish people's
3,500-year connection to the land of Israel, which
she subsequently cancelled. 

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
21 January '14..

Did anyone really think a United Nations agency would sponsor a scholarly exhibition about the 3,500-year-old connection between the Jewish people and the land of Israel? The world body’s constituent agencies have been cesspools of anti-Semitism for decades with many of them devoting a disproportionate amount of time, money and effort to attempts to delegitimize the Jewish state and to condemn its every action. Chief among the culprits has been UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization), which endorsed the infamous 1975 “Zionism is racism” resolution by the UN General Assembly on the anniversary of Kristallnacht and has since been a veritable playground for international Israel-bashers. The United States and Israel stopped paying dues to the agency in 2011 when it admitted “Palestine” as a full voting member although it is not a UN member state.

But, perhaps in an effort to win back American support, UNESCO agreed to host an exhibit on the Jews and their ancient homeland at its Paris headquarters. But all it took was a single letter of protest from the Arab members of the agency to get UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova to cancel the exhibit created by the Simon Wiesenthal Center on the grounds that it might harm the Middle East peace process. This is an outrageous insult to Jews everywhere since it treats the ties between the Jewish people and the land of Israel as a matter of debate rather than historical fact. As the author of the exhibit, historian Robert Wistrich has said, coming from an organization devoted to Holocaust commemoration, the decision once again illustrates that the UN “loves dead Jews” but regards the existence of live ones, especially in the state of Israel, as something it cannot stomach.

This is no surprise to anyone who follows the UN, but it is interesting to note that in explaining her decision to shelve the exhibit, Bokova used the same excuse cited by the U.S. State Department when it, too, chose not to co-sponsor the exhibit. Only Israel, Canada, and Montenegro were willing to put their names on the display. Though the U.S. has subsequently and rightly condemned Bokova’s decision, the Obama administration’s decision to keep its distance from the exhibit makes its rebuke to UNESCO an example of rank hypocrisy.

The UNESCO decision to avoid anything having to do with the history of the region might make sense if the world body refrained from endorsements of the Palestinian view of events. But this is the same United Nations that holds an annual International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People (expanded now to a “Year of Solidarity” in 2014), an event that is nothing less than an Israel-bashing festival, replete with pseudo-historical displays aimed at walking back the UN’s 1947 decision to create a Jewish state in the then-British Mandate for Palestine alongside an Arab one.

The Farce Ends

Jennifer Rubin
Contentions/Commentary
29 July '10

The worst-kept secret in the Middle East “peace process” has been that Mahmoud Abbas was never serious about a peace deal. This was apparent to anyone who has observed him over the years, who has followed his duplicitous rhetoric (incitement in Arabic, peace lingo in English), and who understands that he is incapable of making an enforceable peace agreement that would recognize the Jewish state, ensure that Israel retains defensible borders, renounce the dream of a one-state solutions with Jerusalem as its Muslim capital, and commit to disarmament and the renunciation of terror. Even to list what is required reveals how misplaced were the expectations of Obama and his “smart” diplomats.

After 18 months of badgering and bullying Israel and sucking up to the Muslim World, that world is on the verge of dealing a stinging blow to their patron: “Despite pressure from the US and EU, Abbas has signaled in recent days that he does not intend to enter direct talks until Israel stops all settlement construction, as well as construction in east Jerusalem, and commits itself to the establishment of a Palestinian state based on the June 4, 1967, lines.” And he’s gone scurrying to the Arab League to bless this.

(Read full post)

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