A no-go zone where terrorists should be free to live without fear of arrest?

The notion that IDF troops should submit to live fire as well as lethal rock showers without seeking to defend themselves is not a standard that anyone would apply to any other army or police force in the world.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
27 August '13..

The Israelis have done it again. After Secretary of State John Kerry managed to drag both parties back to the peace table, the Israelis are doing their utmost to sabotage the talks by provoking the Palestinians with violent incursions into Palestinian towns and villages that have resulted in the indiscriminate use of gunfire by the Israel Defense Forces that led to several deaths of innocent Arabs. If the Palestinian Authority has stayed away from the negotiations in order to protest this, then it is the only way they have of protecting their people against Israeli outrages. Or so we are being told.

The prevailing narrative of the incidents alluded to in the preceding paragraph follow this line in which the presence of Israeli forces in Palestinian areas is not merely a provocation but a standing argument for the need to force the Jewish state to pull back to the 1967 lines. But the problem with this narrative is that it is based on a lie. Incidents like the one that occurred today in Qalandia that resulted in three Palestinian deaths and last week’s confrontation in Jenin do illustrate the problem with the peace process, but it is not the one that the liberal mainstream media and the international press think it is. The idea that Israel is staging these attacks to undermine the talks is false. The fact that the IDF is forced to enter built-up areas in order to track down terrorist suspects shows just how unreliable the Palestinian Authority is as a peace partner. Moreover, the willingness of mobs in these towns to rally to defend suspects and attack the IDF with gunfire and rocks is testimony to how deeply rooted support for terror operations is in a Palestinian population that we are told is ready for an end to the conflict.

It needs to be understood that the relative lack of terrorism directed at Israel from the West Bank is not solely the work of the security fence that is reviled by the left for its role in preventing suicide bombings. It is also the function of proactive IDF actions in the West Bank, including checkpoints that make it harder for killers to move about with impunity, and raids such as the ones that have recently led to shootings where the Israelis can arrest those planning or guilty of having committed terrorism.

Going after these terrorists is dangerous work, especially when ordinary Palestinians still venerate those who seek to kill Jews and are willing to risk injury to prevent their arrest. The notion that IDF troops should submit to live fire as well as lethal rock showers without seeking to defend themselves is not a standard that anyone would apply to any other army or police force in the world.

No Good Will in Sight - Meet the Terrorists

...But whatever one may think of the prime minister’s decision, the shameless manner by which the PA seeks to honor terrorists and the importance it placed on the issue undermines any hopes for peace. Their freedom will only encourage and legitimate the next round of Palestinian attacks when their intransigence causes the peace talks to fail.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
12 August '13..

Israel’s decision to release terrorist prisoners to entice the Palestinian Authority to show up for the peace talks convened by Secretary of State John Kerry is being described in international circles as a “good will” gesture. But if Kerry thought the controversial by Prime Minister Netanyahu would actually engender good will toward Israel on the part of the Palestinians or help Israelis think better of the Palestinians, he is learning just how wrong he was. Indeed, it is doubtful that anything that Kerry could have asked Netanyahu to do could have done more to make peace seem less likely.

The decision had already been the subject of bitter debate on both sides last month, but today’s announcement of the first round of releases has revived the argument. The details of the crimes committed by these Palestinians are painful to read. But just as painful for Israelis is the way they are being lauded as “freedom fighters” by the same Palestinian Authority that they are told is the Jewish state’s peace partner. That the PA is also saying that none of these killers will be deported or at least sent into relative isolation in Gaza is also chilling. The Palestinian reaction to their release is conclusive evidence that the culture of violence that makes such terrorist acts acceptable has not sufficiently been altered in order to make peace possible.

The prime minister’s decision has been slammed in some quarters because of the belief that he had a choice between releasing prisoners and enacting a building freeze in Jerusalem and the West Bank when Kerry forced him to assist the re-starting of the talks. His choice, if indeed there really was such a choice, is defensible on the grounds that making concessions on territory would have made negotiations pointless. But whether he was right or wrong to pick this option, the details about the released prisoners will not convince many Israelis that there is much hope for the talks. Here, thanks to the Times of Israel, is a brief compendium of the lucky Palestinian prisoners:

Pursuing ‘Peace’ Mirages, Kerry Returning to Israel

P. David Hornik..
Frontpagemag.com..
22 May '13..

On Thursday Secretary of State John Kerry will be visiting Israel, and presumably also the Palestinian Authority, for the fourth time since accompanying President Obama on his visit here in late March. Four times since late March suggests something like obsession. Indeed, Kerry is reportedly set to unveil a “framework for peace talks” in early June.

The PA, for its part, is making threats about what it will do if the talks don’t start up again. Israel Hayom reports that “The Palestinians have done all the legal work necessary to join 63 U.N. agencies, conventions and treaties [and are] planning to apply as a state to 16 international organizations if peace talks with Israel [do] not resume by June.”

The Palestinians want to make this unilateral-statehood push on the basis of the UN vote last November that gave them the status of a nonmember observer state. The United States (along with Israel, of course) was one of the few countries voting “no” and, at least declaratively, strongly opposed the Palestinian move.

Meanwhile, not for the first time, the Palestinians—both official bodies and civilians—have been engaging in behavior not notably consonant with visions of peace.

Earlier this week it was reported that:

A Palestinian man who was detained by the Palestinian Authority security forces in Hebron has lost the ability to speak as a result of severe torture, according to a report released by the Independent Commission for Human Rights.

Mohamed Abdel Karim Dar of Hebron was hospitalized after being tortured while in detention, the report, which documented 28 cases of torture in PA prisons in the West Bank last month, said.

Dar had been detained by agents belonging to the PA’s Preventive Security Service and held in solitary confinement, the document said.

“He lost the ability to speak and suffered from wounds to his body as a result of banging his head against the wall and tying his hands while being held in solitary confinement,” the report added….

The organization…said that it had received complaints of torture and mistreatment against other branches of the PA security forces in the West Bank—13 against the police, seven against the Preventive Security Service, seven against the General Intelligence Service and one against Military Intelligence.

Earlier this month World Tribune reported that

Britain…has been playing a major role in training and financing Palestinian security forces in the West Bank…. [O]fficials said Britain has been training and advising virtually every major PA security force, often in coordination with the United States.

The report goes on to note that British intelligence “has repeatedly urged PA security commanders to stop torture,” but “acknowledged that torture and abuse continued in PA detention facilities against Hamas suspects and pro-democracy activists.”

Bryen - No More ‘Peace Talks,’ Please

The Arab-Israeli conflict has no clear parameters for resolution.

Shoshana Bryen..
pjmedia.com..
02 February '12..
H/T Ruthfully Yours

The current round of Israeli-Palestinian meetings in Jordan ended with a Palestinian decision to leave. “The Israelis brought nothing new in these meetings,” said one official, without bothering to note the obvious — neither did the Palestinians.

The talks were the result of a Quartet plan to have Israelis and Palestinians make proposals on territory and security in hopes of reaching a deal in 2012. Questions abound, but the most important is, “How many more times will this farce be played out without recognition of the real and incompatible bottom lines of the two parties?”

It is that fundamental incompatibility — not the lack of pressure or lack of bribes — that prevents the present creation of the mythical “two-state solution” embedded in the Oslo Accords, negotiated without U.S. participation, and signed in 1993.

From the Israeli side, Oslo had three underlying assumptions:

That Palestinian nationalism could be understood as the mirror image of Jewish nationalism (Zionism);

That Palestinian nationalism could find its full expression in a West Bank and Gaza Strip state; and

That there is a price Israel, the United States, and Europe could pay to the Palestinians that would overcome any remaining Palestinian objection to Jewish sovereignty in the region.

All three assumptions have been proven wrong.

Israel Straight Talk: Peres and Obama - Now it is Imperative for Peace?

Avi Abelow
Israel Straight Talk
IST #43
06 April '11

Yesterday Israeli President Shimon Peres and US President Barak Obama met and made a joint statement that now more than ever it is imperitive to make peace. If anything the instability of the Middle East today means that now is not the time to push forward with peace talks.



Share this video if you agree. Visit us on http://www.facebook.com/israelstraighttalk and let us know what you think. All comments and questions are welcome.

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Western Negotiators Give Up on Israel-Palestinian Peace Process (At least for a few weeks)

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
18 March '11

http://rubinreports.blogspot.com/2011/03/western-negotiators-give-up-on-israel.html

This is one of those buried news items that has much wider importance. After their umteenth (a non-word used in English to indicate a very large number) attempt to bring progress in Israel-Palestinian peace, the Quartet (U.S., EU, Russia, UN) actually admitted (gasp!) that nothing is going to work at present.

Yes! They are actually going to go away for a few weeks before trying again. AND they didn't just blame Israel for the deadlock. Of course, some of the Europeans are thinking of just recognizing an independent Palestinian state, thus eliminating the need to have actual negotiations or give Israel any say in the matter. But that doesn't seem about to happen.

As I've pointed out previously, nothing at all is going to happen this year because the Palestinian Authority is putting all of its bets on getting this recognition. So why bother to talk to Israel? On the contrary, its interest is in proving that talks are hopeless. That's why, the Palestinian leadership is saying, it has to just be handed independence on a silver platter.

People ask me whether the latest upheavals in the Middle East will show people that it isn't all about Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict. (In fact, it hasn't been--if it ever was--for about 30 years.) My response is that objectively, of course, the obsession with Israel and the conflict doesn't make sense.

But then I list a lot of previous events that should have had that effect already. Some did, at least temporarily: the long conflict for hegemony among Arab states; Egypt-Israel peace; the failure of Arab states to help Syria and the PLO in the 1982 war; their growing indifference to the issue; the Iranian revolution and the rise of revolutionary Islamism; the Iran-Iraq war; the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait; and so on down to the present.

Perhaps the recent revolutionary upheavals in several Arab countries coupled with the obvious rise of Iran and its bloc will finally break the fanatical (because it's not responsive to logic) belief by many in the West in "linkage." More realistically, these events might just put a dent into it.

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Lessons of the Peace Process: The Missing Reflection

Rick Richman
Contentions/Commentary
23 December '10

The final chapter of Dennis Ross’s 800-page book on the Oslo Process (The Missing Peace) is entitled “Learning the Lessons of the Past and Applying Them to the Future.” Among his lessons was a warning that the process can become “essentially an end in itself” — self-sustaining because there is never a right time to disrupt it. He concluded that less attention should have been paid to the negotiators and more to preparing their publics for compromise. With respect to the Palestinians, it is a lesson still unlearned.

The lessons the Bush administration drew from the Clinton experience were that Arafat was an obstacle to peace; the Palestinian Authority needed new leadership and democratic institutions; and peace could be achieved only in phases, not all at once. Bush endorsed a Palestinian state in 2002; arranged the three-phase Roadmap in 2003; assured Israel in 2004 of the U.S. commitment to defensible borders; facilitated the Gaza withdrawal in 2005; began moving the parties in 2006 to final status negotiations; and sponsored the Annapolis Process in 2007-08, which produced another Israeli offer of a state and another Palestinian rejection. In the meantime, the Palestinians elected Hamas — an inconvenient fact that peace processors simply ignore.

There were multiple lessons to be drawn from the successive failures of Clinton and Bush, but Obama did not pause to consider them. He appointed George Mitchell on his second day in office and sent him immediately to the Middle East on the first of an endless series of trips. He sought a total Israeli construction freeze and reciprocal Arab concessions — getting nothing from the Arabs but obtaining a one-time Israeli moratorium, which produced nothing. The administration has tried “proximity talks,” followed by “direct talks,” and now “parallel talks.”

(Read full "Lessons of the Peace Process: The Missing Reflection")

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Time For Israel To Stop Telling Abbas He Doesn't Have To Prove He Is Willing To Make Peace

Daled Amos
05 December '10

In this interview with Eliot Spitzer, Michael Oren gives a great explanation of the Israeli position on why it will not extend the moratorium on the settlements.

Nevertheless, there is one part of Oren's explanation, one which he proudly gives, which I find frustrating. Here is the video, starting at the spot where Oren explains how open-minded Israel is at the negotiating table:



Ambassador Michael Oren practically brags:

We don't say to the Palestinians: listen, you have to prove to us you are willing to do peace. We don't say to them that Hamas is ruling half of the Palestinian people--why don't you get your house in order first before you sit down and negotiate with us. We don't say to them you have to stop naming squares in downtown Ramallah after terrorists--the leading Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat this week wrote a letter praising a Palestiian terrorist who killed an Israeli minister in cold blood and praising him as a great martyr. We don't say you have to stop all that or we won't talk to you.

The obvious question is: why not?

The result of Israel's 'righteousness' in making no preconditions is that Abbas gets a free ride while he wipes up the floor with Israel.

(Read full post)

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How’s the Peace Process Going?

Jennifer Rubin
Contentions/Commentary
04 November '10

The direct non-peace talks stopped being direct more than a month ago. Obama has tried to bribe and cajole Bibi into extending the settlement moratorium. It hasn’t worked, and the longer the hiatus, the less likely it seems that the talks would resume. And don’t expect things to improve, given the midterm elections’ results.

Elliott Abrams explains:

There is one clear bottom line from this election: Obama emerges from it a weakened president. And that, says ex-U.S. diplomat Elliott Abrams, means that “anyone who is trying to resist him feels probably that resistance is a little easier.” That will probably hold true in the case of the Middle East peace talks, where the U.S. president has been pushing the Israelis and Palestinians to come to an accord.

Now, says Abrams, “both sides out there [will] feel a little bit freer to push back.” And they’re almost certainly not the only ones who will see it that way. This election clearly does not make Barack Obama’s job as America’s diplomat in chief any easier.

In fact, there is so much downtime for the peace-talk negotiating team that its members are actually spending time talking to outside experts on efforts to promote democratization in Egypt. Maybe this is for real and bespeaks a recognition that their current sloth is a moral embarrassment and a strategic error. Or maybe this is just for show. But it also says something about the state of the non-peace, non-talks:

(Read full post)

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The Desperation Summit

Benjamin Kerstein
newledger.com
06 September '10

The strangest thing about the newest round of talks between Israel and the Palestinians is that neither side wants them. In fact, there is only one party to these negotiations that does want them, and that is the United States or, more precisely, the Obama administration.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is currently sitting on a relatively comfortable status quo. Both the Israeli and Palestinian economies are doing well, violence is at a minimum, Fatah is cornered politically between Israel and Hamas, and the rightwing members of his coalition who are opposed to any territorial concessions on principle are relatively happy. Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas is not in nearly as sanguine a position, but he is not doing particularly badly either. He has maintained his office despite his unpopularity, prevented Hamas from taking power in the West Bank, and led the Palestinians into a growth economy that is finally reversing some of the damage done by the second intifada.

Neither man, in short, has the slightest interest in upsetting the apple cart.

In fact, only one man does. With the American economy still sluggish, his administration distracted by what it considers to be peripheral issues like the Park51 mosque, his poll numbers collapsing, and with no substantial foreign policy achievements whatsoever to boast of, Barack Obama is put simply, desperate for a win.

(Read full article)

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Is There ANYONE In The Palestinian Authority Who Is Serious About Peace?

Daled Amos
13 August '10

“I don’t want my comment on the demilitarization of the uprising to be misunderstood … All I meant is that we are in a phase that does not necessitate arms because we want to negotiate” (Washington Times, December 15, 2004).

“I say to them [the terrorists], this is not the time for this kind of attack” (Washington Times, January 3, 2005).

“A crime against the Palestinian people” (New York Times, July 13, 2005).

“These attacks threaten our national security and undermine our credibility on the international arena” (Jerusalem Post, July 24, 2005).

“These events undermine the truce and calm we had respected” (Reuters, October 17, 2005).
Mahmoud Abbas, who never condemns terrorist attacks as a crime against the Israeli people

And Abbas continues to play games, as Joel Mowbray wrote in 2008:

Discussing the question of whether or not Hamas must recognize Israel, Mr. Abbas explained, I don't demand that the Hamas movement recognize Israel. I only demanded of the [Palestinian] national unity government that would work opposite Israel in recognition of it.

This comment raised eyebrows because it shifted the common understanding of what it means to recognize the Jewish state. Most understand recognition to be fairly straightforward: The acknowledgement of the right of Israel to exist peacefully as a Jewish state neighboring a Palestinian one. Mr. Abbas, however, now defines recognition as acknowledging in a literal sense that an entity named Israel is the country at the other end of the negotiating table.

Every time that Abbas says something that appears to imply recognition of Israel, the statement is either denied later or is simply never repeated in Arabic, when it counts.

(Read full post)

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Bibi-Obama Presser

Jennifer Rubin
Contentions/Commentary
06 July '10

The presser was long on platitudes and short on specifics. To reaffirm the “special relationship” (actually a term generally used for the U.S.-British relationship, which is less than special these days) is nice. Obama disputed that he had tried to distance the U.S. from Israel — entirely disingenuous but generally a good idea to close the public distance between the two countries. As the New York Times reports:

The two leaders were not specific about what “concrete steps” Mr. Netanyahu could take to move the peace talks along, though Mr. Obama seemed to suggest a timetable when he said it was his hope that direct talks would begin “well before” a moratorium on settlement construction expires this fall. The president said he believed that Mr. Netanyahu was “willing to take risks for peace.”

Informed observers really aren’t buying that much has changed:

Even so, Aaron David Miller, a longtime Middle East peace negotiator, said that Tuesday’s session at the White House reflected a “false calm” in the relationship.

“It’s symptomatic of the fact that neither man right now has a stake in a fight, a crisis, and both in fact have stakes in wanting to demonstrate that this relationship is functional,” Mr. Miller said, adding that he saw a “fundamental expectations gap” between the two leaders.

Netanyahu seemed pleased about the progress on sanctions against Iran, but there was not much new on that most critical issue:

(Read full post)

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Peace for Land

Jay D. Homnick
The American Spectator
26 January '10

"So, Sadie, why do you look so happy today?"

"I got a letter from my son Abe in Israel."

"And how is with Abe?"

"He lost all his money in a business, his apartment was damaged by a bomb and he had to wait a month to get a refrigerator."

"Then why so happy?"

"Because mine Abe writes such a beautiful Hebrew!"

This bit of Jewish gallows humor encapsulates much of the modern experience of having coreligionists, often relatives, in Israel. The grind of their everyday battle for survival is tolerated while the astonishing phenomenon of the revenant country and language is celebrated. The perfect metaphor for life in Israel is the ubiquitous habit there of eating sunflower seeds. They jam a fistful of unopened shells in their mouths, then walk down the street spitting the shells while somehow extracting the seeds with teeth and tongue, swallowing only the seeds. Israelis spend their lives dodging shells of one sort or another.

One of these is the shell game of the world-demanded American-sponsored Europe-monitored peace talks with the Palestinians. As matters are currently constituted, these are simply impossible to bring to a satisfactory conclusion. Sounds shocking, but no less true for all that.

(Read full article)
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It’s Starting to Look As If The Obama Administration Has Learned Nothing from Its First Year

Barry Rubin

The Rubin Report

14 January '10

In the United States, about half the population and most of the policy elite thinks that President Barack Obama’s administration is a great success internationally. The other half doesn’t. A key reason for the first group’s attitude is its obsession with the highly visible popularity issue, the idea that America is more liked in the world. The problem is that, at the same time, it is less respected and that is the factor that counts.

As we move into 2010, with the administration’s first, “learning,” year behind it, a turn toward learning the lessons of that experience is not yet visible. This is especially so on the two most high-profile Middle East issue.

Originally, the administration suggested that it would raise sanctions against Iran in September 2009 if engagement yielded no fruit. Then that was pushed back to the end of 2009. Now we have a new estimate: July 2010. Maybe. And we also have the defining of those sanctions long in advance as ineffective, narrowly—and symbolically—focused on a ruling elite which will never feel any pain as a result.

This, then, is the way the Obama Administration views threats, which will make its adversaries see them as hollow. In a Brussels speech, U.S. ambassador to the European Union William Kennard explained:

"You'll hear over the next six months a lot more about our efforts on sanctions."

Hear about them? Haven’t we been hearing about them for a year? And at the end of six months will we actually see them?

(Read full article)
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Obama to Israel: Let’s start at the end

Meryl Yourish
Yourish.com
10 January '10

As reported last week, the Obama administration is going to try to start at the end in order to report some kind of progress in Middle East peace talks. The thing is, you really can’t start at the end. You can work backwards in many things, but you can’t work backwards in a peace process where each side is supposed to show the steps it has taken to achieve the peace. But of course, the Palestinians have been arguing for the endgame from the very beginning, when the people doing the negotiating (or lack thereof) were the Arab states that had occupied Gaza and the West Bank from 1948 to 1967 (cf: Three No’s of Khartoum).

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Friday that once borders are agreed on, the dispute over settlements would be moot.

“Resolving borders resolves settlements, resolving Jerusalem resolves settlements,” Clinton said. “I think we need to lift our sights and instead of being looking down at the trees, we need to look at the forest.”

(Read full post)
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