No Good Deed Goes Unpunished - by Jonathan S. Tobin

...Peres’s problem wasn’t so much the skepticism of the Israeli people about Oslo—which understandably increased once they realized they were trading land for terror, not peace—but the fact that there was no moral equivalent to him on the other side. He was fond of saying, you make peace with your enemies, not your friends. What was needed for this formula to work, however, was a former enemy who shares the fantasy of a Middle East in which the century-old war against Zionism is consigned to the dustbin of history. There was no such person on the Palestinian side in the aftermath of Oslo. Nor is there one now.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
06 October '16..
Link: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/foreign-policy/middle-east/2144281no-good-deed-goes-unpunished-shimon-peres/

A week after Shimon Peres was buried, the tributes for the last of Israel’s founders have ceased, but the vitriol from the Arab world continues. Rather than praise the man who worked harder than any Israeli for coexistence and the creation of a Palestinian state, the Arab and Muslim world still only sees Peres as a Jew and an Israeli, which is to say an enemy to be destroyed no matter what he did or didn’t do. Even those Palestinians who took part in the Oslo peace process that he sponsored are blasting him as a Zionist who didn’t really want peace. Much of this invective is just the sort of typical anti-Semitic slander that has been slung at Israel for several decades. But what’s significant about the groupspeak his death has generated is not that it shows resistance to peacemaking but that it is tied to a revisionist history of the last 25 years that demonstrates why Peres’s Oslo gambit was doomed to fail.

A lot of the attacks on Peres were related to the decision of Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas to attend the funeral. Abbas was lavishly praised for this by President Obama and much of the West, but he was panned by Palestinians. The problem here is that Abbas’s typical double game in which he speaks one way in English to the West and another in Arabic to his own people was exposed by his presence at the funeral.

Though Abbas was smart to seek Obama’s favor in advance of the next push for an independence resolution at the United Nations, Palestinians viewed the effort as contradicting the nonstop drumbeat of incitement to hatred against Israel and Jews that flows from the official PA media. While Abbas is still interested in being viewed as a peacemaker abroad, he has done nothing to create a constituency for peace at home. The need to compete for popularity with the Islamists of Hamas has actually decreased the already negligible backing for an end to the conflict.

Elsewhere, the problem goes deeper than Abbas’s double dealing. It is to some extent understandable that opponents of Israel see Peres primarily in the context of his work in helping to defend Israel against those who wished to destroy it in his first decades of public life. Israel’s survival against the odds is something for which they do not forgive him or the Jewish state. That he is accused of atrocities such as the shelling of a Lebanese village in an area where terrorists were shooting at Israel is also not surprising, but the hypocrisy of such charges is lost on those making them.

More important than any of that is the impulse on the part of Palestinians and their cheerleaders to chart a revisionist history of Oslo and the peace process. According to Peres’s detractors, like former PA official Hanan Ashrawi, who penned an attack published Monday in the New York Times, the Israeli’s efforts for peace were fraudulent. In her version of the events of the last two decades, Peres was part of an Israeli effort to deny Palestinian rights and choke off their demands for statehood and sovereignty.

Surprise! More Bad Advice From a False Prophet

...Shimon Peres’s lifetime of service to Israel may balance out the disastrous nature of some of the policies he advocated in the historian’s ledger. Prophets may never be honored in their own time, but unfortunately false prophets often are. So long as Peres is treated as an authority by the media and Western governments, his urging of more such fiascos on his successors is not only deplorable, it is downright dangerous.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
17 February '15..

After a career that stretches back to Israel’s birth, 91-year-old Shimon Peres is a revered national institution. His multifaceted work in helping to build the state and especially its defense establishment demands respect and admiration. So, too, does a record of public service that saw him serve in virtually every key position of responsibility in the Israeli government. Thus, when Peres speaks, he deserves a hearing. But as much as he should be considered the last of the country’s living founding fathers, his past performance as a prophet is as bad as his resume is impressive. Thus, when Peres tells us today that European Jews shouldn’t panic, that Middle East peace will happen in his lifetime, and that, far from worrying about Iran, we should think the Islamist regime’s days are numbered, these predictions should be dismissed as not only wrong, but dangerously wrong. The problem with Peres is not just that his optimism is foolish, it’s that all too many people in the corridors of power in Washington and Western Europe think he knows what he’s talking about.

Peres served as the headliner at a Times of Israel event held Sunday night in New York and if his hosts were hoping that he would say something faintly newsworthy, the former Israeli president didn’t disappoint. He opposed Prime Minister Netanyahu’s calls for aliyah from Europe as being “political,” claiming that in doing so he was making Israel “a land of fear” rather than one of “hope.” Not satisfied with that astounding claim, he went on to claim that peace would soon break out in the Middle East, said he “trusted” President Obama to deal with the Iranian nuclear threat, opposed any “unilateral” acts against Tehran by the U.S. or Israel, and predicted that the Islamist regime in Iran would fall: “In 10-15 years, Iran will be out of water and thus out of ayatollahs, in my judgment.”

To which friends of Israel as well as supporters of the West can only say “amen,” even as they shake their heads in disbelief at the absurdity of much of what Peres said.

We might dismiss this as just a little more of the same optimism Peres has been selling for the last 25 years. Such statements are very popular, especially with American Jews who dislike being confronted with the intractability of the Arab-Israeli conflict as well as the awful scenarios that the Iranian nuclear program forces us to contemplate and he has done a brisk business peddling these notions among credible Western audiences for a long time.

But as ridiculous as Peres’s pie in the sky sermons may be, they are neither harmless nor without cost to Israel.

No. Still Oslo, after all these years

...We’ve heard over and over that “the basic outlines of a settlement are clear, it’s only a question of details.” This is the opposite of the truth. An agreement based on false principles cannot be achieved, no matter how cleverly the details are worked out.

Fresnozionism.org..
31 January '14..






The Oslo accord was based on several premises:

• That peace could be obtained by creating a Palestinian state on land from which Israel would withdraw.
• That the PLO ultimately desired peace, and so could be a partner.
• That the PLO could transform itself from a terrorist group into a stable governing authority.
• That Palestinian attitudes would moderate as Israel made concessions, and a ‘virtuous cycle’ could be established.
• That there could be ‘solutions’ to the questions of Jerusalem and refugees that both sides could accept.
• That both sides would educate their people for peace.

Every one of these was false in 1993, and as time passed it became evident that they were not going to become true — indeed, Arab attitudes hardened. The transfer of power from the arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat to the bureaucrat Mahmoud Abbas had no effect on them. In addition, the rise of Hamas created brand-new, insuperable difficulties for the Oslo approach.

But despite this, these premises remained at the foundation of Western ‘peace’ proposals, from the Road Map, through Olmert’s too-generous proposals, to the Obama-Kerry plan. Only details and methods of implementation changed.

If we didn’t know in 1993 that the argument was not about ‘Palestine’ but rather about Israel, we know it today, from Abbas’ refusal to admit that Israel is the nation of the Jewish people (he claims there is no such people, only a religion), and from the content of their media, educational system, art, literature, etc., all of which send the message that there is no ‘Israel’ between the river and the sea, only ‘occupied Palestine’.

If we didn’t know that the PLO wasn’t interested in living peacefully alongside a Jewish state, we know it today from the official adulation and financial support for terrorist murderers whose release from prison was extorted by US pressure.

After 21 years of the ‘Palestinian Authority’ (PA) receiving billions in support from the gullible West, Palestinians have no democracy, no independent judiciary, no investment in the public sphere, no private economy — only ‘security’ forces and Swiss bank accounts. Can you imagine what a sovereign ‘Palestine’ would be like?

G-d did not want human sacrifices. The peace process does.

A million Isaacs lie on the altar and no voice calls out to stay the knife, the sacrifice of peace that G-d did not command, is made again and again. The blood flows over the altars of peace and it is never enough. Not so long as one Isaac still lives.

Daniel Greenfield..
Sultan Knish..
07 August '13..

In one of the most famous events in the Bible, G-d commanded Abraham to sacrifice his only son. So Abraham took his son Isaac, bound him on an altar and prepared to bring him up as a burnt offering. And then the voice of the angel called to him and told him not to harm his son.

G-d did not want human sacrifices. The peace process does.

After the handshake with Arafat in the Rose Garden led to a wave of terrorist attacks, Prime Minister Rabin invented a new sacrifice to describe the dead Israelis murdered by the Muslim terrorists who had been permitted to enter Israel, to form armies, to train openly and to kill openly. Korbanot Shalom. Sacrifices of peace. In Ancient Israel, in the Tabernacle and the Temple, the Korban Shelamim, the Peace Offering, was brought as a celebratory offering to be eaten by all. In the modern State of Israel, the Korbanot Shalom were brought by the families of the dead who often had little more than a few scraps of skin tissue, a finger or a hand caught in a crack in the sidewalk to remember their children by.

(Continue)

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Buying the world’s love for ages, but at a price

Sarah Honig..
Another Tack..
21 June '13..

There’s something unsavory in taking on very elder statesmen, especially nonagenarians or near-nonagenarians. It seems so uncouth, so unkind, so unfair – just as it would be to slap around helpless little tots or kick cute big-eyed puppies.

Therefore, for many months I struggled hard to suppress my inclination to carp – while preparations for yet another sumptuous birthday bash for our phenomenally spry president, Shimon Peres, got underway with fitting fanfare. But even the most stringent self-control has its limits. In the end, I am succumbing to temptation.

Why? Maybe because too much sometimes really is too much.

There’s a simple acid test for whether all the pomp and circumstance is over the top or not. How would our never-too-objective media react if the birthday boy were not the progenitor of Oslo – the man adored around the globe for having weakened the Jewish state like none of its enemies could?

Worse yet, what if the very same garish ostentation were lavished on the man most of our talking heads irrepressibly love to hate – Binyamin Netanyahu?

Outraged screams would doubtless reverberate around the planet. Our scandal-mongering press would pull out all stops and passionately pour its scathing scorn on the prime minister whom the public again dared reelect against the admonitions of omniscient opinion-molders. The ad hominem onslaughts would be so merciless that the pilloried premier would rue the day he was born, never mind the party thrown in his honor.

But different criteria apply to Peres. Seemingly, he can get away with just about anything. It’s not for the first time either and not because he’ll turn 90 in August (the shindig was scheduled a tad early to coincide with the Presidential Conference, another resplendent get-together that annually glorifies our ceremonial head of state). Dazzling leading lights and eye-popping pop-culture icons were flown here en masse to fete Peres in the past.

He is serially not publicity-shy. It was much the same ten years ago.

He wasn’t even president then. Indeed he was considered a remarkable political flop locally, but out in the warmth of European cosmopolitan broad-mindedness Peres was already in 2003 a lauded luminary, wined and dined and eagerly courted.

When peace means the war will never end

'Peacemaking is not a policy, it is a religion that we are all obligated to believe in. It is an immoral moral principle that ends in war. Peacemaking in the World War II cost more lives than Hitler could have ever taken on his own. Peacemaking in the War on Terror has cost a hundred times more lives than the terrorists could have ever taken on their own.'

Daniel Greenfield..
Sultan Knish..
21 November '12..

For the last hundred years the best and brightest of the civilized world have been engaged in the business of peace. In the days before the Nobel Peace Prize became a joke, it was expected that scientific progress would lead to moral progress. Nations would accept international laws and everyone would get together to replace wars with international conferences.

Instead technological progress just gave us better ways to kill each other. There have been few innovations in the moral technology of global harmony since Immanuel Kant's "Perpetual Peace" laid out a plan to grant world citizenship to all refugees and outlaw all armies, invasions and atrocities with the whole shebang would be overseen by a League of Nations.

That was in 1795 and Kant's plan was at least more reasonable than anything we have two-hundred years later today because it at least set out to limit membership in this body to free republics. If we had done that with the United Nations, it could conceivably have become something resembling a humane organization. Instead it's a place where the dictators of the world stop by to give speeches about human rights for a show that's funnier than anything you could find eight blocks away at the Broadway Comedy Club.

Since the League of Nations folded, the warring peoples of the world have added the atom bomb, the suicide bomber, the jet plane, the remotely guided missile, the rape squad, the IED, the child soldier and the stealth fighter to their arsenals. And the humanitarians have murdered a few billion trees printing out more useless treaties, conventions and condemnations; more dead trees than accounted for by every piece of human literature written until the 19th Century.

There is no moral technology to prevent war. Or rather war is the moral technology, that when properly applied, ensures peace.

The humanitarians had gone down a dead end by trying to create perpetual peace by outlawing war, but the peace-shouters who wear their inverted Mercedes Logo don't really want peace, some of them reflexively hate war for sentimental reasons, but their leaders and most committed activists don't hate war, they hate the people who win the wars.

The plan for perpetual peace is really a plan for perpetual war. It necessitates that the civilized nations who heed its call amass overwhelming quantities of firepower as deterrents against war, which they will pledge to never use because if the threat of destroying the world isn't enough, their bluff will be called and they will fold. And if they don't fold, then the world will be destroyed because the humanitarians said that peace was better than war.

It also necessitates that the actual wars that they fight be as limited as possible by applying precision technology to kill only actual armed enemy combatants while minimizing collateral damage. And that humanitarian objective also necessitates that the other side reply with a counter-objective of making it as hard as possible to kill them without also killing civilians.

Tobin - The Peace Process is Formally Buried

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary/Contentions..
06 February '12..

In a ceremony broadcast live across the Middle East, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process was formally buried. The event, which formalized the unity pact between the Fatah Party and its Hamas rival, marked the formation of a new Palestinian Authority government in which both factions would share power. PA President Mahmoud Abbas will also assume the role of prime minister, ousting Salam Fayyad, the pro-peace and development technocrat who had earned the trust of the West for his efforts to build the Palestinian economy and enforce the rule of law. But Fayyad’s role in the PA is now over, as is, apparently, Abbas’s pretense that he, too, favored peace and development.

There will be those apologists for the Palestinians who will say that unity was necessary for peace and even claim that this means that Hamas is abandoning violence. But they will be either lying or deceiving themselves. Hamas’ goal of Israel’s destruction is unchanged as is, it should be noted, that of their erstwhile Fatah enemies. By signing the pact and now making it a reality, Abbas has for all intents and purposes torn up the Oslo Peace Accords, signed with such hope on the White House Lawn in September 1993.

Oslo required the Palestinians to give up violence and dedicate themselves to peace and establishing a civil society in exchange for rule over the West Bank and Gaza and the implicit promise of independence. This PLO leader Yasir Arafat did not do. He nurtured terrorists among his own ranks even as he jealously guarded his power against rivals like Hamas. The choice for the Palestinians was clear. Their leaders could act to wipe out those who opposed peace and therefore seal a plan of coexistence with Israel or they could fail to do so and condemn both peoples to another generation or more of conflict. Arafat, who was offered an independent state in the West Bank, Gaza and a share of Jerusalem in 2000 and 2001, refused to accept it, and instead chose another round of conflict via the terrorist war of attrition known as the second intifada.