The Illusion of Peace and Palestinian Intransigence: Enough is Enough - by Ardie Geldman

Why would the leader of the Palestinian people declare all agreements with the State of Israel null and void and, even more incredibly, forfeit the opportunity after half a century to establish a viable Palestinian state bolstered by $50 billion and significant amounts of additional support from nations around the world?

Ardie Geldman..
American Thinker..
30 June '20..
Link:https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/06/palestinian_intransigence_and_the_illusion_of_peace_enough_is_enough_.html

On Jan. 28, 2020, the long-awaited Trump Administration’s “Deal of the Century,” officially titled “Peace to Prosperity: A Vision to Improve the Lives of the Palestinian and Israeli People,” was made public. The proposal aspires to reach the goal within its title after unfreezing and advancing negotiations between the State of Israel and the Palestinian Authority. The aim is to end a conflict as old as the State of Israel, and in some ways older. The plan entails Israel replacing the present military law with its system of civil law in the still non-sovereign territory that Israel captured from the Jordanians and has administered since June 1967. The change would directly affect the lives of the estimated nearly 400,000 Israeli citizens who reside in this area.

The plan allows Israel to execute this change only after July 1st and on no more than what constitutes 30 percent of the West Bank, or biblical Judea and Samaria. However, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently acknowledged in a meeting with the elected heads of a number of Jewish towns from these areas that the initial application of Israeli civil law would apply to only about 3% of the territory that constitutes 132 Jewish communities recognized by the state. The remaining 27%, essentially the Jordan valley, would undergo the transition pending further negotiations with the Trump administration.

The plan also envisions a sovereign State of Palestine on the remaining 70 percent of this land, plus a small area of the western Negev Desert that is currently within the borders of Israel. But the Palestinians stand to gain not only land. The economic section of the plan that was rolled out at a multi-national workshop held in Manama, Bahrain, June 25-26, 2019, sets as an objective the establishment of a $50 billion international investment fund for 179 infrastructure and business projects within the nascent Palestinian state. However, a sovereign Palestine with a national capital just beyond the border of East Jerusalem would receive recognition by the United States and Israel only if after four years from its acceptance of the plan the Palestinian Authority succeeds in meeting a number of criteria.

These criteria prohibit the Palestinian Authority from engaging or supporting, even indirectly, any belligerent behavior towards the State of Israel and its citizens, be it military, legal, economic or through the use of propaganda or incitement. This state in the making would have to (1) officially recognize Israel as a Jewish state, (2) cease all territorial claims against Israel, (3) disarm the terrorist organizations Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the former of which governs Gaza, and who are both operative in territory under the control of the Palestinian Authority, (4) accept demilitarized status, i.e., it would not maintain any armed force other than a security apparatus necessary to uphold internal safety and order, and (5) cease the infamous Pay-to-Slay program of financial support provided to the families of deceased Palestinian terrorists and those serving time in Israeli prisons.

Israeli sovereignty, not appeasement is the key to lasting peace - by Caroline Glick

...It makes sense that policymakers who have built their careers on the delusion that peace will be achieved by blaming Israel for Palestinian bigotry, terrorism and aggression and forcing Israel to surrender to its enemies oppose President Trump’s peace plan. But those who care about Israel and seek true peace between it and its neighbors should support both the Trump peace plan and Israel’s intention to begin implementing the plan by applying its laws—and, through them, its sovereignty to its communities in Judea and Samaria and to the Jordan Valley.

Caroline Glick..
Carolineglick.com..
17 May '20..
Link: http://carolineglick.com/newsweek-column-israeli-sovereignty-not-appeasement-is-the-key-to-lasting-peace/

In the coming months, Israel is expected to apply its civilian law and administration to the 30 percent of Judea and Samaria (or the “West Bank”) that President Donald Trump’s recently unveiled peace plan anticipates remaining with Israel after a final peace agreement.

One might expect that Israel’s plan would be hailed for advancing peace and the equal rights of Israelis and Palestinians alike. But the more common response of many so-called experts has been to distort the facts and preemptively condemn Israel.

The distortions begin with the very words used to describe Israeli plans. Across platforms, “experts” fret over what they call “Israeli annexation.”

As I explained in my 2014 book The Israeli Solution: A One State Plan for Peace in the Middle East, Israel cannot “annex” any part of Judea and Samaria. Annexation is an act under which a state imposes its sovereignty over another state’s territory.

The state of Israel has sovereign rights to Judea and Samaria by force of its declaration of independence issued 72 years ago, on May 14, 1948. With its declaration of independence, together with Britain’s surrender of the Mandate it had been granted by the League of Nations to reconstitute the ancient Jewish national home, Israel became the one and only state that acquired sovereignty over all the Mandate’s territory.

When Israel applies its civilian law, it will be exercising sovereign rights that it has held for decades.

The second problem with the discourse surrounding Israel’s plan to apply its laws to these areas is that it ignores both why doing so is important for Israel and why President Trump included Israeli sovereignty in his peace plan in the first place.

From Israel’s perspective, the plan is important because it will significantly improve the rule of law and the civil rights of residents of the areas. For the past 26 years, Israel has shared governance of the “West Bank” with an autonomous Palestinian Authority. Israel has governed its portion of the territory under military administration. Nearly half a million Israelis and more than 100,000 Palestinians reside in cities, towns and villages in Judea and Samaria governed by the Israel Defense Forces.

Israel’s civilian legal code is far more liberal than the military laws that currently apply to the areas. The civil rights of area residents—Jews and Arabs alike—will be far better protected under Israeli law than they have been under Israeli military administrative law.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) will benefit from the move because soldiers and officers will not be responsible for issues like directing traffic and providing building permits for everything from parking lots to kindergartens to neighborhoods.

The IDF is a fighting organization. The more narrowly it is able to focus on defending the country, the better off it—and Israel as a whole—will be.

As for the Trump peace plan I detailed in my book the long-standing delusion that served as the basis for decades of failed peace processes between Israel and the Palestinians. That delusion holds that Israel is to blame for the Palestinian war against it and that to win peace, Israel has to appease the Palestinians by surrendering land.

The truth is precisely the opposite. Since 1937, Israel has consistently agreed to share its land with the Palestinians and the Palestinians have consistently refused peace. Since 2000, Israel has made three separate offers of peace that involved Israel surrendering nearly all of Judea and Samaria to the Palestinians and repartitioning Jerusalem. The Palestinians rejected all of Israel’s offers. In 2000, the Palestinians initiated a terror war against Israel in response to Israel’s peace offers at Camp David and at Taba. Two thousand Israelis were murdered in that war. And the Palestinians responded to Israel’s 2008 peace offer by escalating their political war against the Jewish state.

Question. Is it wrong to let Israel make decisions for itself? - by Jonathan S. Tobin

Peace cannot be imposed by the United States. If it does ever happen, it will only be when the Palestinians realize that Israel will not be handed over to them on a silver platter in pieces.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
JNS.org..
23 April '20..

In principle, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s answer to a question about Israel’s new coalition government seems unexceptionable. The agreement signed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Blue and White Party leader Benny Gantz allows for a vote in the upcoming months about extending Israeli sovereignty to parts of the West Bank, including settlement blocs and the Jordan Valley. As far as Pompeo is concerned, whether or not they do so is up to the Israelis.

According to Reuters, Pompeo said, “As for the annexation of the West Bank, the Israelis will ultimately make those decisions. That’s an Israeli decision. And we will work closely with them to share with them our views of this in [a] private setting.”

That wouldn’t have been the reaction from President Barack Obama’s State Department, nor is it fair to say from the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush or even Ronald Reagan. They would have all fervently and publicly opposed any Israeli talk of annexation, let alone plans to implement the idea.

The difference between the administration of President Donald Trump, which put forward a plan for the Middle East earlier this year that envisioned Israeli holding onto approximately 30 percent of the West Bank in the context of a scheme that would have also allowed the creation of an independent, though demilitarized Palestinian state, is not just about the contours of a solution to the conflict.

What really sets Trump and Pompeo apart from their predecessors is that the current American government doesn’t think that it is entitled to dictate policy to the Israelis. And it is this unwillingness to give orders to the Jewish state that really shocks critics of Israel and the foreign-policy establishment.

Obama wasn’t reticent about expressing his feelings about the relationship between the two countries. Though at times he paid lip service to the strong affection felt by the overwhelming majority of Americans for Israel, he never bothered to conceal his disdain for any notion that the Israelis should be treated as equals. He was explicit about believing that he had the right to “save Israel from itself” since the policies adopted by its democratically elected government were not in accord with his own unrealistic vision of how to achieve peace. He believed he had the right to override the will of the Israeli people as expressed at the ballot box, and many of his American Jewish adherents agreed with him about that.

(Continue to Full Column)

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.  

Good Question. Why Do Liberals Dismiss President Trump's Peace Plan Out of Hand? - by Dr. Denis MacEoin

We must ask why so many secular liberals, Christians, and a minority of Jews do not grasp that negotiations based on... Islamic law can never play any role in current international law and can never bring peace to the Middle East.

Dr. Denis MacEoin..
Gatestone Institute..
12 April '20..

It was inevitable that liberal politicians, pundits and media would speedily find fault with Donald Trump and Jared Kushner's plan for peace in the Middle East, proclaimed as the "Deal of the Century". So inevitable, in fact, that the plan was condemned years before it was actually announced in 2020.

As far back as May 2017, US President Donald J. Trump had met with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Washington, offered, to get a peace deal and had asked Abbas to end the "pay-for-slay" system of payments to families of terrorist prisoners in Israeli gaols. On May 26, 2017, The New York Times ran an op-ed by PLO representative Diana Buttu in which she dismissed any plan to bring peace, while blaming every problem faced by the Palestinians on Israel and its presence in the West Bank.

Even more striking was an article as late as June 25, 2019, in which The Guardian's former Middle East Editor, Ian Black (author of a 500-page tome on the Arab-Israeli conflict), stated that "The US's Middle East 'peace summit' is nonsense. Palestinians are right to boycott it".

It is easy enough to discern the motivations behind journalism of this nature, one from a Palestinian perspective, the other inspired by left-wing views about Israel and the US administration.

Needless to say, the unrolling of the plan has, almost without exception, resulted in widespread left-wing condemnation that started within minutes of the plan's having been announced. On January 28, 2019, for example, The Guardian dismissed the plan. The newspaper argued:

"The overall message... is that what the Trump administration has in mind is something far less meaningful than the two-state solution conceived by previous administrations or Oslo, with emphasis being placed on Israel's security rather than Palestinian self-determination."

The same day, The New York Times chimed in, saying:

"The plan would discard the longtime goal of granting the Palestinians a full-fledged state. President Trump called it 'a win-win' for both sides; Palestinian leaders immediately rejected it."

Of course, they did. When have any Palestinians ever said "yes" to a US or Israeli peace offer, including an offer of a Palestinian state next door to Israel? Did they ever even propose a counter-offer?

(Continue to Full Post)

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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President Donald Trump's presentation of his Vision for Peace: An open letter from Judea and Samaria mayors

This vision was presented as a vision, not a forced plan. If our country chooses in the future to enter into negotiation based on this basis of the vision, we should not interfere. But while the Palestinians cry hysterically, let it not be our camp that looks and sounds unhinged – let us set an example for the entire country. We the undersigned will work to get a government that will maximize the opportunities presented by this vision while safeguarding against those who will take this vision and use it as a platform to weaken us in every which way.

Oded Revivi, Eli Shaviro, Benny Kashriel, Asaf Minter, Igal Lahav, Shy Rosenzweig, Nir Bartal..
Israel Hayom..
06 February '20..
Link: https://www.israelhayom.com/2020/02/06/an-open-letter-from-judea-and-samaria-mayors/

Today we are a little more than one week from President Donald Trump's presentation of his Vision for Peace.

In that week, people have proclaimed him and his team anything and everything from the Messiah to Judas. The truth is he and his team are neither. President Donald Trump, Jared Kushner and Ambassador David Friedman are loyal patriots to the United States and the greatest friends Israel has ever had in the White House.

Let's remember where we were as recently as December 2016. We were abandoned at the UN and were dictated the terms of a UN/EU style peace plan from then-Secretary of State John Kerry. That was certainly a low point in international relations for our great state of Israel.

Since that point our Kinneret (The Sea of Galilee) has nearly filled up – we haven't figured out how to thank Trump/Kushner/Friedman for that yet, but if we could, we would.

We have become energy independent in no small part because of our partnership with an American company, Noble Energy, in a deal brokered with Jordan and Egypt that could NOT have been possible without the tireless assistance of the United States.

The president and his team recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, moved their embassy there, got out of the Iran deal, recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, stopped funding UNWRA, declared settlements were not illegal, etc, etc, etc.

Then the president presented his Vision for Peace for the region. Let's understand what is in the vision and the importance of working in lockstep with the administration to achieve our goals.

1. Security: This plan is not based upon hope or faith like the terribly flawed Iran deal. Rather, it is based upon enhancing Israeli security control and responsibility throughout all phases of this vision's implementation. At no time, let us repeat that, at no time does Israel's security posture weaken, it only strengthens. For this fact alone we should be eternally grateful to this administration, which understands that Israel is not the source of strife in the Middle East. We are the one bastion of stability and anything that hurts our stability will have a catastrophic domino effect on the entire region.

2. Jewish homes: This administration has been clear, one cannot "Judaize" Judea. Our roots and our homeland are quite literally in the name. Each and every Jewish home and their environs will eventually become part of civilian Israel. This means being able to build throughout Judea and Samaria like Jaffa and Haifa, like Tel Aviv and Bet Shemesh.

3. Jerusalem will be considered by the greatest power on earth undivided and eternal as the capital of Israel. This has been something we have been yearning for, for literally 2000 years, and it is coming to fruition.

4. Everyone is aware of the reality on the ground here: Our neighbors are not ready for peace. They may never be ready for peace. Each and every day we wake up and we pray three times a day for peace, we strive for peace, but we will not die for peace. This vision changes the entire paradigm of how the world looks at this supposed conflict. Instead of asking (demanding) that we take more risks for a peace that will probably never mature, this administration has been extremely clear through its vision for peace, that peace will come if, and only if, our neighbors make dramatic changes. In order to achieve peace, they must demonstrate that they will stop acting like Iran and begin acting like Canada. If, and only, if they cross these hurdles (of which we are highly doubtful they will ever achieve) then we can negotiate with them. To be clear: We want peace, we have always wanted peace and this is the only vision that actually acknowledges what it will take to get peace, no matter how difficult it is to imagine occurring.

In the week since this vision has been released, most of the world has declared that this is something serious to be considered and negotiated on its platform. There are notable groups included in those in support, throughout Europe and Middle East, and even more noticeable are those against Iran, Hamas, the PA.

Rhetorical question? Will Abbas ever surprise Israel? - by Tal Braun

...if Abbas and his ilk in the Arab League would have accepted Trump's deal we could have called this "The surprise of the century.

Tal Braun..
Israel Hayom..
08 February '20..
Link: https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/will-abbas-ever-surprise-israel/

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas's firm opposition to US President Donald Trump's peace plan even before it was published, and certainly afterward, has not come as a surprise in light of the consistent Arab rejectionism since the British mandate.

For decades, there has always been a side that agreed to peace, while the other violently opposed it.

I would dare say that if Abbas and his ilk in the Arab League would have accepted Trump's deal we could have called this "The surprise of the century."

In order to understand the roots of the Arab-Palestinian rejectionism, I will briefly mention five points for consideration:

Actually the problem with the peace process has been too much empathy, not too little - by Jonathan S. Tobin

A call for the Trump administration to show more sympathy for the Palestinian perspective demonstrates the flaw in the thinking of peace advocates.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
JNS.org..
03 February '20..

Treating the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians as a zero-sum game guarantees that peace can’t be made. The only way to create mutual understanding, and hopefully, a path towards peaceful coexistence is via mutual empathy.

That’s the sort of anodyne sermon that we’ve been hearing for decades from advocates for Middle East peace. While that is something of a cliché, there is also truth to it. People who don’t recognize each other’s common humanity and the legitimacy of their existence aren’t going to be able to compromise and learn to live alongside each other.

Nevertheless, a call for more empathy for the Palestinians from Jodi Rudoren, the new editor of The Forward, is not only wrongheaded; it also illustrates everything that has been mistaken about the efforts of those Americans who have been most devoted to bringing about a peaceful resolution to the conflict.

Rudoren is a new edition to the ranks of editors of Jewish publications. She came to the Forward after a long career at The New York Times, including a stint in one of its most difficult and controversial posts. Rudoren served as the Times’ Israel bureau chief from 2012 to 2015. In that role, she became—as was the case with all of her predecessors and successors—the focus of intense interest from media critics (including myself). She was seen as part of a tradition of tendentious Times’ reporting on Israel and for mixing her opinions, which seemed to reflect her affinity for the mindset of the Jewish state’s left-wing political parties, in with her news coverage—a concern that doesn’t apply to her new role as an opinion columnist.

In her most recent column about what she felt were the shortcomings of the Trump administration’s Mideast peace plan, Rudoren resurrects one of the points she often invoked when she was reporting from Israel and claimed that criticism from both sides to the conflict testified to her fairness. In one instance, she was taken to task by a Palestinian official who complained about a piece in which she noted the suffering of a parent of an Israeli soldier who had been killed while defending his country. Even though the soldier had been killed fighting Egypt along the Suez Canal, the Palestinian said that her piece demonstrated a “lack of empathy for Palestinians.”

(Continue to Full Column)

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 27-year Oslo blood libel is over - by Caroline Glick

And closely, more immediately, as I sat there listening, I felt 27 years of worry and frustration washing away. The 27-year Oslo nightmare was over. The blood libel that blamed Israel for the Palestinians’ war against it was rejected by the greatest nation in the world, finally.

Caroline Glick..
Carolineglick.com..
31 January '20..
Link: http://carolineglick.com/the-oslo-blood-libel-is-over/

From 1994 through 1996, as a captain in the IDF, I served as a member of Israel’s negotiating team with the PLO. Those years were the heyday of the so-called peace process. As the coordinator of negotiations on civil affairs for the Coordinator of Government Activities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, I participated in all of the negotiating sessions with the Palestinians that led to a half a dozen or so of agreements, including the Interim or Oslo B agreement from September 28, 1995, which transferred civil and military authorities in Judea and Samaria to the PLO.

Throughout the period of my work, I never found any reason to believe the peace process I was a part of would lead to peace. The same Palestinian leaders who joked with us in fancy meeting rooms in Cairo and Taba breached every commitment they made to Israel the minute the sessions ended.

Beginning with the PLO’s failure to amend its covenant that called for Israel’s destruction in nearly every paragraph; through their refusal to abide by the limits they had accepted on the number of weapons and security forces they were permitted to field in the areas under their security control; their continuous breaches of zoning and building laws and regulations; to their constant Nazi-like anti-Semitic propaganda and incitement and solicitation of terrorism against Israel – it was self-evident they were negotiating in bad faith. They didn’t want peace with Israel. They were using the peace process to literally take Israel apart piece by piece.

Israel’s leaders shrugged it off. Instead of protesting and cutting off contact until Yasser Arafat and his henchmen ended their perfidious behavior, Israel’s leaders ignored what was happening before their faces. And in a way, they had no option of doing anything else.

When Israel embarked on the Oslo peace process it accepted Oslo’s foundational assumption that Israel is to blame for the Palestinian war against it. From the first Oslo agreement, signed on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993, through all its derivative deals, Israel was required to carry out “confidence-building measures,” to prove its good faith and peaceful intentions to Arafat and his deputies.

Time after time, Israel was required to release terrorists from prison as a precondition for negotiations with the PLO. The goal of those negotiations in turn was to force Israel to release more terrorists from prison, and give more land, more money, more international legitimacy and still more terrorists to the PLO.

On Tuesday, this state of affairs ended.

On Sunday morning, just before he flew to Washington, US Ambassador David Friedman briefed me on the details of President Donald Trump’s peace plan at his home in Herzliya.

Friedman told me that Trump was going to announce that the United States will support an Israeli decision to apply its laws to the Jordan Valley and the Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria.

I asked what the boundaries of the settlements would be.

He said that they have a map, it isn’t precise, so it can be flexibly interpreted but it was developed in consultation with Israeli government experts.

Suspicious, I went granular. Khan al-Ahmar is an illegal, strategically located Beduin encampment built on the access road to Kfar Adumim, a community north of Jerusalem. Israel’s Supreme Court ordered its removal, but bowing to pressure from Germany and allegedly, the International Criminal Court, the government has failed to execute the court order.

I asked if Khan al-Ahmar is part of Kfar Adumim on the American map. Friedman answered in the affirmative.

What about the area called E1, which connects the city of Maaleh Adumim to Jerusalem?

Yes, it’s inside the map, he said.

How about the illegal building right outside the northern entrance to my community, Efrat, south of Jerusalem in Gush Etzion. The massive illegal building there threatens to turn Efrat’s highway access road into a gauntlet. Is that area going to be under Israeli jurisdiction?

He nodded.

How about the isolated communities – Yitzhar, Itamar, Har Bracha? Are they Israel?

Yes, yes, yes, he said. Our map foresees Israel applying its sovereignty to about half of Area C, he explained.

What about the other half? Without control of the surrounding areas, the communities in Judea and Samaria will be under constant threat. Their development will be stifled by limitations on the development of critical infrastructure.

For now, Friedman replied, everything in the rest of Area C will be governed as it has been up until now. Israel will have overriding civilian powers and sole security authority. In fact, in our plan, he explained, Israel will have permanent overriding security authority over all of Judea and Samaria, even after a peace agreement is concluded.

Friedman then turned to the nature of the agreement the Trump administration seeks to conclude.

The Palestinians have four years, he explained, to agree to the President’s plan. To reach a deal they have to agree to recognize Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people. They have to accept Israeli control over the airspace and the electromagnetic spectrum. They have agree to a demilitarized state and accept that there will be no Palestinian immigration to Israel from abroad. They have to agree to Israeli sovereignty over the border with Jordan. They have to disarm Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza and demilitarize Gaza.

If they do that, we will recognize them as a state and they will receive the rest of Area C.

What if they don’t agree to those terms? I asked.

If they don’t agree, he replied, then at the end of four years, Israel will no longer be bound by the terms of the deal and will be free to apply its law to all areas it requires.

You’re telling me that in four years we’ll be able to apply Israeli law on the rest of the territory? I asked, almost afraid to hear the answer.

Yes, that’s right.

Calling the Palestinians’ bluff. That’s No Small Achievement. - by Melanie Phillips

The Trump plan won’t bring peace; however, it restores the truth and justice that are essential prerequisites of peace. Crushing the lethal and poisonous fantasies about Israel and the Jewish people, as well as taking a hard-headed approach to Palestinian intentions, it replaces illusions by reality. That’s no small achievement. Now it’s up to the rest of the world.

Melanie Phillips..
JNS.org..
31 January '20..

U.S. President Donald Trump’s Middle East “deal of the century” offers the Palestinians a state. They have rejected it and threatened instead to ramp up violence against Israel.

No one can be surprised. They have rejected every offer of a state previously made to them in 1937, 1947, 2000, 2008 and 2014.


So is this latest deal anything more than Groundhog Day for the Middle East all over again? Yes, because this isn’t a deal. It’s an ultimatum.

Israel intends to enact its part in the plan unilaterally by declaring sovereignty over the Israeli settlement blocs and the Jordan Valley. The big change is that despite the subsequent crossed wires over timing, the United States will accept this.

That’s because this isn’t a “peace process” in which both sides must progress in tandem with each other—a process that gave the Palestinians an effective veto even while they continued to wage their war of extermination against Israel.

For the first time, here’s an American plan that puts the security of Israel first and foremost. It’s therefore the first time that the United States has unequivocally supported Israel’s future existence.

For if a country cannot defend itself against enemies sworn to liquidate it, that country can’t survive. Yet until now, even U.S. administrations supposedly sympathetic to Israel imposed upon it requirements that undermined its security and defense against attack.

Other supposed allies, such as Britain or the European Union, have also paid mere lip service to Israel while denying the validity of its claim to the disputed territories in Judea and Samaria. Yet its claim to these territories is legal many times over, both under international laws of self-defense and through the international community’s decision in the 1920s to designate the whole of Palestine as the homeland of the Jews alone.

By denying Israel’s right to all the land, Britain and the rest of the West have effectively undermined the Jews’ entitlement to any of it.

The Trump plan has now swept aside that appeasement of evil, started by the British in the 1930s, and which has been pursued by the American and Western foreign-policy establishment ever since.

(Continue to Full Column)

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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