by Aaron David Miller
From "Foreign Policy"
On October 18, 1991, against long odds and in front of an incredulous press
corps, U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III and Soviet Foreign
Minister Boris Pankin announced that Arabs and Israelis were being invited
to attend a peace conference in Madrid.
Standing in the back of the hall at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem that
day, I marveled at what America had accomplished. In 18 months, roughly the
time it took Henry Kissinger to negotiate three Arab-Israeli disengagement
agreements and Jimmy Carter to broker an Egypt-Israel peace treaty, the
United States had fought a short, successful war -- the best kind -- and
pushed Iraq's Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. And America was now
well-positioned to bring Arabs and Israelis across the diplomatic finish
line.
Or so I thought.
Baker, who lowballed everything, was characteristically cautious. "Boys," he
told a few of us aides in his suite after the news conference, "if you want
to get off the train, now might be a good time because it could all be
downhill from here." But I wasn't listening. America had used its power to
make war, and now, perhaps, it could use that power to make peace. I'd
become a believer.
I'm not anymore.
Etymologists tell us that the word "religion" may come from the Latin root
religare, meaning to adhere or bind. It's a wonderful derivation. In both
its secular and religious manifestations, faith is alluring and seductive
precisely because it's driven by propositions that bind or adhere the
believer to a compelling set of ideas that satisfy rationally or
spiritually, but always obligate.
So Why Have We Failed?
Americans, Israelis, and Palestinians who've tried and failed to make peace
answer three crucial questions.
And so it has been and remains with America's commitment to Arab-Israeli
peacemaking over the past 40 years, and certainly since the October 1973 war
gave birth to serious U.S. diplomacy and the phrase "peace process" (the
honor of authorship likely goes to a brilliant veteran State Department
Middle East hand, Harold Saunders, who saw the term appropriated by
Kissinger early in his shuttles). Since then, the U.S. approach has come to
rest on an almost unbreakable triangle of assumptions -- articles of faith,
really.
By the 1990s, these tenets made up a sort of peace-process religion,
a reverential logic chain that compelled most U.S. presidents to involve
themselves seriously in the Arab-Israeli issue. Barack Obama is the latest
convert, and by all accounts he too became a zealous believer, vowing within
days of his inauguration "to actively and aggressively seek a lasting peace
between Israel and the Palestinians, as well as Israel and its Arab
neighbors."
Like all religions, the peace process has developed a dogmatic creed, with
immutable first principles. Over the last two decades, I wrote them hundreds
of times to my bosses in the upper echelons of the State Department and the
White House; they were a catechism we all could recite by heart. First,
pursuit of a comprehensive peace was a core, if not the core, U.S. interest
in the region, and achieving it offered the only sure way to protect U.S.
interests; second, peace could be achieved, but only through a serious
negotiating process based on trading land for peace; and third, only America
could help the Arabs and Israelis bring that peace to fruition.
As befitting a religious doctrine, there was little nuance. And while not
everyone became a convert (Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush willfully
pursued other Middle East priorities, though each would succumb at one
point, if only with initiatives that reflected, to their critics, varying
degrees of too little, too late), the exceptions have mostly proved the
rule. The iron triangle that drove Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter,
George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and now Barack Obama to accord the
Arab-Israeli issue such high priority has turned out to be both durable and
bipartisan. Embraced by the high priests of the national security temple,
including State Department veterans like myself, intelligence analysts, and
most U.S. foreign-policy mandarins outside government, these tenets endured
and prospered even while the realities on which they were based had begun to
change. If this wasn't the definition of real faith, one wonders what was.
That Obama, burdened by two wars elsewhere and the most severe economic
crisis since the Great Depression, came out louder, harder, and faster on
the Arab-Israeli issue than any of his predecessors was a remarkable
testament to just how enduring that faith had become -- a faith he very
publicly proclaimed while personally presiding over the announcement of
George Mitchell as his Middle East envoy in an orchestrated ceremony at the
State Department two days after his swearing-in.
At first, it seemed that Obama, the poster president for America's
engagement with the world, had found a cause uniquely suited to his view of
diplomacy, one whose importance had been heightened by his predecessor's
neglect of the issue and the Arab and Muslim attachment to it. Even before
the Gaza war exploded three weeks prior to his inauguration, Obama had been
bombarded by experts sagely urging a renewed focus on Middle East peace as a
way to regain American prestige and credibility after the trauma of the Bush
years. The new president soon hit the Arab media running as a kind of
empathizer-in-chief, ratcheting up expectations even as Israelis
increasingly found him tone-deaf to their needs.
Obama surrounded himself with key figures, such as chief of staff Rahm
Emanuel and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who believed deeply in the
peace religion. He named as his chief peacemaker Mitchell, a man with real
stature and negotiating experience; and his national security advisor is
James L. Jones, himself a former Middle East envoy who made the stunning
pronouncement last year: "If there was one problem that I would recommend to
the president" to solve, "this would be it."
All these veteran leaders were not only believers, but had extra reason to
encourage a tougher line toward Israel; they had seen the Benjamin Netanyahu
movie before and were determined not to let their chance at Middle East
peace end the same way. In his first turn as prime minister in the 1990s,
the brash hard-liner Netanyahu had driven Bill Clinton crazy. (I remember
being briefed on their first meeting in 1996, after which the president
growled: "Who's the fucking superpower here?")
Confronted with Netanyahu again, Obama and his team needed no encouragement to talk tough on the
growing Israeli settlements in the West Bank, an issue that experts inside
and outside government were clamoring for Obama to raise as the first step
in his renewed push for peace.
At the time, it looked to be a magical convergence of leader and moment: The
Arab-Israeli issue seemed perfectly suited to Obama's transformational
objectives and his transactional style. If Obama wanted to begin "remaking
America," why not try to remake the troubled politics of peace, too? After
all, this was the engagement president, who believed deeply in the power of
negotiations.
Obama was not alone in his belief, of course. The peace-process creed has
endured so long because to a large degree it has made sense and accorded
with U.S. interests. The question is, does it still? Does the old thinking
about peacemaking apply to new realities? Is the Arab-Israeli conflict still
the core issue? And after two decades of inflated hopes followed by violence
and terror, and now by directionless stagnation, can we still believe that
negotiations will deliver?
Sadly, the answers to these questions seem to be all too obvious these days.
And Obama's first 15 months as a disciple of the old creed tells you why. In
2009, the president pushed the Israelis, the Arabs, and the Palestinians to
get negotiations going and was rebuffed by all three. He later told Time
magazine ruefully that "we overestimated our ability to persuade." In March
of this year, provoked by the Netanyahu government's incomprehensible
announcement of new housing units in East Jerusalem smack in the middle of
U.S. Vice President Joe Biden's visit to Israel, Obama pushed the Israelis
again, harder this time, though it seems without much of a strategy to put
the crisis to good use.
Obama is clearly determined not to take no for an answer. Fresh from his
victory on health care, he's King of the World again and in no mood to let
the King of Israel frustrate his plans. This willfulness is impressive, and
it makes it even more imperative now that he's engaged in the faith to give
that old-time religion a fresh look, based not just on what's possible but
on what's probable. We don't have the right to abandon hope, but we do have
the responsibility to let go of, or at least temper, our illusions.
I can't tell you how many times in the past 20 years, as an intelligence
analyst, policy planner, and negotiator, I wrote memos to Very Important
People arguing the centrality of the Arab-Israeli issue and why the United
States needed to fix it. Long before I arrived at the State Department in
1978, my predecessors had made all the same arguments. An unresolved
Arab-Israeli conflict would trigger ruinous war, increase Soviet influence,
weaken Arab moderates, strengthen Arab radicals, jeopardize access to Middle
East oil, and generally undermine U.S. influence from Rabat to Karachi.
From the 1940s through the 1980s, the power with which the Palestinian issue
resonated in the Arab world did take a toll on American prestige and
influence.
Still, even back then the hand-wringing and dire predictions in
my Cassandra-like memos were overstated. I once warned ominously -- and
incorrectly -- that we'd have nonstop Palestinian terrorist attacks in the
United States if we didn't move on the issue. During those same years, the
United States managed to advance all of its core interests in the Middle
East: It contained the Soviets; strengthened ties to Israel and such key
Arab states as Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia; maintained access to Arab
oil; and yes, even emerged in the years after the October 1973 war as the
key broker in Arab-Israeli peacemaking.
Today, I couldn't write those same memos or anything like them with a clear
conscience or a straight face. Although many experts' beliefs haven't
changed, the region has, and dramatically, becoming nastier and more
complex. U.S. priorities and interests, too, have changed. The notion that
there's a single or simple fix to protecting those interests, let alone that
Arab-Israeli peace would, like some magic potion, bullet, or elixir, make it
all better, is just flat wrong. In a broken, angry region with so many
problems -- from stagnant, inequitable economies to extractive and
authoritarian governments that abuse human rights and deny rule of law, to a
popular culture mired in conspiracy and denial -- it stretches the bounds of
credulity to the breaking point to argue that settling the Arab-Israeli
conflict is the most critical issue, or that its resolution would somehow
guarantee Middle East stability.
The unresolved Arab-Israeli conflict is still a big problem for America and
its friends: It stokes a white-hot anger toward the United States, has
already demonstrated the danger of confrontation and war (see Lebanon, 2006;
Gaza, 2008), and confronts Israel with a demographic nightmare. But three
other issues, at least, have emerged to compete for center stage, and they
might prove far more telling about the fate of U.S. influence, power, and
security than the ongoing story of what I've come to call the
much-too-promised land.
First, there are the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where tens of thousands
of Americans are in harm's way and are likely to be for some time to come.
Add to the mix the dangerous situation in Pakistan, and you see volatility,
threat, and consequences that go well beyond Palestine. Second, though U.S.
foreign policy can't be held hostage to the war on terror (or whatever it's
now called), the 9/11 attacks were a fundamental turning point for an
America that had always felt secure within its borders. And finally there's
Iran, whose nuclear aspirations are clearly a more urgent U.S. priority than
Palestine. Should sanctions and/or diplomacy fail, the default position --
military action by Israel or even the United States -- can't be ruled out,
with galactic consequences for the region and the world. In any event, it's
hard to imagine Netanyahu making any big decisions on the peace process
until there's much more clarity on what he and most Israelis regard as the
existential threat of an Iran with a bomb.
As Obama surely reckoned, moving fast on Arab-Israeli peacemaking would help
the United States deal with these issues. But that linkage wasn't compelling
when Bush used it to suggest that victory in Iraq would make the
Arab-Israeli conflict easier to resolve; it's not compelling now as an exit
strategy from Iraq either, as if engaging in Arab-Israeli diplomacy will
make the potential mess we could leave behind in Iraq easier for the Arabs
to swallow.
Nor can the Arab-Israeli issue be used effectively to mobilize
Arabs against Iran, because the United States could never do enough
diplomatically (or soon enough) to have it make much of a difference.
Finally, linking the United States' willingness to help the Israelis with
Iran to their willingness to make concessions on Jerusalem and borders isn't
much of a policy either. If anything, it risks the United States losing its
leverage with Israel on the Iranian issue and raising the odds that Israel
would act alone.
Surely the United States can do more than one thing at once, the
foreign-policy equivalent of walking and chewing gum at the same time. But
America must also do multiple things well. Obama can't have an inch-deep and
mile-wide approach in which he commits to everything without a cruel and
unforgiving assessment of what's really possible and what's not. Nor can the
United States afford another high-profile failure based on what a brilliant
and committed Clinton told us shortly before we went to Camp David: "Guys,
trying and failing is a lot better than not trying at all." This is an
appropriate slogan for a high school football team; it's not a substitute
for a well-thought-out strategy for the world's greatest power. Obama
already has made a commitment to the American people to end two wars, keep
them safe from attack at home, and stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear
weapon, not to mention tackling the challenges of a severe recession and
growing deficit.
Governing is about choosing; it's about setting priorities, managing your
politics, thinking strategically, picking your spots, and looking for
genuine opportunities that can be exploited -- not tilting at windmills. And
these days, Arab-Israeli peacemaking is a pretty big windmill.
Even if you could make the case for the centrality of the Arab-Israeli
conflict, could you make peace?
Americans are optimists. Our idealism, pragmatism, and belief in the primacy
of the individual convince us that the world can be made a better place.
Unlike many countries that grapple with existential questions of political
identity and physical survival, Americans today don't live on the knife's
edge or hold (whatever our Puritan or Calvinist beginnings) a dark
deterministic view of human nature.
All this drives our conviction that talking is better than shooting. Rodney
King-like, we believe that if people would only sit down and discuss their
differences rationally and compromise, a way might be found to accommodate
conflicting views. After all, America is the big tent under which so many
religious, political, and ethnic groups have managed to coexist, remarkably
amicably. Perhaps this spirit is best embodied by Obama's Mideast envoy
George Mitchell, who once told me that any conflict created by human beings
could be resolved by them. Mitchell is truly convinced that solutions can be
found and that serious diplomacy is what you do until that time comes. But
he ended his first foray into Arab-Israeli diplomacy with three emphatic
no's: from Israel on a comprehensive settlement freeze, from Saudi Arabia on
partial normalization, and from the Palestinians on returning to
negotiations.
Much of our earlier experience in the tough world of Arab-Israeli
peacemaking seemed to bear out Mitchell's initial conviction. In the time
from the 1973 war to 1991, two Republican secretaries of state (Kissinger
and Baker) and one Democratic president (Carter) succeeded in hammering out
a series of Arab-Israeli agreements that established America's reputation as
an effective, even honest, broker -- seeming to validate the simple
proposition that negotiations can work.
If there was anyone who represented the faith in that proposition, it was
me. I recall giving a talk in Jerusalem in the fall of 1998, after Clinton
had brokered the Wye River accords (never implemented), in which I argued
that Arab-Israeli negotiations and the move toward peace were now
irreversible. That remark, one of the great howlers of the decade, prompted
a note from Efraim Halevy, then Israel's deputy Mossad chief, rightly
questioning my logic, and though Halevy was too polite to say it in his
note, my judgment as well. Still I believed.
And I continued to do so, all the way through the 1990s, the only decade in
the last half of the 20th century in which there was no major Arab-Israeli
war. Instead, this was the decade of the Madrid conference, the Oslo
accords, the Israel-Jordan peace treaty, regional accords on economic
issues, and a historic bid in the final year of the Clinton administration
to negotiate peace agreements between Israel, Syria, and the Palestinians.
But for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was the Arab,
Palestinian, Israeli (and American) unwillingness to recognize what price
each side would have to pay to achieve those agreements, the decade ended
badly, leaving the pursuit of peace bloody, battered, and broken. Perhaps
the most serious casualty was the loss of hope that negotiations could
actually get the Arabs and Israelis what they wanted.
And that has been the story line ever since: more process than peace.
Looking ahead, that process looks much, much tougher -- and peace more and
more elusive -- for three reasons.
First, Arab-Israeli peacemaking is politically risky and life-threatening.
Consider the murders of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime
Minister Yitzhak Rabin. At Camp David, I heard Palestinian leader Yasir
Arafat say at least three times, "You Americans will not walk behind my
coffin." Leaders take risks only when prospects of pain and gain compel them
to do so. Today's Middle East leaders -- Israel's Netanyahu, Syria's Bashar
al-Assad, and Palestine's Mahmoud Abbas -- aren't suicidal. It was
Netanyahu, after all, who once told me: "You live in Chevy Chase. Don't play
with our future."
Second, big decisions require strong leaders -- think Jordan's King Hussein
or Israel's Menachem Begin -- because the issues on the table cut to the
core of their political and religious identity and physical survival. This
requires leaders with the legitimacy, authority, and command of their
politics to make a deal stick. But the current crop are more prisoners of
their constituencies than masters of them: Netanyahu presides over a divided
coalition and a country without consensus on what price Israel will pay for
agreements with Palestinians and Syria; Abbas is part of a broken
Palestinian national movement and shares control over Palestine's guns,
authority, and legitimacy with Hamas. It's hard to see how either can
marshal the will and authority to make big decisions.
Third, even with strong leaders, you still need a project that doesn't
exceed the carrying capacity of either side. In the past, U.S. diplomacy
succeeded because the post-1973-war disengagement agreements, a separate
Egypt-Israel accord, and a three-day peace conference at Madrid aligned with
each side's capabilities. Today, issues such as Jerusalem (as a capital of
two states), borders (based on June 1967 lines), and refugees (rights,
return, and compensation) present gigantic political and security challenges
for Arabs and Israelis. One accord will be hard enough. The prospect of
negotiating a comprehensive peace; concluding three agreements between
Israel and the Palestinians, between Israel and Syria, and between Israel
and Lebanon; dismantling settlements in the Golan Heights and West Bank; and
withdrawing to borders based on June 1967 lines seems even more fantastical.
Bottom line: Negotiations can work, but both Arabs and Israelis (and
American leaders) need to be willing and able to pay the price. And they are
not.
Under these circumstances, the refrain from many quarters is that America
must save the day. If the Arabs and Israelis are too weak or recalcitrant,
then the United States must support and/or push them to make the deal.
Such forceful U.S. diplomacy succeeded in the past. Indeed, it's a stunning
paradox that with the exception of the 1994 Israel-Jordan peace treaty,
every other successful accord came not out of direct negotiations, but as a
result of U.S. mediation. The Oslo accords, often touted as the miracle
produced by direct talks between Israelis and Palestinians, proved to be a
spectacular failure. All that's missing now, the argument goes, is the
absence of American will.
I understand the logic of this view, and having spent more than 20 years in
frustrating talks with the Arabs and Israelis, I can also see how it can be
emotionally satisfying. But because I know a thing or two about failure and
don't want to see the United States fail (yet again), I simply don't buy the
argument. If I genuinely believed America could impose and deliver a
solution through tough forceful diplomacy, I'd be more sympathetic -- but I
don't. And here's why:
Ownership: Larry Summers, Obama's chief economic advisor, said it best: In
the history of the world, no one ever washed a rental car. We care only
about what we own. Unless the Arabs and Israelis want political agreements
and peace and can invest enough in them to give them a chance to succeed, we
certainly can't. The broader Middle East is littered with the remains of
great powers that wrongly believed they could impose their will on small
tribes. Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran... need I continue? Small tribes will always
be meaner, tougher, and longer-winded than U.S. diplomats because it's their
neighborhood and their survival; they will always have a greater stake in
the outcome of their struggle than the great power thousands of miles away
with many other things to do. You want to see failure? Take a whack at
trying to force Israelis and Palestinians to accept an American solution on
Jerusalem.
The negotiator's mystique: It's gone, at least for now. When Americans
succeeded in Arab-Israeli diplomacy, it was because they were respected,
admired, even feared. U.S. power and influence were taken seriously. Today,
much of the magic is gone: We are overextended, diminished, bogged down.
Again Summers: Can the world's biggest borrower continue to be the world's
greatest power? Our friends worry about our reliability; our adversaries,
including Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, believe they can outwait and
outmaneuver us. Nor does there appear much cost or consequence to saying no
to the superpower. After Obama and Mitchell's fruitless first year, I worry
that the mediator's mystique of a Kissinger or a Baker, or the willfulness
and driving force of a Carter, won't return easily.
Domestic politics: The pro-Israel community in the United States has a
powerful voice, primarily in influencing congressional sentiment and
initiatives (assistance to Israel in particular), but it does not have a
veto over U.S. foreign policy.
Lobbies lobby; that's the American way, for better or worse.
Presidents are supposed to lead. And when they do, with a
real strategy that's in America's national interests, they trump domestic
politics. Still, domestic politics constrain, particularly when a president
is perceived to be weak or otherwise occupied. This president has been
battered of late, and his party is likely to face significant losses in the
2010 midterm elections. Should there be a serious chance for a breakthrough
in the peace process, he'll go for it. But is it smart to risk trying to
manufacture one? The last thing Obama needs now is an ongoing fight with the
Israelis and their supporters, or worse, a major foreign-policy failure.
U.S.-Israeli relations: America is Israel's best friend and must continue to
be.
Shared values are at the core of the relationship, and our intimacy with
Israel gives us leverage and credibility in peacemaking when we use it
correctly. But this special relationship with the Israelis, which can serve
U.S. interests, has become an exclusive one that does not. We've lost the
capacity to be independent of Israel, to be honest with it when it does
things we don't like, to impose accountability, and to adopt positions in a
negotiation that might depart from Israel's. It's tough to be a credible
mediator with such handicaps.
Fighting with Israel is an occupational reality. It's part of the mediator's
job description. Every U.S. president or secretary of state who succeeded
(and some who didn't) had dust-ups, some serious, with Israel. (Remember how
Bush 41 and Baker used housing loan guarantees?
In 1991, the United States denied Israel billions in credit to borrow at reduced interest rates because
of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's determination to build settlements.) But
the fight must produce something of value -- like the Madrid conference --
that not only makes the United States look good but significantly advances
the negotiations. In short, we need a strategy that stands a chance of
working. Otherwise, why would any U.S. president want to hammer a close ally
with a strong domestic constituency?
And this was the problem with Obama's tough talk to Israel on settlements.
Not only was the goal he laid out -- a settlements freeze including natural
growth -- unattainable, but it wasn't part of a broader strategy whose
dividends would have made the fight worthwhile. Going after the Israelis
piecemeal on settlements to please the Arabs or to make ourselves feel
better won't work unless we have a way of achieving a breakthrough. That a
tough-talking Obama ended up backing down last year when Netanyahu said no
to a comprehensive freeze tells you why.
And that remains the president's challenge after the Biden brouhaha over
housing units in East Jerusalem. In the spring of 2010 we're nowhere near a
breakthough, and yet we're in the middle of a major rift with the Israelis.
Unless we achieve a big concession, we will be perceived to have backed down
again. And even if the president manages to extract something on Jerusalem,
the chances that Netanyahu will be able to make a far greater move on a core
issue, such as borders, will be much reduced. Unless the president is trying
to get rid of Netanyahu (and produce a new coalition), he'll have no choice
but to find a way to cooperate with him.
Now Obama faces a conundrum. A brilliant, empathetic president, with a
Nobel Peace Prize to boot, has embraced the iron triangle and made America
the focal point of action and responsibility for the Arab-Israeli issue at a
time when the country may be least able to do much about it.
Trying to compensate for the absence of urgency, will, and leadership among
Arabs and Israelis by inserting your own has always been a tough assignment.
The painful truth is that faith in America's capacity to fix the
Arab-Israeli issue has always been overrated. It's certainly no coincidence
that every breakthrough from the Egypt-Israel treaty to the Oslo accords to
the Israel-Jordan peace agreement came initially as a consequence of secret
meetings about which the United States was the last to know. Only then, once
there was local ownership or some regional crisis that the United States
could exploit, were we able to move things forward.
Right now, America has neither the opportunity nor frankly the balls to do
truly big things on Arab-Israeli peacemaking. Fortuna might still rescue the
president. The mullahcracy in Tehran might implode. The Syrians and Israelis
might reach out to one another secretly, or perhaps a violent confrontation
will flare up to break the impasse.
But without a tectonic plate shifting somewhere, it's going to be tough to
re-create the good old days when bold and heroic Arab and Israeli leaders
strode the stage of history, together with Americans, willing and able to do
serious peacemaking.
I remember attending Rabin's funeral in 1995 in Jerusalem and trying to
convince myself that America must and could save the peace process that had
been so badly undermined by his assassination. I'm not a declinist. I still
believe in the power of American diplomacy when it's tough, smart, and fair.
But the enthusiasm, fervor, and passion have given way to a much more sober
view of what's possible. Failure can do that.
The believers need to re-examine their faith, especially at a moment when
America is so stretched and overextended. The United States needs to do what
it can, including working with Israelis and Palestinians on negotiating core
final-status issues (particularly on borders, where the gaps are narrowest),
helping Palestinians develop their institutions, getting the Israelis to
assist by allowing Palestinians to breathe economically and expand their
authority, and keeping Gaza calm, even as it tries to relieve the
desperation and sense of siege through economic assistance.
But America should also be aware of what it cannot do, as much as what it can.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who probably didn't know much about the Middle East,
said it best: "There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, then in
half the creeds."
And maybe, if that leads to more realistic thinking when it comes to America's view of Arab-Israeli peacemaking, that's not such a bad thing.
Aaron David Miller served as an advisor on the Middle East to Republican and
Democratic secretaries of state. He is currently a public policy scholar at
the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the author of The
Much Too Promised Land: America's Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace.
See the original article in Foreign Policy
See more on this at Israel Behind the News
Showing posts with label Oslo accords. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Oslo accords. Show all posts
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Monday, April 5, 2010
Foreign Policy: Obama's Settlements Ultimatum
by Steven J Rosen for Foreign Policy
U.S. President Barack Obama's decision to confront Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Israeli construction activity in East Jerusalem has been greeted by a hail of praise, especially from people impatient to proceed with peace negotiations with the Palestinians. The belief seems to be that meeting this issue head-on will accelerate progress toward an agreement ending a conflict that has festered for generations. The historical record suggests a different conclusion.
The assumption that a faceoff over construction in Jerusalem will advance negotiations has not been subjected to much scrutiny. But the last two decades show that progress has occurred not when this issue was put first, but when it was finessed and left for the final status negotiations on Jerusalem.
Consider this: If, 17 years ago, U.S. President Bill Clinton or Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat had insisted that Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin freeze all settlement construction, including in Jerusalem, before Arafat would sit down with Rabin, there would have been no Oslo agreements. By Rabin's own account, in comments before the Knesset, Israel's parliament, he had to fudge the issue.
"I explained to the president of the United States," he said,"that I wouldn't forbid Jews from building privately in the area of Judea and Samaria... I am sorry that within united Jerusalem construction is not more massive."
The same year as the famous handshake on the White House lawn, 1993, the Rabin government completed the construction of more than 6,000 units in the Pisgat Zeev neighborhood of East Jerusalem, out of a total of 13,000 units that were in various stages of completion in areas of the city that had been outside Israeli lines before 1967.
So Arafat did sit down with Rabin, even while Israel's construction in Jerusalem continued. And, on Sept. 13, 1993, the Oslo peace accord was signed -- by the same Mahmoud Abbas who refuses to sit down today. And on October 14, 1994, Rabin, who built homes for Jews in East Jerusalem, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Altogether, Israel completed 30,000 dwelling units in the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem in the four years of Rabin's government. Even the Jan. 9, 1995, announcement of a plan to build 15,000 additional apartments in East Jerusalem neighborhoods beyond the 1967 borders (especially Pisgat Zeev, Neve Yaacov, Gilo, and Har Homa) did not stop negotiations, which resulted in the Oslo II accord of September 28, 1995. Israeli construction continued while Abbas and Rabin signed an historic accord.
And what was the American policy toward Rabin's construction of Jewish homes in East Jerusalem? Mild annoyance.
On Jan. 3, 1995, the State Department spokesman said mildly, in response to the Rabin government's announcement of expanded construction, "The parties themselves... have to judge whether it presents any kind of a problem in their own dialogue. The important thing is to continue to meet." The spokesman added on Jan. 10, 1995, "We admit that settlements are a problem, but we... enjoin the parties to deal with these issues in their negotiations."
Clinton's Middle East peace advisor, Martin Indyk, told the U.S. Senate on Feb. 2, 1995, that Rabin's government had recently "given approval for something like 4,000 to 5,000 new housing units to go up in settlements around the Jerusalem area." But, he said, Clinton had decided to stay out of it. "To take action now that would in one way or another... would be very explosive in the negotiations, and frankly, would put us out of business as a facilitator of those negotiations." Had Clinton taken Obama's approach, it might well have exploded the negotiations and brought the Oslo process to a halt.
Nor was this example of construction in Jerusalem while diplomacy made progress an isolated exception. Two years after Oslo II, in January 1997, Abbas and Arafat sat down with another Israeli prime minister, Netanyahu, to sign the Hebron Protocol, which provided for the withdrawal of the Israeli armed forces from 80 percent of the very sensitive area of Hebron in the West Bank. Arafat and Abbas had no illusions that Netanyahu intended to freeze Israeli construction in East Jerusalem. In fact, Netanyahu had announced that he would proceed with the building of Har Homa, a controversial Israeli suburb conceived by Rabin. Nor, another 18 months later, did the Palestinians' fierce objections to Har Homa stop them from joining the Wye Plantation negotiations from October 15-23, 1998. These talks led to an agreement known as the Wye River Memorandum, in which Netanyahu, under considerable pressure from President Clinton, agreed to pull the Israel Defense Forces out of an additional 13 percent of the West Bank. This move was fiercely opposed by Netanyahu's right flank, and it led to his downfall in January 1999 when the hard-liners in his coalition defected.
Had Clinton demanded Netanyahu freeze construction in Jerusalem and Arafat made it a precondition for negotiations, neither the Hebron nor Wye agreements would have been signed.
The Labor government that was elected in the wake of Netanyahu's ouster continued the pattern of building in Jerusalem while moving forward in negotiations with the Palestinians. At the Camp David Summit (July 11-25, 2000), then Prime Minister Ehud Barak went past Israel's past "red lines" and the Palestinians most of the West Bank and a capital in Jerusalem, along with land swaps. But, at the same time that he was taking these unprecedented steps, Barak was accelerating the construction of Har Homa and other Jerusalem communities across the pre-1967 line. While the talks accelerated, Barak also moved ahead with the Ras al-Amud neighborhood on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. President Clinton said he " would have preferred that this decision was not taken." But Clinton added that the United States "cannot prevent Israel from building in Har-Homa." Haim Ramon, Rabin's minister for Jerusalem affairs, said "I would like to make it clear that the government has no intention of stopping the building at Har Homa."
Here again, had Clinton taken Obama's position and issued an ultimatum demanding that all construction in Jerusalem stop, and had Arafat made that American demand a precondition to begin negotiations, the Camp David Summit of 2000 and the Taba talks in January 2001 would not have occurred.
The next Israeli government, headed by retired general Ariel Sharon, did not seek any breakthroughs in negotiations with the Palestinians. But Sharon ordered the most dramatic territorial concession in Israel's history since 1967: the withdrawal of all Israeli soldiers from every square inch of Gaza along with the abandonment of 21 settlements in Gaza and four in the West Bank, in the "unilateral disengagement" of August-December 2005. Sharon pulled 8,000 Israeli settlers from their homes against fierce opposition from his right flank.
President George W. Bush played a key role in making Sharon's withdrawal from Gaza possible by softening U.S. policy on the settlement issue. To offset the concession that Sharon was making, and counter opposition to it from Israel's right, he wrote a letter to Sharon on April 14, 2004, acknowledging that, "In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949.... It is realistic to expect that any final status agreement will only be achieved on the basis of mutually agreed changes that reflect these realities." One implication of the letter was that the United States would treat Israeli construction in communities that all parties knew will remain part of Israel in any future two-state agreement, like the Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem, differently from settlement activity on controversial areas in the interior of the West Bank.
Elliott Abrams, the White House advisor who negotiated the Bush administration's compromises on the natural growth of settlement, explained the significance of the step Bush took last June in the Wall Street Journal: "There were indeed agreements between Israel and the United States regarding the growth of Israeli settlements on the West Bank.... The prime minister of Israel relied on them in undertaking a wrenching political reorientation... the removal of every single Israeli citizen, settlement and military position in Gaza.... There was a bargained-for exchange. Mr. Sharon was determined to... confront his former allies on Israel's right by abandoning the 'Greater Israel' position.... He asked for our support and got it, including the agreement that we would not demand a total settlement freeze."
There were expressions of unhappiness by Palestinian leaders and European diplomats about the Bush policy of giving a green light to limited construction in Jerusalem and certain settlement blocs. But the Bush administration defended it as a realistic policy that moved the peace process forward.
Four months after the disengagement from Gaza, on Jan. 4, 2006, Sharon went into a coma. His deputy, Ehud Olmert, became prime minister. Olmert sought a resumption of negotiations with the Palestinians. Following the Annapolis Summit in November 2007, Abbas, who had taken over as president of the Palestinian Authority and head of the PLO after Arafat's death in November 2004, agreed to begin intensive negotiations with Olmert. While Abbas expressed his unhappiness with continued Israeli construction in East Jerusalem and the settlement blocs, he did not make cancelation of these projects a precondition for talks. In fact, Olmert said, "It was clear from day one to Abbas... that construction would continue in population concentrations -- the areas mentioned in Bush's 2004 letter.... Beitar Illit will be built, Gush Etzion will be built; there will be construction in Pisgat Zeev and in the Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem... areas [that] will remain under Israeli control in any future settlement."
These negotiations produced significant results: on Sept. 16, 2008, Olmert offered Abbas 93 percent of the West Bank, partition of Jerusalem, and a land swap. Abbas's deputy Saeb Erekat boasted to a Jordanian newspaper that he and Abbas had achieved considerable progress with the Olmert government between the November 2007 Annapolis talks and the end of 2008 in as many as 288 negotiation sessions by 12 committees -- all while Israeli construction continued.
The record is clear and consistent: The United States has never liked Israeli construction in East Jerusalem, and frequently stated that it complicated the peace process. But until Obama, no U.S. president had made its cancelation a precondition for negotiations, and until Obama, Palestinian leaders including Abbas did not make it a precondition either. For 19 years -- from the Madrid conference of October 1991 through the Olmert/Abbas negotiations that ended in 2008, negotiations moved forward while Jerusalem construction continued. Madrid, Oslo I, Oslo II, the Hebron Protocol, the Wye River Memorandum, Camp David, Taba, the disengagement from Gaza, and the Olmert offer to Abbas -- all these events over the course of two decades were made possible by a continuing agreement to disagree about Israeli construction of Jewish homes in Jewish neighborhoods outside the pre-1967 line in East Jerusalem.
Today, for the first time in 19 years, we have an aministration unable to produce Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Abbas is following Obama's lead in demanding an unprecedented precondition that Israel cannot satisfy. This is the same Abbas who negotiated with seven previous Israeli prime ministers -- Shamir, Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu (in his first term), Barak, Sharon, and Olmert, without the precondition that he now demands of Netanyahu. We have a crisis. Netanyahu is doing something that every past Israeli prime minister of the left and right has done, but Obama is doing something that past American leaders considered unwise. It is the U.S. behavior that has changed.
At this moment, Obama's decision to confront Netanyahu about construction in Jerusalem wins wide praise. Whether Obama's policy will still look good in six months, when people realize he has mired the negotiations in quicksand, remains to be seen.
Obama would do better to take the advice of his own Mideast envoy, George Mitchell, who wisely told PBS host Charlie Rose, "For the Israelis, what they're building in is in part of Israel. Now, the others don't see it that way. So you have these widely divergent perspectives on the subject. Our view is, let's get into negotiations, let's deal with the issues and come up with a solution to all of them including Jerusalem.... The Israelis are not going to stop settlements in or construction in East Jerusalem.... There are disputed legal issues.... And we could spend the next 14 years arguing over disputed legal issues or we can try to get a negotiation to resolve them in a manner that meets the aspirations of both societies."
Steven J. Rosen served for 23 years as foreign-policy director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and was a defendant in the recently dismissed AIPAC case. He is now director of the Washington Project at the Middle East Forum.
See the original article in Foreign Policy
See this and more articles at Israel Behind the News
U.S. President Barack Obama's decision to confront Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Israeli construction activity in East Jerusalem has been greeted by a hail of praise, especially from people impatient to proceed with peace negotiations with the Palestinians. The belief seems to be that meeting this issue head-on will accelerate progress toward an agreement ending a conflict that has festered for generations. The historical record suggests a different conclusion.
The assumption that a faceoff over construction in Jerusalem will advance negotiations has not been subjected to much scrutiny. But the last two decades show that progress has occurred not when this issue was put first, but when it was finessed and left for the final status negotiations on Jerusalem.
Consider this: If, 17 years ago, U.S. President Bill Clinton or Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat had insisted that Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin freeze all settlement construction, including in Jerusalem, before Arafat would sit down with Rabin, there would have been no Oslo agreements. By Rabin's own account, in comments before the Knesset, Israel's parliament, he had to fudge the issue.
"I explained to the president of the United States," he said,"that I wouldn't forbid Jews from building privately in the area of Judea and Samaria... I am sorry that within united Jerusalem construction is not more massive."
The same year as the famous handshake on the White House lawn, 1993, the Rabin government completed the construction of more than 6,000 units in the Pisgat Zeev neighborhood of East Jerusalem, out of a total of 13,000 units that were in various stages of completion in areas of the city that had been outside Israeli lines before 1967.
So Arafat did sit down with Rabin, even while Israel's construction in Jerusalem continued. And, on Sept. 13, 1993, the Oslo peace accord was signed -- by the same Mahmoud Abbas who refuses to sit down today. And on October 14, 1994, Rabin, who built homes for Jews in East Jerusalem, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Altogether, Israel completed 30,000 dwelling units in the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem in the four years of Rabin's government. Even the Jan. 9, 1995, announcement of a plan to build 15,000 additional apartments in East Jerusalem neighborhoods beyond the 1967 borders (especially Pisgat Zeev, Neve Yaacov, Gilo, and Har Homa) did not stop negotiations, which resulted in the Oslo II accord of September 28, 1995. Israeli construction continued while Abbas and Rabin signed an historic accord.
And what was the American policy toward Rabin's construction of Jewish homes in East Jerusalem? Mild annoyance.
On Jan. 3, 1995, the State Department spokesman said mildly, in response to the Rabin government's announcement of expanded construction, "The parties themselves... have to judge whether it presents any kind of a problem in their own dialogue. The important thing is to continue to meet." The spokesman added on Jan. 10, 1995, "We admit that settlements are a problem, but we... enjoin the parties to deal with these issues in their negotiations."
Clinton's Middle East peace advisor, Martin Indyk, told the U.S. Senate on Feb. 2, 1995, that Rabin's government had recently "given approval for something like 4,000 to 5,000 new housing units to go up in settlements around the Jerusalem area." But, he said, Clinton had decided to stay out of it. "To take action now that would in one way or another... would be very explosive in the negotiations, and frankly, would put us out of business as a facilitator of those negotiations." Had Clinton taken Obama's approach, it might well have exploded the negotiations and brought the Oslo process to a halt.
Nor was this example of construction in Jerusalem while diplomacy made progress an isolated exception. Two years after Oslo II, in January 1997, Abbas and Arafat sat down with another Israeli prime minister, Netanyahu, to sign the Hebron Protocol, which provided for the withdrawal of the Israeli armed forces from 80 percent of the very sensitive area of Hebron in the West Bank. Arafat and Abbas had no illusions that Netanyahu intended to freeze Israeli construction in East Jerusalem. In fact, Netanyahu had announced that he would proceed with the building of Har Homa, a controversial Israeli suburb conceived by Rabin. Nor, another 18 months later, did the Palestinians' fierce objections to Har Homa stop them from joining the Wye Plantation negotiations from October 15-23, 1998. These talks led to an agreement known as the Wye River Memorandum, in which Netanyahu, under considerable pressure from President Clinton, agreed to pull the Israel Defense Forces out of an additional 13 percent of the West Bank. This move was fiercely opposed by Netanyahu's right flank, and it led to his downfall in January 1999 when the hard-liners in his coalition defected.
Had Clinton demanded Netanyahu freeze construction in Jerusalem and Arafat made it a precondition for negotiations, neither the Hebron nor Wye agreements would have been signed.
The Labor government that was elected in the wake of Netanyahu's ouster continued the pattern of building in Jerusalem while moving forward in negotiations with the Palestinians. At the Camp David Summit (July 11-25, 2000), then Prime Minister Ehud Barak went past Israel's past "red lines" and the Palestinians most of the West Bank and a capital in Jerusalem, along with land swaps. But, at the same time that he was taking these unprecedented steps, Barak was accelerating the construction of Har Homa and other Jerusalem communities across the pre-1967 line. While the talks accelerated, Barak also moved ahead with the Ras al-Amud neighborhood on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. President Clinton said he " would have preferred that this decision was not taken." But Clinton added that the United States "cannot prevent Israel from building in Har-Homa." Haim Ramon, Rabin's minister for Jerusalem affairs, said "I would like to make it clear that the government has no intention of stopping the building at Har Homa."
Here again, had Clinton taken Obama's position and issued an ultimatum demanding that all construction in Jerusalem stop, and had Arafat made that American demand a precondition to begin negotiations, the Camp David Summit of 2000 and the Taba talks in January 2001 would not have occurred.
The next Israeli government, headed by retired general Ariel Sharon, did not seek any breakthroughs in negotiations with the Palestinians. But Sharon ordered the most dramatic territorial concession in Israel's history since 1967: the withdrawal of all Israeli soldiers from every square inch of Gaza along with the abandonment of 21 settlements in Gaza and four in the West Bank, in the "unilateral disengagement" of August-December 2005. Sharon pulled 8,000 Israeli settlers from their homes against fierce opposition from his right flank.
President George W. Bush played a key role in making Sharon's withdrawal from Gaza possible by softening U.S. policy on the settlement issue. To offset the concession that Sharon was making, and counter opposition to it from Israel's right, he wrote a letter to Sharon on April 14, 2004, acknowledging that, "In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949.... It is realistic to expect that any final status agreement will only be achieved on the basis of mutually agreed changes that reflect these realities." One implication of the letter was that the United States would treat Israeli construction in communities that all parties knew will remain part of Israel in any future two-state agreement, like the Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem, differently from settlement activity on controversial areas in the interior of the West Bank.
Elliott Abrams, the White House advisor who negotiated the Bush administration's compromises on the natural growth of settlement, explained the significance of the step Bush took last June in the Wall Street Journal: "There were indeed agreements between Israel and the United States regarding the growth of Israeli settlements on the West Bank.... The prime minister of Israel relied on them in undertaking a wrenching political reorientation... the removal of every single Israeli citizen, settlement and military position in Gaza.... There was a bargained-for exchange. Mr. Sharon was determined to... confront his former allies on Israel's right by abandoning the 'Greater Israel' position.... He asked for our support and got it, including the agreement that we would not demand a total settlement freeze."
There were expressions of unhappiness by Palestinian leaders and European diplomats about the Bush policy of giving a green light to limited construction in Jerusalem and certain settlement blocs. But the Bush administration defended it as a realistic policy that moved the peace process forward.
Four months after the disengagement from Gaza, on Jan. 4, 2006, Sharon went into a coma. His deputy, Ehud Olmert, became prime minister. Olmert sought a resumption of negotiations with the Palestinians. Following the Annapolis Summit in November 2007, Abbas, who had taken over as president of the Palestinian Authority and head of the PLO after Arafat's death in November 2004, agreed to begin intensive negotiations with Olmert. While Abbas expressed his unhappiness with continued Israeli construction in East Jerusalem and the settlement blocs, he did not make cancelation of these projects a precondition for talks. In fact, Olmert said, "It was clear from day one to Abbas... that construction would continue in population concentrations -- the areas mentioned in Bush's 2004 letter.... Beitar Illit will be built, Gush Etzion will be built; there will be construction in Pisgat Zeev and in the Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem... areas [that] will remain under Israeli control in any future settlement."
These negotiations produced significant results: on Sept. 16, 2008, Olmert offered Abbas 93 percent of the West Bank, partition of Jerusalem, and a land swap. Abbas's deputy Saeb Erekat boasted to a Jordanian newspaper that he and Abbas had achieved considerable progress with the Olmert government between the November 2007 Annapolis talks and the end of 2008 in as many as 288 negotiation sessions by 12 committees -- all while Israeli construction continued.
The record is clear and consistent: The United States has never liked Israeli construction in East Jerusalem, and frequently stated that it complicated the peace process. But until Obama, no U.S. president had made its cancelation a precondition for negotiations, and until Obama, Palestinian leaders including Abbas did not make it a precondition either. For 19 years -- from the Madrid conference of October 1991 through the Olmert/Abbas negotiations that ended in 2008, negotiations moved forward while Jerusalem construction continued. Madrid, Oslo I, Oslo II, the Hebron Protocol, the Wye River Memorandum, Camp David, Taba, the disengagement from Gaza, and the Olmert offer to Abbas -- all these events over the course of two decades were made possible by a continuing agreement to disagree about Israeli construction of Jewish homes in Jewish neighborhoods outside the pre-1967 line in East Jerusalem.
Today, for the first time in 19 years, we have an aministration unable to produce Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Abbas is following Obama's lead in demanding an unprecedented precondition that Israel cannot satisfy. This is the same Abbas who negotiated with seven previous Israeli prime ministers -- Shamir, Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu (in his first term), Barak, Sharon, and Olmert, without the precondition that he now demands of Netanyahu. We have a crisis. Netanyahu is doing something that every past Israeli prime minister of the left and right has done, but Obama is doing something that past American leaders considered unwise. It is the U.S. behavior that has changed.
At this moment, Obama's decision to confront Netanyahu about construction in Jerusalem wins wide praise. Whether Obama's policy will still look good in six months, when people realize he has mired the negotiations in quicksand, remains to be seen.
Obama would do better to take the advice of his own Mideast envoy, George Mitchell, who wisely told PBS host Charlie Rose, "For the Israelis, what they're building in is in part of Israel. Now, the others don't see it that way. So you have these widely divergent perspectives on the subject. Our view is, let's get into negotiations, let's deal with the issues and come up with a solution to all of them including Jerusalem.... The Israelis are not going to stop settlements in or construction in East Jerusalem.... There are disputed legal issues.... And we could spend the next 14 years arguing over disputed legal issues or we can try to get a negotiation to resolve them in a manner that meets the aspirations of both societies."
Steven J. Rosen served for 23 years as foreign-policy director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and was a defendant in the recently dismissed AIPAC case. He is now director of the Washington Project at the Middle East Forum.
See the original article in Foreign Policy
See this and more articles at Israel Behind the News
The Future of an Illusion: A piece of paper will not bring peace to the Middle East
by Elliott Abrams in the Weekly Standard
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned, it seems, to direct the Middle East policy of the Obama administration.
Since the Oslo Accords of 1993, 17 years of efforts under three American presidents and six Israeli prime ministers have taught five clear lessons. Each of them is being ignored by President Obama, which is why his own particular "peace process" has so greatly harmed real efforts at peace. Today the only factor uniting Palestinian, Israeli, and Arab leaders is distrust of the quality, sagacity, and reliability of American leadership in the region.
The patching-up efforts of the last two weeks were impressive, but perversely: They showed how much damage had been done and how little the administration cares about reversing it. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, against whom Obama was said to be "boiling with rage" after the Jerusalem housing announcement, got the complete slate of Washington meetings: Clinton, Gates, Biden, Obama. But the meetings were virtually secret: The White House did not permit a single photo to be taken of the Oval Office session, an unprecedented snub. Same at State: no ceremony, no press conference.
For her part, Secretary Clinton told the giant AIPAC meeting, "Our credibility in this process depends in part on our willingness to praise both sides when they are courageous, and when we don't agree, to say so, and say so unequivocally." Several recent Palestinian actions, she said, were "provocations" that are "wrong and must be condemned." That was nice, but saying it to a Jewish audience in a kiss-and-make-up session in Washington fools no one, not after her famous 43-minute telephone call to Netanyahu. These "provocations. . . that must be condemned" (note the passive voice) did not after all elicit a timely call to Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas condemning them, nor did she use the Quartet meeting in Moscow on March 19 for that purpose. And general administration protestations that the United States is committed to Israel's security and that relations are "rock solid" now carry little persuasive power; they sound like Obama's (and for that matter Clinton's) campaign rhetoric, and everyone knows how useful a guide to administration policy all of that proved to be.
What are the lessons the Obama team is ignoring?
1. Israel's flexibility is dependent on its sense of security.
Martin Indyk, Bill Clinton's ambassador to Israel, put it this way in his memoirs: "The record. . . suggests that American presidents can be more successful when they put their arms around Israeli prime ministers and encourage them to move forward, rather than attempt to browbeat them into submission." During the George W. Bush years, the leader of the Israeli right, Ariel Sharon, decided to abandon the idea of a "Greater Israel," impose constraints on settlement construction in the West Bank (no new settlements, no outward expansion of settlement territory), and remove every settlement in Gaza and four small ones in the West Bank. His closest advisers say all of this was possible for him only in the context of unwavering American support for Israel's security steps - including the targeting and killing of Hamas terrorists and the refusal to deal with a terrorist leader like Arafat. What was the turning point for Sharon? Bush's June 24, 2002, speech, where he abandoned Arafat, denounced Palestinian terrorism, and said thorough reforms were the only possible basis for Palestinian statehood. Reassured, Sharon began to act.
Contrast this with the Obama administration, where Israel has been "condemned" - the toughest word in the diplomatic dictionary - for a housing project. Instead of seeking practical and politically feasible limits to settlement activity, the Obama approach has been to say every brick cemented to another was "illegitimate."
Israelis know that these American denunciations of Israel liberate Europeans and others to crank up their own, and so it has been this past year: Israel has been increasingly isolated and criticized internationally. Once we used "condemn," it was impossible (even if we were trying, which we were not) to keep it out of Quartet and EU statements. Add a few other international assaults (the Goldstone Report on the Gaza war, for instance) and American acts of distancing (the president visits Cairo and Riyadh but skips Israel, for example), and Israelis are in no mood for additional risktaking. Who, after all, will have their back if things get rough? Hillary Clinton told AIPAC that "the status quo is unsustainable," as if just about anything we can get on paper would be better. Such phrases do not inspire Israeli confidence that their country's security is anywhere near the top of the administration's list. All this should be elementary, but it seems to have escaped the Obama White House.
2. The failure to set standards for Palestinian conduct hurts the cause of peace.
In the Bill Clinton years, the foreign leader who visited the White House most often was Yasser Arafat - 13 times. Who can blame Arafat for failing to take seriously criticism of his "alleged links" to terrorism when the invitations kept on coming? For years, American officials of both parties have said the "incitement must end," but they have imposed no penalty for its failure to end. When in March the Palestinian Authority (PA) named a square for a terrorist involved in an attack in 1978 that killed 38 Israelis, including 13 children, Obama, Biden, and Clinton were silent. Lower-ranking officials tut-tutted. In Palestinian society, the veneration of this terrorist, Dalal Mughrabi, is widespread; Fatah, not Hamas, is the one celebrating Mughrabi. PA radio and television incite hatred of Israel and Jews with regularity, as Palestinian Media Watch and MEMRI document every month.
In recent weeks the Obama administration has stated that both sides have responsibilities to meet, but it made no serious demands of the PA. Had there been early and regular insistence that incitement end, the Mughrabi incident would never have taken place. The price for such negligence is being paid in both Israeli and Palestinian society: Every such action and every vicious broadcast helps persuade Israelis that Palestinians do not truly seek peace and helps raise a new generation of Palestinians who see Jews as enemies to hate, not neighbors with whom to reach an accommodation. This infantilization of Palestinian society, moreover, moves it further from the responsibilities of statehood, for it holds harmless the most destructive elements of West Bank life and suggests that standards of decency are not necessarily part of progress toward "peace."
A tough demand that all the incitement end now - no more terrorist squares, a clean-up of Palestinian broadcasting, the replacement of offending school textbooks - would both help Palestinian moderates undertake these actions and reassure Israelis that President Obama shares at least some of their concerns about the ability of Palestinians to negotiate and sustain a peace deal. The silence thus far, the unconvincing and rote handling of this issue, leaves the impression that Obama simply wants a deal signed and doesn't much care about what happens after that. Like his distancing himself from Israel and his apparent lack of concern for Israeli security, this undermines any chance of successful peace talks.
3. Israeli withdrawals do not lead to peace unless law and order can be maintained by responsible security forces.
Israelis learned this the hard way in South Lebanon and Gaza, and it is unquestionably the greatest factor leading them to oppose a similar withdrawal from the West Bank. The Labor party leader Ehud Barak is not viewed in Israel as a hardliner; when he was prime minister he offered Arafat a dramatic peace proposal in 2000. But when, as defense minister, he met with President Bush in 2008 he handed over, and raised repeatedly in later meetings with Secretary Rice, a list of Israel's security needs in the West Bank. He and Netanyahu (and the vast majority of Israelis) are of one mind on this: Terrorism from Gaza is a security challenge for Israel, but terrorism from the West Bank threatens Israel's survival. There has been considerable progress in training Palestinian security forces, but no one believes they can yet maintain order without the presence of the IDF and Shin Bet. Those who say, as George Mitchell - Obama's special envoy to the Middle East - and the Quartet have, that there can be a peace deal in 24 months are saying that fundamental security issues can be finessed or forgotten. Of course they can if your goal is a piece of paper - or, perhaps better put, a paper peace. If you want a real and lasting peace, you must have the answer to the question: What will fill the vacuum when Israeli forces leave? Today the answer is chaos or Hamas, and any prediction that in 24 months these matters will be resolved shows a lack of seriousness. Palestinians who value law and order and seek to build a decent society, as well as Jordanians who worry what forces will be across the river from them, cannot be so cavalier. This brings us back to lesson one: If the United States is intent on a deal in 24 months no matter what, Israelis will understand that we are not going to protect their security and that we'll complain when they assert the need to do it themselves.
4. The Israeli-Palestinian dispute is not the center of world, Arab, or Muslim politics.
George Mitchell once acknowledged that when he talks to Arab leaders they raise Iran first, but no one in the administration wants to allow mere facts to interfere with their ideology. George W. Bush was as close as any American president ever has been to Israel, but had excellent relations with the Moroccan, Algerian, Emirati, Omani, Bahraini, Kuwaiti, Saudi, and Jordanian rulers - all except the Egyptians, who were annoyed that he thought they should have free elections. Paying attention to what Arab political leaders say publicly about Israel is foolish, for their real views consist of tough-minded assessments of the balance of power in the region. What they want most of all is calm; they do not want their streets riled up by Israeli-Palestinian violence. Palestinians are not at the center of their hearts or they would visit the West Bank and bring plenty of cash with them. What preoccupies them is survival and Iran. If they take any lesson from the current coldness between the United States and Israel, it is that the United States is not a reliable ally. If we can ditch Israel, they know we can far more easily ditch them.
The most perverse misunderstanding along these lines is the thought that supporting Israel is risking American lives in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the war on terror. Vice President Biden is reported to have told Netanyahu that "this is starting to get dangerous for us. What you're doing here undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan." White House denials suggest that the quotation is not exact, but there has also been no flat-out denial of the sentiment. David Axelrod, the political hack who appears to be a key foreign policy strategist and spokesman for the president, was asked on one of the Sunday shows if he agreed that settlement construction puts U.S. troops' lives at risk. He replied, "It is important for our own security that we move forward and resolve this very difficult issue." Not exactly a resounding "no." General David Petraeus, the CENTCOM commander, told the Senate that "clearly the tensions in these issues have an enormous effect on the strategic context in which we operate in the Central Command area of responsibility." Once again, not a "No way" or a "Get real." Petraeus had a chance to say the Pakistanis are not thinking hard about West Bank settlement construction when they watch the Taliban and developments in Waziristan, and he failed to do so then or in later explanations. How hard would it have been for him or some other official to remind everyone that Osama bin Laden became a terrorist to overthrow the government in Riyadh, not the one in Jerusalem? The struggles between modernizers and traditionalists, Sunni and Shia, secularists and Islamists are tearing the Islamic and the Arab world apart. They would continue to do so if Israel no longer existed.
Israelis listening to official American remarks hear an amateurish interpretation of Arab politics, which as Lee Smith reminded us in his recent book (quoting bin Laden himself) is basically about backing the strong horse. Arab leaders want to know what we will do to stop Iran; they want to know if their ally in Washington is going to be the top power in the region. Israelis wonder where the "uh oh, this will make Islamic extremists angry" argument stops. Does anyone think al Qaeda or the Taliban would be mollified by a settlement freeze? The Islamists are not interested in "1967 issues" related to Israel's size, but in "1948 issues" related to Israel's existence. If henceforth we mean to engage such people rather than to defeat them, Israel's existence - not its settlement policy - comes into play.
If this is not the Obama view of the world, the administration should say so quickly and very clearly. Otherwise his administration can fairly be said to be revisiting our own "1948 issues." The argument that Israel would be a great burden and ruin our place in the Arab world was proffered then by George Marshall - and rejected by Harry Truman. In his memoirs, Clark Clifford wrote at length about the State Department's efforts to stop Truman from recognizing the new State of Israel. Clifford quoted Marshall's deputy Robert Lovett as saying on May 14, 1948 - the day Israel declared its independence and Truman offered recognition - "There will be a tremendous reaction in the Arab world. We might lose the effects of many years of hard work with the Arabs. We will lose our position with Arab leaders. It will put our diplomatic missions and consular representatives in personal jeopardy." After 60 years of American leadership and military dominance in the Middle East, it should be as disturbing to Americans - not least to Democrats who venerate Truman - as it is to Israelis that traces of this approach are emerging again in Washington.
Netanyahu answered these poor arguments in his address to AIPAC:
"Our soldiers and your soldiers fight against fanatic enemies that loathe our common values. In the eyes of these fanatics, we are you and you are us. To them, the only difference is that you are big and we are small, you are the Great Satan and we are the Little Satan."
5. The 'peace process' retards peace.
A single-minded concentration on "the peace process" hurts the cause of peace and moderation throughout the region and does little to build the necessary institutions of Palestinian society. It's obvious that nearly two decades of negotiations have not produced peace. Instead this focus has had two deleterious effects.
First, it means we care more about getting Syria, Egypt, or others to endorse some negotiating plan than we do about their own internal situations. The people, the politics, the alliances of such countries become unimportant, as we focus on whether their rulers will deign to sit at some table we've laid. Human rights and democracy issues evaporate.
Second, we use all our chips for the negotiating sessions, instead of applying them to the hard work of nation building. We ask Arab states to reach out to Israel (which they will not do) when we should be demanding that they reach out to the Palestinians (which they might). We explode, and damage U.S.-Israeli relations, over a tiny construction announcement because it might slow "proximity talks" Mitchell has cooked up. We use American influence with Israel not to promote economic growth in the West Bank, but to try and impede Jewish (never Arab) construction in Israel's capital city. This set of priorities is perverse and will not lead to peace. Instead, a pragmatic approach that seeks to create in the West Bank a decent society and a state that will maintain law and order should be our goals.
The last week of March brought talk of "reconciliation" between the Obama administration and the government of Israel. Relations are so strained that we, too, appear to need our own set of "proximity talks" now. But reconciliation is not a simple matter, as the Catholic Church knows. In that faith, it is a sacrament consisting of three elements: conversion, confession, and celebration. Conversion is the internal realization of wrongdoing, confession is the external admission of it, and celebration follows when (and only when) the sinner has converted, repented, confessed, and returned. Given the Obama administration's view of Israel and the Middle East, celebration seems a long way off.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliott_Abrams
Elliott Abrams (born January 24, 1948) is an American lawyer and politician who served in foreign policy positions for two Republican U.S. Presidents, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. He is currently a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.[6]
During the Reagan administration, Abrams gained notoriety for his involvement controversial foreign policy decisions regarding Nicaragua and El Salvador. During Bush's first term, he served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director on the National Security Council for Near East and North African Affairs. At the start of Bush's second term, Abrams was promoted to be his Deputy National Security Advisor for Global Democracy Strategy, in charge of promoting Bush's strategy of advancing democracy abroad. His appointment by Bush was controversial due to his conviction in 1991 on two misdemeanor counts of unlawfully withholding information fromCongress during the Iran-Contra Affair investigation.
See this article and more at Israel Behind the News
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned, it seems, to direct the Middle East policy of the Obama administration.
Since the Oslo Accords of 1993, 17 years of efforts under three American presidents and six Israeli prime ministers have taught five clear lessons. Each of them is being ignored by President Obama, which is why his own particular "peace process" has so greatly harmed real efforts at peace. Today the only factor uniting Palestinian, Israeli, and Arab leaders is distrust of the quality, sagacity, and reliability of American leadership in the region.
The patching-up efforts of the last two weeks were impressive, but perversely: They showed how much damage had been done and how little the administration cares about reversing it. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, against whom Obama was said to be "boiling with rage" after the Jerusalem housing announcement, got the complete slate of Washington meetings: Clinton, Gates, Biden, Obama. But the meetings were virtually secret: The White House did not permit a single photo to be taken of the Oval Office session, an unprecedented snub. Same at State: no ceremony, no press conference.
For her part, Secretary Clinton told the giant AIPAC meeting, "Our credibility in this process depends in part on our willingness to praise both sides when they are courageous, and when we don't agree, to say so, and say so unequivocally." Several recent Palestinian actions, she said, were "provocations" that are "wrong and must be condemned." That was nice, but saying it to a Jewish audience in a kiss-and-make-up session in Washington fools no one, not after her famous 43-minute telephone call to Netanyahu. These "provocations. . . that must be condemned" (note the passive voice) did not after all elicit a timely call to Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas condemning them, nor did she use the Quartet meeting in Moscow on March 19 for that purpose. And general administration protestations that the United States is committed to Israel's security and that relations are "rock solid" now carry little persuasive power; they sound like Obama's (and for that matter Clinton's) campaign rhetoric, and everyone knows how useful a guide to administration policy all of that proved to be.
What are the lessons the Obama team is ignoring?
1. Israel's flexibility is dependent on its sense of security.
Martin Indyk, Bill Clinton's ambassador to Israel, put it this way in his memoirs: "The record. . . suggests that American presidents can be more successful when they put their arms around Israeli prime ministers and encourage them to move forward, rather than attempt to browbeat them into submission." During the George W. Bush years, the leader of the Israeli right, Ariel Sharon, decided to abandon the idea of a "Greater Israel," impose constraints on settlement construction in the West Bank (no new settlements, no outward expansion of settlement territory), and remove every settlement in Gaza and four small ones in the West Bank. His closest advisers say all of this was possible for him only in the context of unwavering American support for Israel's security steps - including the targeting and killing of Hamas terrorists and the refusal to deal with a terrorist leader like Arafat. What was the turning point for Sharon? Bush's June 24, 2002, speech, where he abandoned Arafat, denounced Palestinian terrorism, and said thorough reforms were the only possible basis for Palestinian statehood. Reassured, Sharon began to act.
Contrast this with the Obama administration, where Israel has been "condemned" - the toughest word in the diplomatic dictionary - for a housing project. Instead of seeking practical and politically feasible limits to settlement activity, the Obama approach has been to say every brick cemented to another was "illegitimate."
Israelis know that these American denunciations of Israel liberate Europeans and others to crank up their own, and so it has been this past year: Israel has been increasingly isolated and criticized internationally. Once we used "condemn," it was impossible (even if we were trying, which we were not) to keep it out of Quartet and EU statements. Add a few other international assaults (the Goldstone Report on the Gaza war, for instance) and American acts of distancing (the president visits Cairo and Riyadh but skips Israel, for example), and Israelis are in no mood for additional risktaking. Who, after all, will have their back if things get rough? Hillary Clinton told AIPAC that "the status quo is unsustainable," as if just about anything we can get on paper would be better. Such phrases do not inspire Israeli confidence that their country's security is anywhere near the top of the administration's list. All this should be elementary, but it seems to have escaped the Obama White House.
2. The failure to set standards for Palestinian conduct hurts the cause of peace.
In the Bill Clinton years, the foreign leader who visited the White House most often was Yasser Arafat - 13 times. Who can blame Arafat for failing to take seriously criticism of his "alleged links" to terrorism when the invitations kept on coming? For years, American officials of both parties have said the "incitement must end," but they have imposed no penalty for its failure to end. When in March the Palestinian Authority (PA) named a square for a terrorist involved in an attack in 1978 that killed 38 Israelis, including 13 children, Obama, Biden, and Clinton were silent. Lower-ranking officials tut-tutted. In Palestinian society, the veneration of this terrorist, Dalal Mughrabi, is widespread; Fatah, not Hamas, is the one celebrating Mughrabi. PA radio and television incite hatred of Israel and Jews with regularity, as Palestinian Media Watch and MEMRI document every month.
In recent weeks the Obama administration has stated that both sides have responsibilities to meet, but it made no serious demands of the PA. Had there been early and regular insistence that incitement end, the Mughrabi incident would never have taken place. The price for such negligence is being paid in both Israeli and Palestinian society: Every such action and every vicious broadcast helps persuade Israelis that Palestinians do not truly seek peace and helps raise a new generation of Palestinians who see Jews as enemies to hate, not neighbors with whom to reach an accommodation. This infantilization of Palestinian society, moreover, moves it further from the responsibilities of statehood, for it holds harmless the most destructive elements of West Bank life and suggests that standards of decency are not necessarily part of progress toward "peace."
A tough demand that all the incitement end now - no more terrorist squares, a clean-up of Palestinian broadcasting, the replacement of offending school textbooks - would both help Palestinian moderates undertake these actions and reassure Israelis that President Obama shares at least some of their concerns about the ability of Palestinians to negotiate and sustain a peace deal. The silence thus far, the unconvincing and rote handling of this issue, leaves the impression that Obama simply wants a deal signed and doesn't much care about what happens after that. Like his distancing himself from Israel and his apparent lack of concern for Israeli security, this undermines any chance of successful peace talks.
3. Israeli withdrawals do not lead to peace unless law and order can be maintained by responsible security forces.
Israelis learned this the hard way in South Lebanon and Gaza, and it is unquestionably the greatest factor leading them to oppose a similar withdrawal from the West Bank. The Labor party leader Ehud Barak is not viewed in Israel as a hardliner; when he was prime minister he offered Arafat a dramatic peace proposal in 2000. But when, as defense minister, he met with President Bush in 2008 he handed over, and raised repeatedly in later meetings with Secretary Rice, a list of Israel's security needs in the West Bank. He and Netanyahu (and the vast majority of Israelis) are of one mind on this: Terrorism from Gaza is a security challenge for Israel, but terrorism from the West Bank threatens Israel's survival. There has been considerable progress in training Palestinian security forces, but no one believes they can yet maintain order without the presence of the IDF and Shin Bet. Those who say, as George Mitchell - Obama's special envoy to the Middle East - and the Quartet have, that there can be a peace deal in 24 months are saying that fundamental security issues can be finessed or forgotten. Of course they can if your goal is a piece of paper - or, perhaps better put, a paper peace. If you want a real and lasting peace, you must have the answer to the question: What will fill the vacuum when Israeli forces leave? Today the answer is chaos or Hamas, and any prediction that in 24 months these matters will be resolved shows a lack of seriousness. Palestinians who value law and order and seek to build a decent society, as well as Jordanians who worry what forces will be across the river from them, cannot be so cavalier. This brings us back to lesson one: If the United States is intent on a deal in 24 months no matter what, Israelis will understand that we are not going to protect their security and that we'll complain when they assert the need to do it themselves.
4. The Israeli-Palestinian dispute is not the center of world, Arab, or Muslim politics.
George Mitchell once acknowledged that when he talks to Arab leaders they raise Iran first, but no one in the administration wants to allow mere facts to interfere with their ideology. George W. Bush was as close as any American president ever has been to Israel, but had excellent relations with the Moroccan, Algerian, Emirati, Omani, Bahraini, Kuwaiti, Saudi, and Jordanian rulers - all except the Egyptians, who were annoyed that he thought they should have free elections. Paying attention to what Arab political leaders say publicly about Israel is foolish, for their real views consist of tough-minded assessments of the balance of power in the region. What they want most of all is calm; they do not want their streets riled up by Israeli-Palestinian violence. Palestinians are not at the center of their hearts or they would visit the West Bank and bring plenty of cash with them. What preoccupies them is survival and Iran. If they take any lesson from the current coldness between the United States and Israel, it is that the United States is not a reliable ally. If we can ditch Israel, they know we can far more easily ditch them.
The most perverse misunderstanding along these lines is the thought that supporting Israel is risking American lives in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the war on terror. Vice President Biden is reported to have told Netanyahu that "this is starting to get dangerous for us. What you're doing here undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan." White House denials suggest that the quotation is not exact, but there has also been no flat-out denial of the sentiment. David Axelrod, the political hack who appears to be a key foreign policy strategist and spokesman for the president, was asked on one of the Sunday shows if he agreed that settlement construction puts U.S. troops' lives at risk. He replied, "It is important for our own security that we move forward and resolve this very difficult issue." Not exactly a resounding "no." General David Petraeus, the CENTCOM commander, told the Senate that "clearly the tensions in these issues have an enormous effect on the strategic context in which we operate in the Central Command area of responsibility." Once again, not a "No way" or a "Get real." Petraeus had a chance to say the Pakistanis are not thinking hard about West Bank settlement construction when they watch the Taliban and developments in Waziristan, and he failed to do so then or in later explanations. How hard would it have been for him or some other official to remind everyone that Osama bin Laden became a terrorist to overthrow the government in Riyadh, not the one in Jerusalem? The struggles between modernizers and traditionalists, Sunni and Shia, secularists and Islamists are tearing the Islamic and the Arab world apart. They would continue to do so if Israel no longer existed.
Israelis listening to official American remarks hear an amateurish interpretation of Arab politics, which as Lee Smith reminded us in his recent book (quoting bin Laden himself) is basically about backing the strong horse. Arab leaders want to know what we will do to stop Iran; they want to know if their ally in Washington is going to be the top power in the region. Israelis wonder where the "uh oh, this will make Islamic extremists angry" argument stops. Does anyone think al Qaeda or the Taliban would be mollified by a settlement freeze? The Islamists are not interested in "1967 issues" related to Israel's size, but in "1948 issues" related to Israel's existence. If henceforth we mean to engage such people rather than to defeat them, Israel's existence - not its settlement policy - comes into play.
If this is not the Obama view of the world, the administration should say so quickly and very clearly. Otherwise his administration can fairly be said to be revisiting our own "1948 issues." The argument that Israel would be a great burden and ruin our place in the Arab world was proffered then by George Marshall - and rejected by Harry Truman. In his memoirs, Clark Clifford wrote at length about the State Department's efforts to stop Truman from recognizing the new State of Israel. Clifford quoted Marshall's deputy Robert Lovett as saying on May 14, 1948 - the day Israel declared its independence and Truman offered recognition - "There will be a tremendous reaction in the Arab world. We might lose the effects of many years of hard work with the Arabs. We will lose our position with Arab leaders. It will put our diplomatic missions and consular representatives in personal jeopardy." After 60 years of American leadership and military dominance in the Middle East, it should be as disturbing to Americans - not least to Democrats who venerate Truman - as it is to Israelis that traces of this approach are emerging again in Washington.
Netanyahu answered these poor arguments in his address to AIPAC:
"Our soldiers and your soldiers fight against fanatic enemies that loathe our common values. In the eyes of these fanatics, we are you and you are us. To them, the only difference is that you are big and we are small, you are the Great Satan and we are the Little Satan."
5. The 'peace process' retards peace.
A single-minded concentration on "the peace process" hurts the cause of peace and moderation throughout the region and does little to build the necessary institutions of Palestinian society. It's obvious that nearly two decades of negotiations have not produced peace. Instead this focus has had two deleterious effects.
First, it means we care more about getting Syria, Egypt, or others to endorse some negotiating plan than we do about their own internal situations. The people, the politics, the alliances of such countries become unimportant, as we focus on whether their rulers will deign to sit at some table we've laid. Human rights and democracy issues evaporate.
Second, we use all our chips for the negotiating sessions, instead of applying them to the hard work of nation building. We ask Arab states to reach out to Israel (which they will not do) when we should be demanding that they reach out to the Palestinians (which they might). We explode, and damage U.S.-Israeli relations, over a tiny construction announcement because it might slow "proximity talks" Mitchell has cooked up. We use American influence with Israel not to promote economic growth in the West Bank, but to try and impede Jewish (never Arab) construction in Israel's capital city. This set of priorities is perverse and will not lead to peace. Instead, a pragmatic approach that seeks to create in the West Bank a decent society and a state that will maintain law and order should be our goals.
The last week of March brought talk of "reconciliation" between the Obama administration and the government of Israel. Relations are so strained that we, too, appear to need our own set of "proximity talks" now. But reconciliation is not a simple matter, as the Catholic Church knows. In that faith, it is a sacrament consisting of three elements: conversion, confession, and celebration. Conversion is the internal realization of wrongdoing, confession is the external admission of it, and celebration follows when (and only when) the sinner has converted, repented, confessed, and returned. Given the Obama administration's view of Israel and the Middle East, celebration seems a long way off.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliott_Abrams
Elliott Abrams (born January 24, 1948) is an American lawyer and politician who served in foreign policy positions for two Republican U.S. Presidents, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. He is currently a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.[6]
During the Reagan administration, Abrams gained notoriety for his involvement controversial foreign policy decisions regarding Nicaragua and El Salvador. During Bush's first term, he served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director on the National Security Council for Near East and North African Affairs. At the start of Bush's second term, Abrams was promoted to be his Deputy National Security Advisor for Global Democracy Strategy, in charge of promoting Bush's strategy of advancing democracy abroad. His appointment by Bush was controversial due to his conviction in 1991 on two misdemeanor counts of unlawfully withholding information fromCongress during the Iran-Contra Affair investigation.
See this article and more at Israel Behind the News
Monday, February 8, 2010
Stop the Bonner-Bashing!
by David Wilder, Spokesman, Jewish Community of Hebron
For the past couple of weeks, ever since the 'story' broke, I've been debating with myself whether or not to write anything about it. I've learned, usually the hard way, that sometimes it's better to shut up. But usually, my second nature gets the better of me and I mouth off anyhow. That's what I seem to be doing now. Actually, I find myself in a somewhat strange situation. I've helped out journalists before, even those I really didn't particularly care for. A number of years ago a CNN correspondent was hit in the head with a rock (thrown by an Arab) outside Beit Hadassah. The guy really wasn't a friend of ours, but, what can you do �" he was bleeding. So I sent him up to my apartment to get some first aid from my wife. Another time, when a journalist's car battery died in Hebron, I helped him start up with cables. A photographer friend of mine was almost killed by a group of very angry people the night that Beit Shapiro was emptied of its Jewish residents. I didn't save him; someone else from the community arrived first. Etc. Etc. I guess it's what we call in Hebrew 'Derech Eretz' or in plainer language, just being well-mannered and polite. But I don't recall that I ever had to publicly defend a journalist. Especially one of the most well-known journalists in the field who happens to work for a paper that surely isn't a friend of ours. Well, there's a first time for everything. I've known Ethan Bronner probably for about as long as I've worked in the business of media as spokesman for Hebron's Jewish community, primarily with the foreign and English-speaking press. Way back then, I'd guess about 13 years ago, Bronner was working for the Boston Globe. I'm not sure why I remember him; I meet so many reporters from around the world and have a lousy memory for names and faces. And truthfully, I usually prefer to forget them as fast as I can after meeting them. But, for whatever reason, when he arrived back in Israel, probably a decade after leaving, I remembered him. Why? I'm not sure. But his name stuck in my head perhaps because he wasn't as one-sidedly biased and subjective as others. That’s not to say that I agreed with everything he wrote. Far from it. In 1996 he wrote, “Since the settlers in Hebron are among the most fervent of Jewish nationalists, believing they are part of a celestial scheme for Jewish reconquest of the Promised Land, the conflict here seems insoluble.” On the other hand, that same year, he also penned,“For years, leaders of the tiny, fortress-like Jewish settlement in the middle of this Palestinian city have said that the very idea of Palestinian police is absurd since armed Palestinians, uniformed or not, would ultimately turn their guns on Israelis. Never, these leaders argued, should such a force be permitted in Hebron, a city rich in Jewish history where the biblical patriarchs are buried, and today the last West Bank city under full Israeli control. If that came to pass, they said, the lives of every Jew -- settler or visitor -- would be at risk.” In any case, there aren’t a whole lot of journalists that can be described as being ‘somewhat objective’ concerning Hebron. I’ve followed Bronner’s writing in the NY Times since he arrived back here, I guess about a year or so ago. I publicly attacked him in an op-ed piece written for the Jerusalem Post this past summer, marking the 80th anniversary of the 1929 riots and massacre, [http://goo.gl/tKiG], when he compared the Israeli right to Hamas. On the other hand, after reading a feature he authored called Resolve of West Bank Settlers May Have Limits last September, I had to seriously consider the merits of the piece. But I really didn’t get a kick out of the positive publicity he gave to the radical left-winger Ezra Nawi in the pages of the New York Times [http://goo.gl/TojJ]. So much for another NY Times bureau chief in Israel. They come, they go, but we stay. Almost. Until a couple of weeks ago. I started catching blogs attacking Bronner because… his son joined the Israeli army. This, it seems, in the opinion of some of my best left-wing friends, is a primary reason why Bronner cannot continue to serve as the Time’s Bureau Chief. Why? Because he can no longer be…. Objective? Ah. The truth finally revealed. Remember such bureau chiefs such as Serge Shememan, who titled Hebron Jews as ‘militants’ and ‘extremists’ [http://goo.gl/Peoh]. Or Deborah Sontag’s magnum opus, written as she retired from her position in Israel, Quest for Mideast Peace: How and Why It Failed [http://goo.gl/1Av9], where she absolves Arafat from the ‘failed’ Barak-Arafat Camp David powwow, which led to the beginning of the Oslo War aka 2nd Intifada in October, 2000, and places the blame on Barak. (According to Tom Gross http://goo.gl/imfk - “this piece has been dubbed “the mother of all Arafat-rehab articles.””) Well, that’s OK. That’s good, objective NY Times journalism because it extols the Arabs, lambasts Israel, and most importantly, demonizes “the settlers.” But, if a correspondent happens to have a son who has patriotic emotions towards the Jewish state, and desires to take part in defending his people (Bronner is Jewish, and married to an Israeli), well, that’s just too much. That kind of a correspondent will never ever be able to fit the bill and abide by the Times age-old agenda (see previously quoted Tom Gross article). What’s the problem? It’s a given that Israeli soldiers are, by definition, ‘bad guys,’ evil Arab-hating killers, who will let nothing stop their vindictive violent acts of war against poor, innocent, defenseless terrorists, who have nothing but Goldstone to protect them. That being the case, Ethan Bronner’s son is now ‘one of them.’ Bronner the elder, being the ‘evil ones’ father must have some sympathetic symbiosis with these iniquitous emotions, thereby branding him as ‘unfit’ to cover Israel for the paper that publishes all the news that’s not fit to print. Guilt by association. I wonder how far back they would go. Say, for example, that it wasn’t Bronner’s son in the army, rather his grandson. Would that still taint his objectivity? Probably. I seem to remember that about 60 years ago the “Jew stain” included anyone twenty-five percent Jewish. OK. The left wing blogs can be excused. After all, this is how they make their money. But �" on Saturday, the NY Times Public Editor, Clark Hoyt, wrote in a column in the NY Times [http://goo.gl/hIcb] officially recommending that Bronner be relieved of his Israeli duties, “at least for the duration of his son’s service in the I.D.F.” This is about as inexcusable as you get. Like I said, I’m not a flag-waving fan of Ethan Bronner, but I do believe that he retains some qualitative journalistic integrity. And I am a flag-waving fan of Jewish patriotism, especially when it takes the form of a young man wanting to serve his country and his people. Especially a kid who didn’t spend his entire life growing up in Israel. To penalize his father for such devotion, to accuse him before-the-fact of lacking the ability to continue to write objectively, is a professional slap in the face, publicly insulting. These people’s problem is that a correspondent who cannot Israel-bash on a daily basis is not worthy of his business card. Despite my professional disagreements with Ethan Bronner, which I will continue to express whenever necessary, in this case I stand behind him, his son and his family one hundred percent. With blessings from Hebron.
www.hebron.com (English)
www.hebron.org.il (Hebrew)
www.machpela.com
www.hebronfund.com
www.thewilderway.info
Tel:Israel # 972-52-429-5554
US # - 1-347-725-0325
Canada 1-647-723-3789 x109
Fax: (801) 720-9291
Google/Aim Chats: Beit Hadassah
Skype: Beithadassah
Twitter: DavidWilder
Facebook: http://profile.to/hebron.jewish.community
For the past couple of weeks, ever since the 'story' broke, I've been debating with myself whether or not to write anything about it. I've learned, usually the hard way, that sometimes it's better to shut up. But usually, my second nature gets the better of me and I mouth off anyhow. That's what I seem to be doing now. Actually, I find myself in a somewhat strange situation. I've helped out journalists before, even those I really didn't particularly care for. A number of years ago a CNN correspondent was hit in the head with a rock (thrown by an Arab) outside Beit Hadassah. The guy really wasn't a friend of ours, but, what can you do �" he was bleeding. So I sent him up to my apartment to get some first aid from my wife. Another time, when a journalist's car battery died in Hebron, I helped him start up with cables. A photographer friend of mine was almost killed by a group of very angry people the night that Beit Shapiro was emptied of its Jewish residents. I didn't save him; someone else from the community arrived first. Etc. Etc. I guess it's what we call in Hebrew 'Derech Eretz' or in plainer language, just being well-mannered and polite. But I don't recall that I ever had to publicly defend a journalist. Especially one of the most well-known journalists in the field who happens to work for a paper that surely isn't a friend of ours. Well, there's a first time for everything. I've known Ethan Bronner probably for about as long as I've worked in the business of media as spokesman for Hebron's Jewish community, primarily with the foreign and English-speaking press. Way back then, I'd guess about 13 years ago, Bronner was working for the Boston Globe. I'm not sure why I remember him; I meet so many reporters from around the world and have a lousy memory for names and faces. And truthfully, I usually prefer to forget them as fast as I can after meeting them. But, for whatever reason, when he arrived back in Israel, probably a decade after leaving, I remembered him. Why? I'm not sure. But his name stuck in my head perhaps because he wasn't as one-sidedly biased and subjective as others. That’s not to say that I agreed with everything he wrote. Far from it. In 1996 he wrote, “Since the settlers in Hebron are among the most fervent of Jewish nationalists, believing they are part of a celestial scheme for Jewish reconquest of the Promised Land, the conflict here seems insoluble.” On the other hand, that same year, he also penned,“For years, leaders of the tiny, fortress-like Jewish settlement in the middle of this Palestinian city have said that the very idea of Palestinian police is absurd since armed Palestinians, uniformed or not, would ultimately turn their guns on Israelis. Never, these leaders argued, should such a force be permitted in Hebron, a city rich in Jewish history where the biblical patriarchs are buried, and today the last West Bank city under full Israeli control. If that came to pass, they said, the lives of every Jew -- settler or visitor -- would be at risk.” In any case, there aren’t a whole lot of journalists that can be described as being ‘somewhat objective’ concerning Hebron. I’ve followed Bronner’s writing in the NY Times since he arrived back here, I guess about a year or so ago. I publicly attacked him in an op-ed piece written for the Jerusalem Post this past summer, marking the 80th anniversary of the 1929 riots and massacre, [http://goo.gl/tKiG], when he compared the Israeli right to Hamas. On the other hand, after reading a feature he authored called Resolve of West Bank Settlers May Have Limits last September, I had to seriously consider the merits of the piece. But I really didn’t get a kick out of the positive publicity he gave to the radical left-winger Ezra Nawi in the pages of the New York Times [http://goo.gl/TojJ]. So much for another NY Times bureau chief in Israel. They come, they go, but we stay. Almost. Until a couple of weeks ago. I started catching blogs attacking Bronner because… his son joined the Israeli army. This, it seems, in the opinion of some of my best left-wing friends, is a primary reason why Bronner cannot continue to serve as the Time’s Bureau Chief. Why? Because he can no longer be…. Objective? Ah. The truth finally revealed. Remember such bureau chiefs such as Serge Shememan, who titled Hebron Jews as ‘militants’ and ‘extremists’ [http://goo.gl/Peoh]. Or Deborah Sontag’s magnum opus, written as she retired from her position in Israel, Quest for Mideast Peace: How and Why It Failed [http://goo.gl/1Av9], where she absolves Arafat from the ‘failed’ Barak-Arafat Camp David powwow, which led to the beginning of the Oslo War aka 2nd Intifada in October, 2000, and places the blame on Barak. (According to Tom Gross http://goo.gl/imfk - “this piece has been dubbed “the mother of all Arafat-rehab articles.””) Well, that’s OK. That’s good, objective NY Times journalism because it extols the Arabs, lambasts Israel, and most importantly, demonizes “the settlers.” But, if a correspondent happens to have a son who has patriotic emotions towards the Jewish state, and desires to take part in defending his people (Bronner is Jewish, and married to an Israeli), well, that’s just too much. That kind of a correspondent will never ever be able to fit the bill and abide by the Times age-old agenda (see previously quoted Tom Gross article). What’s the problem? It’s a given that Israeli soldiers are, by definition, ‘bad guys,’ evil Arab-hating killers, who will let nothing stop their vindictive violent acts of war against poor, innocent, defenseless terrorists, who have nothing but Goldstone to protect them. That being the case, Ethan Bronner’s son is now ‘one of them.’ Bronner the elder, being the ‘evil ones’ father must have some sympathetic symbiosis with these iniquitous emotions, thereby branding him as ‘unfit’ to cover Israel for the paper that publishes all the news that’s not fit to print. Guilt by association. I wonder how far back they would go. Say, for example, that it wasn’t Bronner’s son in the army, rather his grandson. Would that still taint his objectivity? Probably. I seem to remember that about 60 years ago the “Jew stain” included anyone twenty-five percent Jewish. OK. The left wing blogs can be excused. After all, this is how they make their money. But �" on Saturday, the NY Times Public Editor, Clark Hoyt, wrote in a column in the NY Times [http://goo.gl/hIcb] officially recommending that Bronner be relieved of his Israeli duties, “at least for the duration of his son’s service in the I.D.F.” This is about as inexcusable as you get. Like I said, I’m not a flag-waving fan of Ethan Bronner, but I do believe that he retains some qualitative journalistic integrity. And I am a flag-waving fan of Jewish patriotism, especially when it takes the form of a young man wanting to serve his country and his people. Especially a kid who didn’t spend his entire life growing up in Israel. To penalize his father for such devotion, to accuse him before-the-fact of lacking the ability to continue to write objectively, is a professional slap in the face, publicly insulting. These people’s problem is that a correspondent who cannot Israel-bash on a daily basis is not worthy of his business card. Despite my professional disagreements with Ethan Bronner, which I will continue to express whenever necessary, in this case I stand behind him, his son and his family one hundred percent. With blessings from Hebron.
www.hebron.com (English)
www.hebron.org.il (Hebrew)
www.machpela.com
www.hebronfund.com
www.thewilderway.info
Tel:Israel # 972-52-429-5554
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Sunday, February 7, 2010
Israeli Intelligence Think Tank Hosts Palestinian leader: Issues Ultimatum to Israel
by David Bedein
On Tuesday, February 2, Palestinian Authority leader Salman Fayyad made an unprecedented appearance at the annual “Herzlia conference” of the leading lights of Israeli intelligence, and used the occasion to issue an ultimatum to Israel, in which Fayyad, appointed as the Prime Minister of the PA by Machmud Abbas, declared that he would a Palestinian state within two years.
Fayyad said: “We have shown that we are serious in our intention to establish a state. We will do everything possible to be ready for this within two years”.
Fayyad’s theme was that “a failure to establish a state within two years could create severe disappointment on the Palestinian street”. Fayyad clarified that the international community also expects to see a solution within this time span, and that the Palestinian demand is to create a situation in which the world applies pressure on Israel.
Fayyad laced his presentation with statements of recent PLO history that had nothing to do with reality. Fayyad declared that the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization, the patron of the Palestinian Authority, had recognized Israel at the PLO’s conference in 1988 and in the wake of the Oslo Accord in 1993.
What Fayyad failed to mention was that at the PLO conference in 1988, which convened in Algiers, he refused to recognize Israel, while the media and many wishful thinking diplomats quoted a memo from Palestinian sources BEFORE the Algiers conference which assessed that the PLO was “expected to cancel the PLO covenant and recognize Israel”, a decision which never occurred.
The 1993 myth of PLO recognition is even more interesting.
The Oslo “Declaration of Principles” mutual recognition peace accords were indeed signed by the PLO’s Machmud Abbas and Yassir Arafat together with Israel’s Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993.
Yet the Israeli Knesset Parliament ratified the Oslo Accords on September 25, 1993 - while the PLO would not ratify the accords when the PLO executive convened in Tunis on October 6, 1993 and the PLO’s Palestinian National Council convened in Gaza on April 24, 1996 to cancel the PLO Covenant which calls for Israel’s destruction and simply refused to do so and has never cancelled the PLO Covenant.
Fayyad also addressed security issues, demanding that Israel stop military incursions in areas governed by the Palestinian Authority, which have continued since Israel reestablished its presence in Palestinian cities and villages and refugee camps since April, 2002, greatly reducing terror attacks from Palestinian areas, after Palestinian terrorists had infiltrated Israel and murdered more than 1,000 people in Israel between 1993 and 2002.
During 2009, with Israeli military presence firmly entrenched in Palestinian areas, five Israelis were murdered by Palestinian terrorist infiltrators, as opposed the tens of Israelis per month who were murdered by terrorist infiltrators at the beginning of the decade.
However, Fayyad was firm in his demand that Israel must withdraw its military presence from all Palestinian areas: “The meaning of an end to the occupation is Palestinian presence, and not Israeli presence, in this area. We have proven ourselves from a security standpoint. Dealing with the security situation is not in Israel’s interests, it is also in the Palestinians’ interests”, including Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem. Fayyad went on to say that “ In all the agreements and understandings, nothing has ever been said to contradict the fact that East Jerusalem is an inseparable part of the Palestinian state...You are building exactly in the places where the Palestinian state is supposed to be established”
Along with this, Fayyad issued a further demand, to remove the “siege from the Gaza Strip”, without any call for the Palestinian Hamas regime that rules Gaza to cease and desist from hostile activity against Israel, saying that “ Removing it will contribute to a positive dynamic in advance of achieving internal Palestinian unity”. Fayyad added that if the Palestinian Authority were given a chance, it could rehabilitate Gaza very quickly. Fayyad forgot to mention that there is no chance that the PA will ever rule Gaza, where Hamas’s Gaza government remains unchallenged.
In terms of Fayyad’s call to remove Israeli military presence from Palestinian areas, Fayyad conveniently forgot to mention to the rank and file of Israeli intelligence that armed Israeli military intelligence forces protect his home and family in the Jerusalem Arab neighborhood of Beit Hanina, seven days a week, 24 hours a day, and that Israeli security guards often accompany Fayyad during his travels.
How would Fayyad react to the removal of Israeli military protection from his home and family?
On Tuesday, February 2, Palestinian Authority leader Salman Fayyad made an unprecedented appearance at the annual “Herzlia conference” of the leading lights of Israeli intelligence, and used the occasion to issue an ultimatum to Israel, in which Fayyad, appointed as the Prime Minister of the PA by Machmud Abbas, declared that he would a Palestinian state within two years.
Fayyad said: “We have shown that we are serious in our intention to establish a state. We will do everything possible to be ready for this within two years”.
Fayyad’s theme was that “a failure to establish a state within two years could create severe disappointment on the Palestinian street”. Fayyad clarified that the international community also expects to see a solution within this time span, and that the Palestinian demand is to create a situation in which the world applies pressure on Israel.
Fayyad laced his presentation with statements of recent PLO history that had nothing to do with reality. Fayyad declared that the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization, the patron of the Palestinian Authority, had recognized Israel at the PLO’s conference in 1988 and in the wake of the Oslo Accord in 1993.
What Fayyad failed to mention was that at the PLO conference in 1988, which convened in Algiers, he refused to recognize Israel, while the media and many wishful thinking diplomats quoted a memo from Palestinian sources BEFORE the Algiers conference which assessed that the PLO was “expected to cancel the PLO covenant and recognize Israel”, a decision which never occurred.
The 1993 myth of PLO recognition is even more interesting.
The Oslo “Declaration of Principles” mutual recognition peace accords were indeed signed by the PLO’s Machmud Abbas and Yassir Arafat together with Israel’s Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993.
Yet the Israeli Knesset Parliament ratified the Oslo Accords on September 25, 1993 - while the PLO would not ratify the accords when the PLO executive convened in Tunis on October 6, 1993 and the PLO’s Palestinian National Council convened in Gaza on April 24, 1996 to cancel the PLO Covenant which calls for Israel’s destruction and simply refused to do so and has never cancelled the PLO Covenant.
Fayyad also addressed security issues, demanding that Israel stop military incursions in areas governed by the Palestinian Authority, which have continued since Israel reestablished its presence in Palestinian cities and villages and refugee camps since April, 2002, greatly reducing terror attacks from Palestinian areas, after Palestinian terrorists had infiltrated Israel and murdered more than 1,000 people in Israel between 1993 and 2002.
During 2009, with Israeli military presence firmly entrenched in Palestinian areas, five Israelis were murdered by Palestinian terrorist infiltrators, as opposed the tens of Israelis per month who were murdered by terrorist infiltrators at the beginning of the decade.
However, Fayyad was firm in his demand that Israel must withdraw its military presence from all Palestinian areas: “The meaning of an end to the occupation is Palestinian presence, and not Israeli presence, in this area. We have proven ourselves from a security standpoint. Dealing with the security situation is not in Israel’s interests, it is also in the Palestinians’ interests”, including Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem. Fayyad went on to say that “ In all the agreements and understandings, nothing has ever been said to contradict the fact that East Jerusalem is an inseparable part of the Palestinian state...You are building exactly in the places where the Palestinian state is supposed to be established”
Along with this, Fayyad issued a further demand, to remove the “siege from the Gaza Strip”, without any call for the Palestinian Hamas regime that rules Gaza to cease and desist from hostile activity against Israel, saying that “ Removing it will contribute to a positive dynamic in advance of achieving internal Palestinian unity”. Fayyad added that if the Palestinian Authority were given a chance, it could rehabilitate Gaza very quickly. Fayyad forgot to mention that there is no chance that the PA will ever rule Gaza, where Hamas’s Gaza government remains unchallenged.
In terms of Fayyad’s call to remove Israeli military presence from Palestinian areas, Fayyad conveniently forgot to mention to the rank and file of Israeli intelligence that armed Israeli military intelligence forces protect his home and family in the Jerusalem Arab neighborhood of Beit Hanina, seven days a week, 24 hours a day, and that Israeli security guards often accompany Fayyad during his travels.
How would Fayyad react to the removal of Israeli military protection from his home and family?
Monday, August 3, 2009
The Philadelphia Bulletin: Historic Fatah Conference to Convene in Bethlehem
by David Bedein
Jerusalem, Israel - For the first time in more than 20 years, Fatah (Arabic for “conquest”), the dominant ruling power of the Palestinian Authority, will gather next week for a conference in Bethlehem, with than 1,7,50 of its active members expected to attend. This is the first since the 1993 signing of the Oslo Accords, which the Fatah never ratified.
Israel has decided not to not keep any delegate to the Fatah convention from being able to attend the parley next week in Bethlehem, including those coming from Syria and Lebanon.
A senior Fatah official Muhammad "Abu Maher" Ghneim returned to Palestinian territory on Wednesday from in Tunisia ahead of the movement's general conference, which opens next week in Bethlehem. Palestinian news sources reported that President Mahmoud Abbas convinced Israeli authorities to allow Ghneim to attend the conference.
After crossing the Israeli-controlled Allenby Bridge border crossing from Jordan on Wednesday, Ghneim was whisked to the Palestinian Authority (PA) headquarters in Ramallah in a presidential car, accompanied by top negotiator Saeb Erekat. In Ramallah, the Fatah official was welcomed by Abbas in an official ceremony.
Ghneim's return also marks a reversal in Palestinian politics. Ghneimopposed the Oslo peace agreements, and at first refused to return to Palestine until all of its territory was "liberated
On the eve of the conference, the Middle East Newsline broke the story that Israel's military has determined that the ruling Fatah movement continues to engage in weapons smuggling, after capturing Fatah militia commanders who admitted to
smuggling weapons acquired weapons from such sources as Israeli organized crime, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority itself.
"The weapons are sold for profit, mostly to Israeli and Palestinian criminals, some of them who engage in terrorism," a military source said.
Fatah weapons smugglers were operating in Bethlehem, Hebron, Nablus, Ramallah and Tulkarm, in coordination with the Iranian-sponsored Islamic Jihad. Israeli military sources also confirm that Fatah weapons smugglers have also sold weapons to the opposition Hamas.
On July 24, the Israel Army arrested a suspected Fatah weapons smuggler in Nablus named as Nasser Mahmoud Abu Kishk, a 34-year-old Fatah militia operative from Nablus Abu Kishk, wanted by Israel for several years, was also said to have supplied weapons to Fatah's Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, which is identified by both Israel and by the United States intelligence agencies as a terrorist organization.
Israeli army spokesmen also said that Kishk has participated in shooting attacks against Israelis.
Policy Issues On The Agenda
An organization known as www.palwatch.org has put forward four policy issues for the Fatah to reconsider, if Fatah is to be seen as a real party to peace talks in the future.
1. Fatah does not recognize Israel's right to exist. Fatah leaders emphasize that this ideology is current and not merely an oversight
2. Fatah continues to use maps that don't acknowledge Israel's existence
3. Fatah charter still calls for Israel's destruction
4. Fatah continues to support the cease fire, only in terms of the continued armed struggle against Israel
View this story in the Philadelphia Bulletin
View this story at Israel Behind the News
Jerusalem, Israel - For the first time in more than 20 years, Fatah (Arabic for “conquest”), the dominant ruling power of the Palestinian Authority, will gather next week for a conference in Bethlehem, with than 1,7,50 of its active members expected to attend. This is the first since the 1993 signing of the Oslo Accords, which the Fatah never ratified.
Israel has decided not to not keep any delegate to the Fatah convention from being able to attend the parley next week in Bethlehem, including those coming from Syria and Lebanon.
A senior Fatah official Muhammad "Abu Maher" Ghneim returned to Palestinian territory on Wednesday from in Tunisia ahead of the movement's general conference, which opens next week in Bethlehem. Palestinian news sources reported that President Mahmoud Abbas convinced Israeli authorities to allow Ghneim to attend the conference.
After crossing the Israeli-controlled Allenby Bridge border crossing from Jordan on Wednesday, Ghneim was whisked to the Palestinian Authority (PA) headquarters in Ramallah in a presidential car, accompanied by top negotiator Saeb Erekat. In Ramallah, the Fatah official was welcomed by Abbas in an official ceremony.
Ghneim's return also marks a reversal in Palestinian politics. Ghneimopposed the Oslo peace agreements, and at first refused to return to Palestine until all of its territory was "liberated
On the eve of the conference, the Middle East Newsline broke the story that Israel's military has determined that the ruling Fatah movement continues to engage in weapons smuggling, after capturing Fatah militia commanders who admitted to
smuggling weapons acquired weapons from such sources as Israeli organized crime, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority itself.
"The weapons are sold for profit, mostly to Israeli and Palestinian criminals, some of them who engage in terrorism," a military source said.
Fatah weapons smugglers were operating in Bethlehem, Hebron, Nablus, Ramallah and Tulkarm, in coordination with the Iranian-sponsored Islamic Jihad. Israeli military sources also confirm that Fatah weapons smugglers have also sold weapons to the opposition Hamas.
On July 24, the Israel Army arrested a suspected Fatah weapons smuggler in Nablus named as Nasser Mahmoud Abu Kishk, a 34-year-old Fatah militia operative from Nablus Abu Kishk, wanted by Israel for several years, was also said to have supplied weapons to Fatah's Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, which is identified by both Israel and by the United States intelligence agencies as a terrorist organization.
Israeli army spokesmen also said that Kishk has participated in shooting attacks against Israelis.
Policy Issues On The Agenda
An organization known as www.palwatch.org has put forward four policy issues for the Fatah to reconsider, if Fatah is to be seen as a real party to peace talks in the future.
1. Fatah does not recognize Israel's right to exist. Fatah leaders emphasize that this ideology is current and not merely an oversight
2. Fatah continues to use maps that don't acknowledge Israel's existence
3. Fatah charter still calls for Israel's destruction
4. Fatah continues to support the cease fire, only in terms of the continued armed struggle against Israel
View this story in the Philadelphia Bulletin
View this story at Israel Behind the News
Thursday, May 28, 2009
The Philadelphia Bulletin: Arafat Protege Abbas to Meet with Obama Today
by David Bedein
Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, the protégé of the late Yasser Arafat, will arrive in Washington, D.C., today to meet with the president of the United States.
There are 10 issues at hand that would challenge the credibility of Mr. Abbas as a peace negotiator:
Mr. Abbas’ continued incitement in the Arabic language, as expressed in his school books, media outlets and public statements that emanate from the Palestinian Authority (PA), which operates under his firm control.
Mr. Abbas’ refusal to renounce his own Holocaust Denial Ph.D., which also contends that the Nazis and Zionists worked together during WWII.
Mr. Abbas’ election platform from 2005 that calls for the total right of return to villages from before 1948.
Mr. Abbas’ celebrations of murder attacks against Jews.
Mr. Abbas’ refusal to implore the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) or the PA to ratify the Oslo Accords or cancel the PLO covenant.
Current weapons/security sharing arrangements between the PA and Hamas.
Disappearance of Arafat’s billions, some of which have wound up in the coffers of Mr. Abbas.
Mr. Abbas’ endorsement of the Hezbollah war, summer 2006.
The Nakba campaign endorsed by Mr. Abbas, which calls on Palestinians to reclaim areas lost in 1948 - by force if necessary.
Mr. Abbas’ continued confinement of Palestinian Arab refugees and their descendants to the indignity of United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) refugee camps, under the specious premise of the “right of return” to villages that no longer exist.
View this story in the Philadelphia Bulletin
View this story at Israel Behind the News
Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, the protégé of the late Yasser Arafat, will arrive in Washington, D.C., today to meet with the president of the United States.
There are 10 issues at hand that would challenge the credibility of Mr. Abbas as a peace negotiator:
Mr. Abbas’ continued incitement in the Arabic language, as expressed in his school books, media outlets and public statements that emanate from the Palestinian Authority (PA), which operates under his firm control.
Mr. Abbas’ refusal to renounce his own Holocaust Denial Ph.D., which also contends that the Nazis and Zionists worked together during WWII.
Mr. Abbas’ election platform from 2005 that calls for the total right of return to villages from before 1948.
Mr. Abbas’ celebrations of murder attacks against Jews.
Mr. Abbas’ refusal to implore the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) or the PA to ratify the Oslo Accords or cancel the PLO covenant.
Current weapons/security sharing arrangements between the PA and Hamas.
Disappearance of Arafat’s billions, some of which have wound up in the coffers of Mr. Abbas.
Mr. Abbas’ endorsement of the Hezbollah war, summer 2006.
The Nakba campaign endorsed by Mr. Abbas, which calls on Palestinians to reclaim areas lost in 1948 - by force if necessary.
Mr. Abbas’ continued confinement of Palestinian Arab refugees and their descendants to the indignity of United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) refugee camps, under the specious premise of the “right of return” to villages that no longer exist.
View this story in the Philadelphia Bulletin
View this story at Israel Behind the News
Friday, April 4, 2008
"April Fools" Piece in the NYTimes Mimimizes Fatah/PA Anti-semitism
by Professor Gil Troy
I usually don't like playing bash-the-journalist. I try avoiding the ritualistic Tirade against the Times, which keeps pro-Israel New York Times readers' blood flowing. But an April 1, 2008 front-page article was so ridiculous it could have been an April Fools joke. "IN GAZA, HAMAS'S FIERY INSULTS TO JEWS COMPLICATE PEACE EFFORT," the headline ever so delicately proclaimed - as if there was much of a peace effort with Hamas to complicate, and as if the bombs raining down on Sderot or hundreds of cold-blooded murders over the years did not first "complicate" matters. Even the usually hostile International Herald Tribune reprinted the article under a more accurate headline "HAMAS RATCHETS UP ANTI-JEWISH RHETORIC."
Equally absurd, the one line the Times website highlighted pronounced: "While the Palestinian Authority under Fatah has made significant, if imperfect, efforts to end incitement against Jews, Hamas feels no such restraint." Moral obtuseness is one of the great crimes of our times and of the Times. The editors too easily forgive Fatah's "imperfections" in fighting anti-Semitism.
Steven Erlanger's article unintentionally illustrates how Hamas has helped sanitize Fatah and the Palestinian Authority in the eyes of gullible Westerners. The article admits, again in surprisingly delicate language, that "the Palestinian Authority of Fatah also causes some concern - its textbooks, for example, rarely recognize the state of Israel." Erlanger ignores the systematic anti-Semitism preached in Palestinian mosques, broadcast on PA TV, weaved into so many cartoons, and permeating the culture of what they call martyrdom, what we call terrorism. Fatah's Al-Aqsa Martyrs' brigade celebrated the recent Merkaz HaRav massacre as a "heroic operation."
The Times article implies that since the 1993 Oslo Accords, mainstream Palestinian leaders opposed anti-Semitic incitement. Tragically, the opposite is true. It represents one of the Oslo Peace Process's great betrayals. While many Israelis went beyond demonization to try incorporating the Palestinian narrative into their worldviews, while Israel's Ministry of Education introduced Palestinian national poets into Israel's curriculum, the PA under Fatah systematically tried to delegitimize Israel - and demonize Jews. Palestinian culture since the 1990s has marinated more than ever in this culture of hatred, with monstrous results for Israelis and Palestinians.
The rise of Hamas has helped many Palestinian Authority leaders wear the mask of moderation, legitimized by a perverted law of bogus averaging. The Hamas ideology of genocidal extremism and criticism of Mahmoud Abbas for being accommodating does not make Fatah moderate. Moderation is not just a relative term; you should be somewhat temperate to earn the label. It was Abbas, not Hamas, who recently accused Israel of committing "more than a holocaust," in Gaza, comparing 100 people killed during justified military moves with six million systematically slaughtered. It was Abbas the alleged moderate who has threatened further violence unless Israel meets his demands. And it is Abbas the supposed suppressor of incitement who, despite presiding over a political system that lacks free speech, nevertheless grants freed expression to rank anti-Semitism.
The Times article had other howlers, including the following sentence: "Intended to indoctrinate the young to its brand of radical Islam, which combines politics, social work and military resistance, including acts of terrorism, the programs of Al Aksa television and radio, including crucial Friday sermons, are an indication of how far from reconciliation Israelis and many Palestinians are" (emphasis added). Beyond the law of bogus averaging we see the tic of false equivalence. Ending a sentence about Hamas incitement with a phrase about reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians put the moral onus on both. This amoral unequal equivalence blames the victim along with the hater.
The article also views Hamas's anti-Semitism in a vacuum. Beyond one reference to Hizbullah and the mention of Hamas's "brand of radical Islam," Erlanger overlooked how typical such rhetoric has become throughout the Arab world. In fact, given that newspapers usually emphasize the exceptional, the innocent reader would finish the piece not realizing how many Arab newspapers regularly caricature Jews in the most despicable of ways, how many Muslim preachers every Friday preach against Jews in the harshest of ways, and how the Koranic characterization of Jews as "apes and pigs" has become routinized as discourse in the most disturbing of ways.
Unfortunately this foolish April article reflects a broader phenomenon. The recent State Department report charting Global anti-Semitism ignored PA incitement. Israel itself, both in its Foreign Ministry and in some university departments monitoring anti-Semitism, frequently overlooks PA and Fatah incitement. More broadly, many tend to minimize the ubiquity of the hatred, and how it is frequently linked with an appalling -- and equally genocidal -- anti-Americanism.
Too many Westerners are becoming like the iconic frog who, rather than being thrown into a pot of boiling water and jumping out, was burned to death as cold water, gradually heated, eventually turned deadly. Too many have become systematically desensitized by the steady discharge of genocidal anti-Semitism. Vitriolic Jew hatred has become so much a part of the background in the Arab world and much of the Muslim world that many have become gradually desensitized to it. And, as we saw during the terrorist wave against Israel that began in 2000, a constant onslaught slowly, gradually diffuses the outrage as people start accepting the unacceptable, tolerating the intolerable. When you add to this the journalistic compulsion to give two sides to every story, no matter how lopsided, and the broader political delusion that there is a broad Palestinian commitment to the anemic peace process, some of the ugliness now permeating Palestinian national culture ends up ignored or sanitized.
We cannot afford to be so lethargic in facing Hamas hatred or Fatah incitement. We have seen too many examples of words feeding violence; we have buried too many innocents whose killers became heroes. A culture of hate breeds more hatred, more violence. Ignoring it, minimizing it, or excusing it feeds the fires rather than dousing them as needed.
Gil Troy is a professor of history at McGill University in Montreal. He is the author of "Why I Am A Zionist" published by Gefen
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