New Israeli-Palestinian talks are doomed to failure

Nothing constructive is likely to emerge from the latest talks between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas because both leaders are too weak and the two sides are too far apart. Netanyahu cannot maintain his majority in Israel's parliament without the support of conservative settler parties that oppose further territorial concessions, and Abbas does not even have authority over all the territory he expects to make part of the Palestininan-dominated new country to emerge from a comprehensive peace agreement. The talks, which would not have even been scheduled without diplomatic pressure from the United States, have started just in time to resolve the still widely misunderstood issue of Israeli settlements when Israel's freeze on such construction expires Sept. 26, according to the Reuters international news service. The Abbas-led Palestinian Authority considers a freeze extension to be a necessary condition of its continued participation in the talks; Israel insists on continuing to build housing for its population, and obviously considers such construction to be its prerogative as a conquering power. But these people have been over this same issue for decades. It should be obvious to everyone involved that somebody is going to have to blink first. But whom? It doesn't help, of course, that both sides think they have already blinked numerous times with questionable results. Israel has maintained its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip for more than 40 years, and the Palestinians -- people who did not even exist as a people until they were disowned by their Arab brethren after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war -- have a functioning government and observer status at the United Nations. Complicating matters is the breakaway Hamas government in Gaza, which broke off from the West Bank government in 2007 to protest the PA's moves toward settlement with Israel. In the midst of the pessimism is U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who said recently that her view is that the issues could be settled within one year. Good luck with that.

Indirect peace talks between Israel and Palestinian Authority are pointless

Word from Ramallah yesterday that Palestinian leaders had agreed to take part in indirect peace talks with Israel is at once good news and bad. It's good news, of course, because the Palestinians and Israelis are going to have to be in constant and constructive contact with each other if there is any hope of the two societies living together in peace. But it's bad news, too, because the Palestinian Authority agreed only to hold indirect talks with Israeli leaders in Jerusalem, with the United States acting as mediator, and that's a huge step in the wrong direction. Nothing can come from indirect talks that will be better than what the Israelis and Palestinians can achieve together, and whatever comes of them is likely to be a lot less useful for both. Sunday's agreement to hold indirect talks for four months was arranged after the Arab League endorsed the talks at a meeting in Cairo on Wednesday, according to the New York Times. The PA had refused to resume negotiations until Israel agreed to freeze settlement activity in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, which it wants for the capital of a future state. The new agreement comes one day before U.S. Vice President Joe Biden is expected to arrive in the region for the highest-level talks since the election of Biden and President Barack Obama. Israel accepted the indirect talks offer last week; the talks will be the first between the two sides in 14 months. But all the maneuverings and nuances cannot hide the real problem that keeps the PA from reaching a comprehensive peace deal. The Palestinian leadership doesn't want one, even though it promises tremendous benefits for the Palestinian people. Have Palestinian Authority-run schools stopped teaching children to hate Jews? Are Palestinian children still taught to mistrust their Israeli neighbors? It will take at least two generations to fix the years of hatred deliberately sowed by the PA, and Hamas-run schools in Gaza are undoubtedly worse. It will take generations to fix this, but the PA hasn't even started yet. This is the work that any real peace will require, and it's not getting done. Palestinian leaders prefer to dither over boundary lines and eschew any real compromises, because they know -- and the radical elements that dominate regional political discourse know, too -- that they are simply unwilling to accept Israel.

Were pope's mistakes in Jerusalem too obvious to be accidental?

What's up with Pope Benedict XVI? Did the first actual Nazi to lead the Catholic church really think he could visit Israel and not have his every move, his every word, microscopically examined for vestiges of the ideology of hatred? Of course not. He is not a stupid man -- he has risen despite his past to the pinnacle of one of the world's greatest religions. He is considered one of the holiest men in the world and his visit to the Middle East -- holy man in the Holy Land -- was a major event. So why would this guy, with so much to prove, fall so pitifully short? In the first visit of any pope to the Holy Land since John Paul II's trip in 2000, Benedict deliberately alienated his Jewish hosts with cavalier references to the Holocaust, in which 12 million people, including 6 million Jews, were brutally slaughtered by the Nazis, according to the Cable News Network (CNN). Benedict knows what happened in World War II, he has no doubt seen the "concentration" camps that made a perfectly innocuous word into a euphemism for evil. Yet he angered many Jews in Israel by referring to Holocaust victims as having been "killed" instead of "murdered," a distinction not overlooked by his predecessor. No doubt, John Paul II would not have rehabilitated an excommunicated bishop who denies the Holocaust, either. But perhaps Benedict's biggest mistake was trying to navigate the treacherous Israeli-Palestinian dispute without understanding it. The pope actually said that "one of the saddest sights" he saw was the wall being built on the West Bank to protect Jewish communities. What is he talking about? Is the wall around Vatican City "sad?" Is the wall around Jerusalem "sad?" Hardly. Also, the West Bank wall is not made of stone and built to stand for a thousand years; it can easily be removed, and no doubt will be, when the Palestinian Arabs of the West Bank finally resolve to live in actual peace with the people of Israel. That is the problem between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and between the Israelis and most of the other countries of the Middle East, and all the rhetoric in the world is not going to solve it until the Arab nations face up to their internal and international responsibilities and change the dialog. Benedict, apparently, has not even begun to get a clue.