Arab League rhetoric ignores the facts

Thursday's declaration by the Arab League that it favored direct negotiations between the Palestinian Authority and Israel whenever PA President Mahmoud Abbas agrees to participate is the height of arrogance. After all, the intransigence of the very 21 countries that make up the League of Arab States is responsible for the perpetually unsettled political situation in the Middle East and the political and economic isolation of the Palestinian people. Of course, the league is free to continue to blame the situation on Israel, but false rhetoric does not become truthful merely by how often or how vehemently it is repeated. The league issued its declaration after Abbas briefed members of its peace process committee at a meeting in Cairo, according to the Reuters international news service. League members agreed to send a letter to U.S. President Barack Obama outlining Palestinian concerns over the negotiating process with Israel in the face of that country's refusal to extend a 10-month partial ban on settlement construction after Sept. 25, Reuters said. "There is a green light from the Arabs to go to direct negotiations if we receive terms of reference (for the negotiations) in line with the letter," Nabil Abu Rdainah, a senior Abbas aide, told Reuters. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants direct negotiations with Abbas to begin immediately, but his coalition is tied to pro-settler political parties that adamantly oppose extending the partial settlement freeze. The prospects for a breakthrough in such talks is, of course, unclear. But nobody should forget how the situation got to this point. Instead of accepting Palestinians and Jews as brothers and neighbors, which they clearly are, Arab states have chosen to keep Palestinians who fled the three wars they started in refugee camps for decades and to keep maintain a constant state of hostilities against Israel, first as warring enemies and now through radical proxy groups.

Arab League can't decide whether to endorse talks with Iran or between Palestinians and Israelis

News from Libya that the Arab League was unable to agree whether to endorse indirect peace talks between the Palestinian Authority and Israel should be no surprise to anyone after the PA expressed outrage over Israeli plans to build 1,600 homes near east Jerusalem. The league's two-day summit in Sirte ended abruptly after the 22 nations were unable to agree on either a new endorsement of the peace talks or on formulating a new approach to Iran, according to the Reuters international news service. The Arab League did endorse U.S.-mediated proximity talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority earlier this month. "Within the next few weeks, we have to decide what to do: whether to continue with the negotiations or to completely shift course," Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa said at a news conference after the summit closed down. Moussa said Arab states were frustrated by the slow pace of negotiations between Jerusalem and Ramallah and would propose alternatives if there was no progress soon, Reuters said. "We cannot enter into a vicious circle to be added to the hundreds of previous vicious circles that will end in another zero result," Moussa said. "We are fed up with this." The stalemate is bad news for the stalled peace process, since Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas probably will be reluctant to conduct substantive talks without the Arab League endorsement due to the threat from hardliners in his own community. Of course, there is no reason to expect anything from the Arab League if the Palestinians themselves are unwilling to pursue an actual peace agreement with Israel. And, of course, nothing is what came of the proposal before the Arab League to start talks with Tehran about Iran's nuclear program, Reuters said. Foreign ministers were unable to agree on their next step, even though Persian Gulf states near Iran had expressed concerns about problems if Tehran develops weapons or is prevented from doing so by Western states. "I do not believe the time has come where we can see that Iran has changed its behavior toward Arab countries," said Prince Saud Al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia's foreign minister. Iran has insisted that its nuclear development is intended solely for peaceful purposes, even though it doesn't make sense for the country with the world's third-largest oil reserves to pursue nuclear power to generate electricity.

Israelis get an earful from Biden

If Tuesday's announcement of new East Jerusalem housing sparked such outrage from U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, imagine what he's going to say when he finds out the eastern half of the city is already part of Israel and has been for more than 40 years. Biden was sharply critical of Israel following the announcement on Wednesday, saying the move would "inflame tensions" with the Palestinians, who want East Jerusalem to be the capital of a future West Bank state, according to the Reuters international news service. It may be news to all of them, but Israel has been in control of East Jerusalem since 1967, when its soldiers drove Jordan from the West Bank in yet another war started by Israel's Arab neighbors. Jews had been prevented from entering the historic old city after Israel's founding in 1948, even though East Jerusalem contains sites sacred to Jews and Muslims since before the birth of Christ. But Israel agreed to negotiate the future of Jerusalem with the Palestinian Authority in 1993, and considered the possibility of East Jerusalem becoming the Palestinian's capital in 2001. A lot has changed since then, including the election of a conservative government in Israel that opposes territorial concessions. Tuesday's announcement of 1,600 new units in East Jerusalem sparked the expected outrage from Arab nations but the United States' criticism apparently surprised Israeli leaders. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had ordered a partial freeze of West Bank settlement construction last year in an effort to encourage the Palestinian Authority to return to negotiations over a future Palestinian state in the area, but specifically excluded East Jerusalem. "It is incumbent on both parties to build an atmosphere of support for negotiations and not to complicate them," Biden said Wednesday in a meeting with PA President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah. "Yesterday, the decision by the Israeli government to advance planning for new housing units in East Jerusalem undermines that very trust, the trust that we need right now in order to begin ... profitable negotiations." Abbas urged Israel to cancel its housing plans, Reuters said. British Foreign Secretary David Miliband also condemned Israel's decision after giving a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., Reuters said.

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.

Israel calls UN report on Gaza "unfair"

Okay, Israel's rejection of a United Nations report that accused Jerusalem of committing war crimes in its three-week Gaza offensive was more than expected. The Jewish state has actually been speaking out loudly against the findings of the report, which was approved last week by the UN Council on Human Rights. The report blamed both Israel and the Palestinian Hamas movement, which controls the Gaza Strip, for committing "actions amounting to war crimes, possibly crimes against humanity," during the offensive that ended in January, according to Cable News Network (CNN). Israeli President Shimon Peres, a former prime minister, told CNN on Monday that the report was "one-sided" and "unfair" because his country had the right to defend itself against the barrages of missiles fired from Gaza since Hamas took control of the territory in 2007. "The right of self-defense is non-negotiable," Peres said. "I think we have shown courage in war and we have shown devotion in peace and we shall continue to struggle for peace." Not to be outdone, Hamas also rejected the portion of the report accusing it of war crimes while endorsing accusations against Israel. Hamas and Israel also disagree about the number of casualties, with the Palestinian Center for Human Rights putting the Palestinian death toll at 1,419, including 1,167 civilians, and the Israeli military saying 1,166 Palestinians were killed.

Palestinians back away from peace deal

Are there still many among us who are surprised to hear that the Palestinian Authority is backing away from reaching any kind of peace deal with Israel? Word from Ramallah today that the PA would refuse to make any kind of deal with Israel that allowed the expansion of settlements in the West Bank is yet another indication of how far from seriousness the talks have strayed. Top Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat told Voice of Palestine radio on Sunday that "there are no middle-ground solutions for the settlement issue" and that all settlement activity must stop, according to the Reuters international news service. Erekat said Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas told U.S. President Barack Obama the same thing in a letter yesterday, Reuters reported. But readers of this blog understand by now that the settlement issue actually is a non-issue designed to enrage the populace and delay any comprehensive peace between Israel and the PA. If the PA is planning to establish a free state that protects its citizens' rights, the only way settlement can be an obstacle to peace is if peace is not really being contemplated and the proposed two-state solution is not being seriously considered. Two countries at peace would allow the free movement of citizens between their borders -- it would not matter where the homes were located. If Israel wants to continue to build and expand settlements in territory promised to the Palestinians, it should go ahead -- but with the assumption that it is not guaranteed sovereignty over them in a final peace deal. Sovereignty is, after all, the only issue that can only be resolved with direct negotiations between the aggrieved parties. But reaching such a deal necessarily means that the Palestinian people give up their preposterous 'right of return' claims and the pretense of shared sovereignty over Jerusalem and its holy sites. It also means that the Palestinians must stop teaching their children to hate Jewish people. The Palestinian leadership is afraid to do this because it is afraid of angering radicals in its community who have shown no hesitation to resort to violence. But peace is a long-range proposition that can only be accomplished with a long-term commitment to pluralism. That will involve suppressing violent groups and changing the community dialogue from hatred to hopefulness, from demonization to democracy. Sadly, nobody who pays attention to the Middle East can image the PA being ready to commit to that.

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.

Peace is not the goal of new Obama-backed Middle East peace plan

The new U.S. peace plan for the Middle East, the so-called "57-state solution," might sound good on paper but could be quite different in reality. The new plan, reportedly developed in meetings between Jordan's King Abdullah and U.S. President Barak Obama in April, would result in all of world's Muslim countries recognizing Israel, according to the Reuters international news service. But what would Israel be required to surrender in return? Details on that are sketchy, but they appear to involve having Israel withdraw to its pre-1967 war borders and the creation of a Palestinian state on the West Bank of the Jordan River, which Israel captured in the Six-Day War along with East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula, which it also captured in 1967, in a separate peace treaty with Egypt in 1979. "We are offering a third of the world to meet them with open arms," Abdullah told the London Times, Reuters said. "The future is not the Jordan River or the Golan Heights or the Sinai, the future is Morocco in the Atlantic and Indonesia in the Pacific. That is the prize." But that is no prize -- not if, as Abdullah says, Israel will be forced to make further concessions to get the right to fly over Arab countries or the right to visit them. What he is talking about is not peace, it is precisely the opposite. Abdullah is offering a situation that can serve only as a prelude to war. In fact, Abdullah actually threatens war is Israel does not agree to the plan. "If we delay our peace negotiations, then there is going to be another conflict between Arabs or Muslims and Israel in the next 12-18 months," Abdullah told the newspaper. Maybe new U.S. president Barak Obama is in accord with the new plan, maybe not. Maybe Obama already realizes this is not a legitimate peace offer. Peace means more than the mere absence of war and, rhetoric aside, the 57-state solution is, at best, no more than a starting point.