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.

Palestinian rhetoric on Israeli settlements is just talk

Anybody can say anything about whatever they want to about anything, and it is with that understanding that Sunday's statement by former Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei about Israeli "settlements" in Jerusalem being a "time bomb" should be viewed. Qurei and Israeli opposition leader Tsipi Livni, the former foreign minister, urged moderates on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to work harder to settle their differences. "The Jerusalem situation, I think, is a time bomb if it continues in this way," Qurei said a meeting of academics in Jerusalem, according to the Reuters international news service. "It has an impact on the Palestinian people . . . and on trust on both sides." Qurei was discussing Israel's continuing construction of housing for its citizens in formerly Jordanian-controlled East Jerusalem, often after demolishing Palestinian-owned housing. "It is 19 years since Oslo and things remain as is," Qurei said, referring to the historic agreement that recognized Palestinian sovereignty over the West Bank of the Jordan River, which Israel captured, along with East Jerusalem, in the 1967 Mideast war, and led to the return from exile of Yasir Arafat. Arafat, the Palestinian leader, and then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for reaching the Oslo Accords. But the lasting peace that seemed within reach in 1993 no longer appears at hand, not after the years of violence and mistrust that supplanted what turned out to be naive optimism -- on both sides. If the Israelis assumed that their Arab enemies, with whom they had already fought three all-out wars, were now willing to accept their Jewish neighbors as equals, and if Palestinian leaders assumed they were on the fast-track to statehood without having to undo the hatred they had been planting in the hearts of their people and convince them to work for peace, they both were tragically mistaken. The repeated failure of all parties to accept these realities are responsible for the current situation.

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.

Democracy takes a holiday in West Bank political mess

Maybe the biggest casualty in the relentlessly intractable Palestinian-Israeli conflict is democracy in the new country planned for the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The latest from the West Bank is that the Palestinian Liberation Organization has extended the term of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas because it is expiring and the rebellious Hamas group that controls Gaza refuses to participate in elections scheduled for Jan. 24, 2010, according to the New York Times. That means, assuming Abbas agrees to stay in office -- not an entirely assured prospect, given recent public statements -- that the Palestinian people will no longer have elected representatives in a matter of weeks. Not that this would be the first time -- the PA deactivated its parliament after Hamas candidates won a clear majority in the 2007 elections and Western nations threatened to withdraw financial support if Hamas refused to change a charter provision calling for the destruction of Israel. But, then again, it's probably not entirely Hamas' fault; Middle East nations are well known for their lack of enthusiasm for democracy except westernized Israel, their avowed enemy. That is probably not a mere coincidence. The PLO Central Council reached its decision to extend Abbas' term at its meeting yesterday and today in Ramallah, the West Bank city where the PA has its headquarters. Hamas, which was unable to resolve its differences with the PA despite high-profile mediation by Egypt earlier this year, has rejected the PLO plan as "illegal," the Times said. Abbas has indicated he will not be a candidate for re-election no matter when the elections are held out of frustration with the peace process with Israel, which has stalled, but officials from the Palestinian, Israeli and United States governments have been trying to convince him to reconsider.

Israel rejects Palestinian rejection of peace moves

Maybe Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman was only kidding Thursday when he said Israel was more interested in winning international support for its efforts toward peace with Palestinians living in the West Bank than what the Palestinians themselves think. Or, maybe, just maybe, his remarks reflected Israel's frustration with the Palestinian Authority's blanket refusal to begin talks on a peace settlement until Israel stops building homes on land the Palestinians want for their own country. "The last thing that should interest us is the Palestinians' concern," Lieberman said on Israel Radio, according to the Reuters international news service. "Before the Palestinian issue, what should interest us is our friends in the world. We spoke to them and most said, 'help us to help you.'" Lieberman's statement was in reaction to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas' outright rejection of Israel's announcement of a 10-month partial freeze of settlement activity in the West Bank. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered the partial freeze in an effort to get the PA to agree to restart peace negotiations. But Abbas, who is threatening to leave government if and when his current term ends, demands a total freeze on building on lands claimed by his stateless people including East Jerusalem, which Israel captured in 1967. Israel has annexed East Jerusalem and made it part of its capital, but most of the world's nations have not accepted it. Yet Western nations lined up behind Netanyahu's proposal despite Palestinian objections, Reuters said. French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner called Israel's move "a positive contribution to peace, and British Foreign Secretary David Miliband urged that Israel's proposal "become a step toward resuming meaningful negotiations." Israel's chief backer, the United States, has called for the resumption of negotiations without preconditions. But Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat told Israel's Army Radio that Israel's proposal was merely a bid to deflect pressure from the United States, Reuters said. "At the end of the day, Netanyahu needs to make peace with us, the Palestinians, he doesn't need to make peace with Americans," Erekat said. "If that's what he wants, that is his business. The last I know, Washington is 6,000 miles from Jerusalem, while Jericho is 67." More than 500,000 Israelis live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem alongside 2.7 million Palestinians, Reuters said.

Israeli settlements are not the problem in Middle East

Maybe if most Arab nations were democracies that acted only with the approval of their citizens, they would more-easily be able to understand what has happened to the Middle East peace process. It's fairly obvious that U.S. President Barack Obama, who perhaps unwisely raised expectations in the Arab world about changing this country's policies toward Israel, has acquired a greater appreciation of what Jerusalem has been telling him about peacemaking with the Palestinian Authority. Israel's willingness to compromise, which has varied over time, has never produced a lasting agreement because Palestinian leaders have been unwilling to prepare their people for the possibility of peace -- probably out of fear for their own safety -- after years of agitating for war. Israeli intransigence is not the chief cause of the decades-long deadlock; rather, it's the refusal of the Palestinians and of most of the countries in the region to plan for a future that includes their Jewish cousins. That's why it was kind of sad to see U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton go traipsing around the Arab world this week trying to convince those countries to accept Israel's partial settlement freeze proposal and return to peace talks, as the Reuters international news service reported. The Palestinian Authority still thinks its warlike posture toward Israel, a posture supported by its Arab backers, is the best way to achieve its goal -- a Middle East without Israel. That's why previous overly generous Israeli peace offers that included the sharing of Jerusalem were rejected by Palestinian authorities. Now, with the election of a conservative government in Israel, such offers are almost certainly off the table. But a readers of this blog know, Israeli settlement-building in the West Bank is not an obstacle to true peace in the region. What it does complicate, however, is the kind of peace that is merely the absence of war. If Palestinians and Israelis are going to live side-by-side in the long term, it won't matter what country they live in assuming their rights are respected and protected. The fact that this has yet not occurred to anyone in the region strongly suggests that none of the parties is prepared to come to anything more than an interim agreement, if at all.

Israeli leader Netanyahu flies into week of contentious talks with U.S., Europe

Maybe the leaders of England and Germany will be able to understand what U.S. leaders seem to be unable to grasp during talks this week with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Europe. A freeze on Israeli settlements in the West Bank is reportedly the top of the agenda for Netanyahu's meetings with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and U.S. Middle East envoy George Mitchell in London on Tuesday and Wednesday, and with German Prime Minister Angela Merkel in Berlin on Thursday, according to the Reuters international news service. The Palestinian Authority insists on such a freeze before it will agree to negotiate with Israel on a peace deal, and Israel actually is committed to a freeze under the George W. Bush-era road map peace framework. But as readers of this blog realize, the settlement issue is merely a distraction from the real issue -- do Israel's neighbors, particularly the Palestinian Authority, want to live in peace and cooperation with Israel. The louder Palestinian leaders insist on making a freeze a condition of talks, the louder they are answering that question with "no." New towns with homes for hundreds of thousands of people are a material asset to a poor country -- why wouldn't any country want that? The issue for Palestinian leaders is that they don't think their people will accept Jewish people being their neighbors and will vote them out of office if peace happens. The failure to prepare their people for peace with Israel is is an utter dereliction of their duty as leaders. They are still funding school curricula that teach Palestinian children to distrust and hate Jewish people -- people who will be their neighbors whenever peace finally comes to the region. There is no reason why settlements built by Israel on land destined to be part of a Palestinian state can't be part of that state -- unless the Palestinian government is planning a country with no Jewish people allowed. If that's the case, then Palestinian leaders have no desire to live in peace with Israel, because peace necessarily involves people living side-by-side in understood cooperation. If the leaders do not want peace with Israel, then all they are doing is buying time until they can resume warfare against the Jewish state. And that is what Netanyahu needs to explain to England, Germany and the U.S. envoy during his trip to Europe.

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.

Negotiating with Netanyahu may be tough but when did talking become the problem?

What's most curious about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's endorsement of a Palestinian state Sunday was not the most surprising thing, that the right-wing leader offered a state at all -- but that officials of the West Bank and Gaza government reacted with such vehement opposition. Netanyahu's statement about accepting a Palestinian state -- albeit with conditions the Palestinian leaders obvious found unacceptable -- marked a reversal of his repeatedly stated rejection of statehood for the residents of the Israeli-occupied territories. Netanyahu's conservative approach to the Palestinians was why he was able to form a coalition to become prime minister after the February election. But pressure from the new U.S. government apparently convinced him to change his stance, presented in a speech at Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv, according to the Reuters international news service. "If we receive this guarantee regarding demilitarization and Israel's security needs, and if the Palestinians recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people, then we will be ready in a future peace agreement to reach a solution where a demilitarized Palestinian state exists alongside the Jewish state," Netanyahu said in Sunday's speech. Yet instead of seeing the new Israeli position as a potential breakthrough that could lead to statehood as early as this year or 2010, the Palestinian leadership blithely rejected Netanyahu's initiative as "sabotaged," Reuters said. "Netanyahu's remarks have sabotaged all initiatives, paralyzed all efforts being made and challenges the Palestinian, Arab and American positions," said Nabil Abu Rdainah, a spokesman for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. "The peace process has been moving at the speed of a tortoise," said Saeb Erekat, a PA official who has negotiated interim peace accords with the Israelis. "Tonight, Netanyahu has flipped it over on its back." Netanyahu's speech was widely seen as Israel's answer to U.S. President Barack Obama's speech 10 days ago in Egypt, in which Obama called for "a new beginning" in relations with the Moslem world. Obama advocated the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel and for a halt to Israel's settlement building in the West Bank. The timing has never seemed better for an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, yet the parties have rarely seemed further apart. In fact, the Palestinians are seriously divided amongst themselves, even to the point of setting up separate, diametrically opposed governments in the territories. They actually are in no position to negotiate with Israel, even though negotiations are precisely the way to proceed from this point. That may be the key to understanding where the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at this point. The demands being made by the Palestinian leadership -- to set up a state without acknowledging Israel's right to exist, to have its capital inside the capital of an already existing country and to negotiate on behalf of people they are warring with, are so untenable as to be preposterous. There really must be a secure peace for the Palestinian people, even at the price of discomfort for Israel, but the current PA leadership does not want even that. The very existence of the current leadership is dependent upon maintaining conflict, not on reaching an agreement with Israel that will bring peace and prosperity to its people. Complaints about Israeli settlements are a distraction that exposes this unfortunate situation. Settlements are a problem only if the new Palestinian country intends to refuse to allow Jewish people to live in it. Otherwise, the borders of the new state could be drawn without regard to the settlements -- the ones that are in Israel would be part of Israel and the ones that are not would be part of the new country. That this possibility is not even being considered reveals that real peace between Israel and the new Palestinian country is not part of this equation. And the fact that an obviously astute political thinker like Obama does not seem to understand this is highly troubling.

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.

Palestinian Authority agrees deal with Hamas is necessary for peace with Israel

At least Fatah, which controls Palestinian civil society on the West Bank of the Jordan River, understands that it must resolve its standoff with the radical group Hamas before it can hope to negotiate a reasonable peace with Israel. At least, that's what a top Fatah official said Tuesday after the fourth round of negotiations in Cairo failed to reach an agreement between the rivals. Azzam al-Ahmed, a senior Fatah official who took part in the negotiations with Fatah, said a deal between the groups was a priority because it is a prerequisite for a regional peace deal with Israel, according to the New York Times. “The next round will determine everything,” Ahmed said. “Egypt will not allow a failure." The Times said Egypt has set a May 15 deadline for an agreement, according to Moussa Abu Marzouk, the deputy political chief of Hamas leader. “We cannot just talk for the sake of talking,” said Abu Marzouk said. “To continue without results is a disaster on the national level.” Hamas controls the Gaza Strip, which Israel abandoned to Palestinian authority in 2005. Such an agreement would be a daunting accomplishment. The two sides, which fought a bitter war nearly two years ago, have been unable to resolve any of the major issues separating them, including terms for setting up a unity government, holding new legislative and presidential elections, and unifying competing security forces, the Times said. Such a deal is urgent for the Palestinians because the international community refuses to openly provide reconstruction funds to Hamas, which Israel, the United States and the European Union consider a terrorist group. The aid is sorely needed in the Gaza Strip following the 22-day Israeli offensive that ended in January.