Obama’s Plan Won’t Persuade Palestinians. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, December 4, 2013.
Why Should Anyone Believe Kerry? By Jonathan Tobin. Commentary, December 6, 2013.
U.S., Stepping Up Role, Will Present West Bank Security Proposal to Israel. By Michael R. Gordon and Jodi Rudoren. New York Times, December 4, 2013.
Palestinians Want a Geneva Accord Against Israel. By Khaled Abu Toameh. Gatestone Institute, December 3, 2013.
Halfway through timeframe, Palestinian-Israeli talks are going nowhere. By Noam Sheizaf. +972, November 28, 2013.
Tobin:
Anyone
who thought the Obama administration is concentrating so much on its push for
détente with Iran that it can’t simultaneously launch a new push for Israeli
concessions to the Palestinians was wrong. As the New York Times reports this afternoon, a former U.S. commander in
Afghanistan that is currently serving as an advisor to Secretary of State John
Kerry is heading to the Middle East to brief the Israelis on a detailed plan
for the West Bank that the U.S. envisages will be implemented in the wake of a
peace agreement. Though President Obama has repeatedly pledged that he would
not seek to impose a U.S. plan on the parties, the Times’s friendly sources at the State Department say retired Marine
General John Allen will be bringing with him a specific scheme for the future
of the West Bank.
The
sources say it won’t be presented to the Israelis as a take-it-or-leave-it
proposal. But there’s little question that the general’s arrival must be seen
as part of an effort to strong arm the Israelis into abandoning the West Bank
and specifically giving up most of its demands that a future Palestinian state
be prevented from posing a military or terrorist threat to its Jewish neighbor.
More to the point, it may be part of an effort to impose an international
military presence in the region that would replace Israeli forces.
It’s
possible that Israel will agree to some of the elements of the American plan
even though they are loath to put themselves at the mercy of Western powers
that will, as with other peacekeeping forces, be more interested in preserving
the status quo than in preventing terror. But the real obstacle to the
administration’s hubristic push for an agreement will come from the
Palestinians. The same article that spoke of Allen’s mission discussed the
remarks of chief Palestinian Authority negotiator Saeb Erekat at a dinner last
week in Jerusalem in honor of the United Nations’ annual “day of solidarity”
with the Palestinians. Erekat’s remarks in front of a friendly audience made it
clear that if President Obama is serious about achieving Middle East peace, he
needs to be concentrating on pressuring the Palestinians to see reason rather
than expending so much effort on trying to strong arm the Netanyahu government.
While
lamenting his lack of military leverage over Israel, Erekat stated again that
despite even the Obama administration’s acceptance of the idea of territorial
swaps that would accommodate Israeli settlement blocks, the PA’s idea of a
two-state solution remained the “1967 border.” But aside from inflexibility on
territory rooted in a desire to ethnically cleanse the West Bank and much of
Jerusalem of hundreds of thousands of Jews and refusing to disavow the “right
of return” for the descendants of the 1948 refugees, Erekat also signaled that
any peace deal would not end the conflict:
Mr.
Erekat told the diplomats that the Palestinians could never accede to Israel’s
demand that they recognize it as the nation-state of the Jewish people. “I
cannot change my narrative,” he said. “The essence of peace is not to convert
each other’s stories.”
Why is
Erekat’s stance so crucial?
Palestinian
apologists dismiss Israeli demands that the Palestinians simply accept that
whatever territory is left to the Jews after a theoretical deal is a Jewish
state as irrelevant to a deal. What difference, we are asked, does it make
whether the Palestinians accept Israel as the Jewish state so long as they
accept the concept of peace and take what is offered them? But it does matter
so long as the Palestinian leadership continues enable a political culture that
is rooted in rejection of Israel’s legitimacy.
If
Israel is to accede to U.S. demands that it give up the bulk of the West Bank,
let alone compromise on Jerusalem, it cannot be on any terms but on those that
conclusively end the conflict. And that can only happen once the Palestinians
give up the dream of eradicating the Jewish state, either immediately or in
stages. A peace deal that only sets the stage for future violence on more
advantageous strategic terms for the Palestinians is not a rational option for
Israel no matter what the United States says now or what guarantees it makes.
Right now, the Palestinian “story” is one that is based on the idea that
Israel’s existence, not its policies or post-1967 borders, is a crime. Until
that changes, there is no way to argue that peace is possible.
That’s
why all the U.S. pressure on Israel is utterly misplaced. Even if Israel bowed
to Obama’s dictates, the negotiations into which Secretary Kerry has invested
so much effort will inevitably run aground on the shoals of Palestinian
intransigence. PA leaders know that so long as the culture of intolerance they
have promoted is in place and so long as its Islamist Hamas rivals run Gaza,
they cannot sign off on a peace deal that recognizes Israel’s legitimacy and
ends the conflict. Like Kerry’s talks, Allen’s mission is a fool’s errand. If
President Obama wants an outcome that differs from every other attempt to make
peace with the Palestinians he will have to something different. A place to
start means telling the Palestinians that they must do exactly what Erekat says
they will never do.
