Dear Palestinian Authority: I don't think "negotiate" means what you think it means.

As part of a deal for the release of over 100 terrorists being held in Israeli jails, Abbas and his Palestinian Authority have made a pledge to negotiate with Israel for nine months, with the goal of reaching a final status agreement. To date, 52 of these murderers and assassins have been released. Israel is holding up its end of the bargain.  But Abbas has repeatedly stated that he does not intend to make any concessions in the negotiations.  Such statements were reported again today.  See http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4459571,00.html , http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/174639#.UpoIVMRDss8

Is Abbas so dense that he simply does not understand what the word "negotiate" means?  How does he intend to reach a final agreement if, as reported, he will "never give up an ounce of the Palestinians' demands"?  With the negotiations cloaked in secrecy, one has to wonder, what exactly is occurring there, if the PA is not prepared to offer one single concession.  And how is it, exactly, that John Kerry has the gall to reprimand Israel, to threaten another intifada, when Abbas is making such statements?

It is possible, of course, that Abbas is simply posturing for PR.  It is possible that he does not want to incur the type of backlash that he faced a year ago when he admitted that he does not have a right to return to Safed.  See http://www.timesofisrael.com/abbas-i-wasnt-giving-up-right-of-return-i-was-just-speaking-personally/  But he must realize that he cannot present his people with a fait accompli and expect them to accept it.  He must begin preparing his people for the concessions that they will have to make to achieve peace.  Where two groups hold positions that are diametrically opposed, each group must be prepared to give up something in order to live in peace.  Abbas does not seem to understand this most basic principle, a principle that most children learn on the playground.

At this point it certainly appears that while Abbas and the PA were more than happy to accept the bribe of the release of murderers, and to welcome them home as heroes, they did so under false pretenses.  They clearly never intended to live up to their end of the deal, which is, to negotiate in good faith.  Indeed, in releasing those murderers, Israel has already made a huge concession towards peace, one that is irreversible and that has not been given the recognition that it is due.  Abbas and the PA have still made none, and have made it clear that they never intended to.

Update, 3/22/14: In case anyone did not get the message last time, here he is saying the same thing again.

"The PA has already formally refused to recognize Israel as a Jewish state throughout talks, stating that 'the Arab states will never recognize a Jewish state.'  In addition, the PA Chairman will reportedly only agree to extend talks if Israel allows a "right of return" for Palestinian Arabs, free terrorist leaders, and withdraw from Judea and Samaria."

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/178770#.Uy3Tiq1dVXc

Double Standard for Israel Strikes Again at NPR

A couple of days ago NPR published a piece on the plight of the Eritrean refugees in Israel, highlighting the complaints that Israel has been slow to process asylum applications, leaving refugees in legal limbo while the applications are pending.  

Interestingly, searching NPR's website, I did not see any stories about the plight of the Eritrean refugees in Egypt, where they are kidnapped for human trafficking. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jul/21/in-sinai-i-saw-hell-refugees-are-easy-prey-for-bru/?page=all.  I also did not see any stories on NPR about the plight of the Eritrean refugees in Jordan, where they are deported to Yemen, or stories about Eritrean refugees in Yemen, where they are imprisoned.  http://www.hrw.org/news/2012/05/15/jordan-don-t-deport-eritrean-refugees-yemen http://www.unhcr.org/4de64e9a6.html.  Better to just complain about Israel, where they are "slow to process applications."  

The story about the refugees in Israel also did not mention that these refugees currently number about 1% of the population of Israel -- a big number for such a small country.  That's like 3 million asylum seekers coming to the US in less than two years, all of whom need assistance with food, housing, education, employment, and language, all at taxpayer expense.  Usually the US gets less than 100,000 asylum seekers a year.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asylum_in_the_United_States That was also not mentioned in the story.  

Can the New York Times Sink any Lower? The Answer Is Always "Yes."

Just when I think that New York Times can't possibly sink any lower, they do.

Less than a week after publishing Ian Lustick's lurid fantasy in which a massive bloodbath is the precursor to the end of the world's only Jewish-majority state, the Times has printed what I suppose is its attempt to appear unbiased in the form of MK Danny Danon's Op-Ed titled "Israel Should Annul the Oslo Accords."

Danon is, of course, correct that, in hindsight, Oslo brought more bloodshed and not the peace it promised.  Anyone familiar with the facts, however, knows that Danon's proposed course of action, i.e., that Egypt and Jordan should take control, respectively, of Gaza and the West Bank, is a non-starter, as those two countries have made it clear that they are not willing to regain sovereignty over the areas that they controlled prior to 1967.

What is astounding, however, is the vitriolic comments, almost all of which condemn Israel, especially with regard to Israel's settlement building in the West Bank.  Granted I did not read all 246 of them, but I did not see any that mentioned Israel's demonstrated willingness to dismantle settlements, as it did in 2005 when it sent its 18- and 19-year old girls and boys, also knows as "soldiers," to remove its own citizens, by force, from their homes in Gaza.  Or any that mentioned that, if Arafat had taken the 2000 offer that Danon mentions, or if Abbas had taken the 2008 offer, there would be no settlement construction going on in those areas today.  Or any that mentioned that the steep decline in terrorist attacks in the past few years corresponds to Israel's building of the so-called "Aparthied Wall."

For a minute I wondered why the comments seemed so one-sided, but it did not take me long to see the reason.  The piece was published on the second day of Sukkot, going in to Shabbat, times when most observant Jews do not use computers (or phones or ipads).  Conveniently, the comments section was closed before Shabbat ended on the East Coast.

So, in an attempt to show how unbiased it is, the Times ran a nonsensical right-wing Op-Ed and posted it for its already brainwashed readers to read and respond to, right at a time when Jews would not be able to speak up.

No Good Deed . . . .

Here is a hypothetical: refugees fleeing genocide and civil war arrive in a small country, uninvited, seeking asylum.  Although the refugees have no connection whatsoever to the host country, the host country takes in a number of refugees close to 1% of the pre-existing population.  With school districts overcome by sudden population influx, that country spends its own money to build new schools to accommodate the children of these refugees.  Yet, so-called liberal pundits proceed to condemn the new host country.

Sounds crazy, I know.  Except it's not hypothetical, it's real, and of course, the host country is the one country on the planet that can do nothing right, ever -- Israel.

That is the gist of last week's Open Zion column claiming that Israel has set up apartheid schools for children of refugees from war-torn Eritrea and Sudan. Of course, all one has to do is google translate -- well, and read down to the very last paragraph -- the supposed source of Lisa Goldberg's piece to see that "The municipality said: 'Kindergartens are established according to the needs of the neighborhood. [The] Municipality considers its duty to provide adequate education to every child everywhere, so the children of the foreign community in Tel Aviv - Jaffa integrated in all schools in the city."  http://www.mynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-4420418,00.html.  

To the columnists of Open Zion, of course, this does not matter.  Neither does the report in the Jerusalem Post, which states: 

The Tel Aviv Municipality has not enacted any policy of segregation that would see local preschools exclusively for the children of asylum-seekers and other preschools for the rest of the children, the city said on Monday.

A municipality representative said that no such policy has been enacted, and that the only determining factor for where a child attends preschool is their place of residence.

The representative said that in order to accommodate the 2,716 new preschool students in the city, Tel Aviv has opened 70 new kindergarten classrooms ahead of the new school year, and that a large number of these are in neighborhoods with a high concentration of children of African asylum-seekers.

 http://www.jpost.com/National-News/Tel-Aviv-denies-policy-of-segregation-in-pre-schools-for-new-year-324319

With almost 3,000 new students, the city has a choice of overcrowding it's schools, or building new facilities.  So it builds new facilities.  Only in Israel would such an action be labelled "apartheid."  

Of course, no one at Open Zion is crying for the children of the 2 million Syrian refugees, who are living  in tents in Jordan and Turkey, who are not going to school at all this fall.  

Israel's Plan B

A few days ago I wrote that one thing that is very different about the negotiations currently underway between Israel and the Palestinian Authority is that Hamas has been considerably weakened by the downfall of its Egyptian allies in the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as by Iran's and Hezbollah's current preoccupation with Syria.  There is another difference as well: Thanks in part to Hamas, Israel now has a Plan B.  

Seth Mandel speculated in Commentary a few days ago as to whether or not Israel has a Plan B, and if so, what the effect of that would be on the negotiations.  http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2013/08/02/doomsday-diplomacy-and-the-middle-east/#.Uf0GtRG6LYY.twitter  Since Israel's most recent incursion into Gaza, in November of 2012, Israel's Plan B has emerged.  

Prior to last November, unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank, similar to what occcured in Gaza in 2005, was not widely discussed as a viable option.  This was because Israel's major population centers in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem were considered too close to the would-be West Bank border.  Watching the barrage of rockets from Gaza into southern Israel, withdrawal from the West Bank without a peace agreement was considered too dangerous.  Iron Dome, however, has changed that.  

It is thanks to Hamas that we saw how well the Iron Dome missile defense system worked.  Even the longer-range missiles that Hamas aimed at Tel Aviv were rendered ineffectual.  Now that we know that Israel can protect its major cities from a close and hostile enemy, disengagement without a peace agreement seems viable.  In December, the Jerusalem Post reported that 45% of Israelis supported unilateral withdrawal.  http://www.jpost.com/National-News/Poll-45-percent-of-Israelis-support-unilateral-withdrawal  This option was seriously considered at the Jerusalem Post conference that I attended in April of this year, and appears to have been seriously discussed at the Herzliya Conference in March (which I did not attend).  

What would such a move by Israel mean?  To start, it would mean that Israel alone would decide on the borders of the land it would cede to Palestine.  Israel could theoretically keep a presence in the Jordan Valley, and keep as many of the settlement blocs as it chose.  Jerusalem would not be up for discussion at all.  And certainly, no descendants of Palestinian "refugees" would be allowed into Israel.  

The threat of putting Israel's Plan B into action could be what finally pushed Abbas back to the table.  Either way, let's just hope he stays there. 

Forces from Right and Left Involved in Netanyahu's Decision to Release Terrorists

Many people are asking why Netanyahu has made the wildly unpopular decision to release Palestinian murderers and other terrorists from Israeli jails, as well as why the US pressured him to do so.  (For example, Elliott Abrams, here:  http://blogs.cfr.org/abrams/2013/07/29/why-is-the-united-states-asking-israel-to-release-terrorists/#cid=soc-twitter-at-blogs-why_is_the_united_states_askin-072913)

Here is my entirely speculative guess.  First, Kerry is primarily interested in creating his own legacy.  While he may be peripherally concerned with the best interests of the parties involved, his main goal is to be remembered for something other than the man who lost to George Bush.  As an outside observer, it seems fairly clear to me that he put an extraordinary amount of pressure on Netanyahu to make some concession in order to jump start the process.  

My guess would be, however, that Kerry would not have had a strong preference for prisoner release over settlement freeze.  That pressure (again, I am speculating wildly) probably came from within his coalition.  Can anyone doubt that Nafatli Bennett's HaBayit HaYehudi party would have left the coalition over a settlement freeze?  Bennett has vociferously protested the prisoner release, to be sure, but he has not announced any intention to leave the coaltion over it.  

On the other side, Labor's Shelley Yachimovich bears some responsibility as well.  While she urges Netanyahu not to be "led by the extremists in his government" (http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4410416,00.html) she has vowed to remain in the opposition, thereby forcing Netanyahu, in some cases, to do exactly that which she urges him not to do.  (http://www.timesofisrael.com/as-coalition-forms-yachimovich-vows-to-lead-true-opposition/)  If Yachimovich would join the coalition, Netanyahu would not be beholden to Bennett.  With prospects for peace, while still slim, at least, better than they have been in years, now is the time for Yachimovich and her party to put partisan differences aside and step up to provide Netanyahu with the votes he needs to defy extremists is his coaltion.

UPDATE 8/11/13: As I continue to give this issue a lot of thought, I want to add that, given the choice between a settlement freeze and prisoner release, it is also possible that it was Abbas who picked the prisoner release.  A settlement freeze means nothing is happening.  Abbas has a victory but it is not visual.  There are no pictures of a settlement freeze.  And when the talks fall apart, the building can always resume.

A prisoner release is a much more tangible victory.  Of the 26 prisoners set to be released this week, twelve will go to the West Bank.  http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/12/us-palestinians-israel-idUSBRE97A06320130812  Abbas will greet these murderers with a hero's welcome, he will hold parades in their honor.  It will be a glorious PR move for Abbas.  And, it is irreversible.  Once released, the prisoners can't be taken back.

So, perhaps it was not Bennett, after all.  

How Are These Negotiations Different from All Other Negotiations?

After several days of rumors and retractions, Secretary Kerry announced this evening that direct talks between "Israelis and Palestinians" were to resume (note how he cleverly avoids using the word "Palestine").

The announcement was greeted with skepticism (as reported here: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2013/07/19/obama-kerry-middle-east-israel-palestinians/2569373/), and I am pretty skeptical myself.  If Abbas could not accept Olmert's 2008 offer, it is difficult to imagine him accepting anything Netanyahu will offer -- although I do believe Bibi when he says he wants two states for two peoples, it seems highly unlikely that he will offer to give up, for example, sovereignty over the Temple Mount (aka Al-Aqsa Mosque).

But there is one thing that is very different now, and that is, Hamas.  With Hamas's biggest supporters either deposed in Egypt or preoccupied with backing Assad in Syria, Hamas may be in a weaker position than it has been during any previous round of negotiations.  If the real reason that Arafat walked away from Camp David in 2000, and Abbas did the same in 2008, was fear of Hamas -- fear of widespread violence within the Palestinian territories/would-be-state, fear of assassination -- then maybe, just maybe, this weakening of Hamas can allay those fears just enough to give pragmatism and moderation enough edge to carry the day.

There is of course, a host of other reasons the talks can fail, and I am not optimistic.  But there is always hope.