The Mideast Peace Deal You Haven't Heard About

Benjamin Netanyahu is much more serious about Middle East peace than most Americans realize. With U.S. diplomacy on the brink of a surprising success, it's time for the Palestinians to step up.

For a year or two at an early stage in his career, I commuted to and from our adjacent offices each morning and evening with Martin Indyk, later a top peace-process official of the Clinton administration atthe Camp David negotiations and now vice president for foreign policy at the Brookings Institution.

I had just left the Rand Corporation to work at AIPAC,the main pro-Israel lobbying organization in Washington.

Even in those pre-Oslo days of 1982 to 1983,Martin was a True Believer in the idea of a grand land-for-peace bargain between Israel and moderate Palestinians. Reviewing each day the latest installments in the Middle East epic as we rolled down Rock Creek Parkway, weargued all the way.

I heaped scorn on any solution that required Israel totrust Palestinian intentions, and I held that Israel's security could only bebased on a qualitative military edge and the balance of power. I told Martinthat he and our mutual friends Dennis Ross, Aaron Miller, and Dan Kurtzer,though with the noblest of intentions, were pursuing an illusion.

Martin emphatically thought I was wrongabout the Middle East, and he also thought I was blind to an enduring reality in Washington. He said that Democratic and Republican administrations of the left and right may come and go, and some presidents will have less confidence in Middle East peacemaking than others, but no U.S. president will be able to sustain a policy of benign neglect of the peace process for long.

The American people, the United States' European allies, and U.S. friends in the Arab world allneed to have a ray of hope. They need to believe that active diplomacy under U.S.leadership is bringing closer a resolution of the conflict between Israelis andPalestinians, because it is a conflict that roils other American interests anddestabilizes U.S. relations in the region and throughout the world. Martin often cited our friend, the late Peter Rodman, who taught us that U.S. policyin the Middle East is a bicycle. You can keep your balance if you roll forwardeven at a snail's pace, but if you try to stand still you will fall off.

Martin never did succeed in convertingme to the peace camp, but over time I saw the undeniable evidence that he wasright about the imperatives of U.S. foreign policy. Sooner or later, every presidentturns to the peace process, and the Mideast advisors who move to the president'sinner circle are the ones he thinks have the best ideas about how to moveforward toward a contractual peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

I think Benjamin Netanyahu has gone through a personal evolution a little like my own. He continues to be profoundly skeptical that signing a piece of paper can put an end to this conflict. He is a fierce advocate of defensible borders and military strength as the true guarantors of Israel's security.

Nevertheless, he has come back to a second term as prime minister with a deeper appreciation of the reality thathis relations with the United States, Europe, and moderate Arab neighbors dependon the perception that he can be a partner in the search for diplomaticprogress with the Palestinians. And he certainly knows that many harbor doubtsabout him.

That is why Bibi agreed to do somethingunprecedented, something that six previous Israeli prime ministers since the1993 Oslo Accords (Rabin, Peres, Barak, Sharon, Olmert, and Netanyahu himselfin his previous term) refused to do. Very much against the will of his partyand coalition, Netanyahu consented to putting a freeze on "natural growth"of settlements. He has drastically curtailed the volume of construction starts,even in the "consensus" settlement blocs that he believes wereconceded to Ariel Sharon by George W. Bush.

Now, below the radar, Netanyahu is making a series of additional concessions to Barack Obama and his Mideast peaceenvoy, George Mitchell. Their current priority is negotiating "terms of reference"to permit the resumption of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations (TORs in negotiators' vernacular).

Dismissed by some as mere "talking about talking," TORs are in fact vital elements to create the parameters for serious negotiations.For example, then-Secretary of State James Baker shuttled around the region for eight months to negotiate the TORs that made the 1991 Madrid conference possible.

All that was done just to phrase a letter of invitation that allsides could accept. The result was far from trivial; it was a framework thatopened the way to all the direct negotiations that followed over the ensuingtwo decades.

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The enemy within

Philip Mendes and Nick Dyrenfurth

THIS week the world marks the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall's fall. Thirty-five years ago an event with global ramifications likewise occurred. On November 13, 1974, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat famously addressed the UN General Assembly. Carrying a gun and an olive branch, Arafat appealed not to let the olive branch fall from his hand.

Arafat's speech signified that the Palestinians had moved in international eyes from being a group of stateless refugees to a legitimate national movement.

Whether Arafat intended it or not, his statement also signposted two dichotomous directions for the Palestinians.

One was the road to peace and reconciliation with Israel via mutual compromise and a two-state solution. This path would be encapsulated in the 1993 Oslo accord that led to the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, and almost resulted, via the American-auspiced 2000-01 negotiations, in the creation of a Palestinian State.

The other was the unbending war of terror and violence reflected in suicide bombings and rocket attacks to achieve the destruction of Israel.

Arafat's speech coincided with the end of the Vietnam War and the decline of communism. This prompted the far Left to search for a new apocalyptic cause. In Australia, a motley coalition of Trotskyists, Maoists and other tiny fringe groups opted to publicise the plight of the Palestinian people.

Notably they did not endorse a compromise two-state solution that recognised the legitimate claims of Israelis and Palestinians. Rather, they simplistically constructed the Israeli-Arab conflict as an extension of the struggle between Western colonialism and the Third World, and recommended the elimination of the Israeli side of the conflict.

Anti-Zionist fundamentalists captured the pro-Palestinian agenda. In 1974 and again in 1975, the extremist-influenced Australian Union of Students, passed motions calling for the elimination of the state of Israel and its replacement by a democratic secular state of Palestine. The latter term was a disingenuous euphemism for an ethno-religious Islamic Arab state, given that most Palestinian Muslims are highly religious. The motions were rejected by Australian students, but this did not deter the fundamentalists.

The fundamentalist agenda cooled following the PLO's implicit recognition of Israel in 1988. However the outbreak of the second intifada in September 2000 produced a renewal of the inflammatory rhetoric from the far Left.

The higher the tide of violence perpetrated by the Palestinians, the greater the fury and blame directed at the Israeli victims.

The March 2002 attacks provoked the Israeli invasion of the leading West Bank cities in an attempt to destroy the terror networks, and stop the carnage. Yet the first Australian petition for an academic boycott of Israel initiated by a small clique of Australian academics after this invasion in May 2002 was directed at the victims of terror.

Another group condemned Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard's visit to Israel last June.

The petition signatories seemed oblivious to the fact that more than one million Arabs are citizens of Israel; that the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip overwhelmingly demand an Arab state rather than a Jewish-Arab entity, and that most Arab states ethnically cleansed their Jewish populations over 50 years ago.

No exposure of the infantile slogans of the fundamentalists obviates the need for Israel to promote rather than undermine the olive branch solution.

More and more Israelis and diaspora Jews understand that Israel will not only have to freeze West Bank settlements, but eventually dismantle at the very least all settlements east of the security barrier.

Equally the Palestinians will have to make concessions that facilitate peaceful relations. This means finally accepting that the 1948 refugees will only return to the Palestinian state and not to Israel.

The fundamentalists of course will never accept this win-win plan. Such is the nature of black-and-white revolutionary socialism. But their all-or-nothing demands for a similarly coercive utopia will bring only tragedy to the Palestinians.

Philip Mendes is the co-editor of Jews and Australian Politics (Sussex Academic Press, 2004). Nick Dyrenfurth is the co-editor of Confusion: the Making of the Australian Two-Party Political System (forthcoming with Melbourne University Publishing).

Source: The Australian

PA Violating Water Accords as Israel Faces Crisis

The Water Authority rejects Amnesty International claims, to be released in a report on Tuesday, that Israelis whet their thirst at the expense of Palestinian Authority Arabs.

The Water Authority countered that PA Arabs continually violate Oslo Accords by illegally drilling for water and spilling untreated sewage.

“The Amnesty report is selective and incorrect, to make an understatement,” said spokesmen for Water Authority chairman Uri Shore.

Despite several claims by human rights organizations that Israel has taken water away from what is now the Palestinian Authority, the amount of water available to PA Arabs since the Six-Day War in 1967 actually has gone up while Israelis have suffered a whopping 70 percent drop in their resources.

“The amount of natural water, including underground aquifers, the amount of water available annually to every Israeli before 1967 was 500 cubic meters a year,” the Water Authority explained. “Today the figure is 149 cubic meters, while water available to PA Arabs actually has increased by 22 percent, from 87 cubic meters to 105 cubic meters a year per capita.”

It noted that the gap that exists “is not so great” to be termed a disaster.

At the same time, the PA is not treating sewage for agriculture, as agreed on with Israel in 1995 as part of the Oslo Accords.

NGO Monitor’s President Prof. Gerald Steinberg said, “Amnesty’s report manipulates the issue of water and ignores the complexities of history and law in order to again falsely portray Israel as a brutal regime.

The report adopts a painfully simplistic narrative which places blame solely on Israel, to the extent that the Palestinian leadership is absolved of responsibility for the agreements signed under the Oslo framework."

Israel’s water resources are near an all-time low, following four years of drought along with increasing water usage and a growing population. Higher water levies and conservation measures have cut water consumption by more than 20 percent this year.

Forecasters have cautiously predicted this winter will be wetter than usual, but it would take a modern miracle to replenish the country’s resources.

Scattered heavy rain fell in northern and eastern parts of the country on Monday as another heat wave hit the country. The amount of precipitation was impressive by falling a period of a few minutes but had little effect on Kinneret and underground aquifers.

Source: INN

Peace Process or War Process?

When Barack Obama announced in June 2009 about Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy, "I'm confident that if we stick with it, having started early, that we can make some serious progress this year," he displayed a touching, if naïve optimism.

Indeed, his determination fits a well-established pattern of determination by politicians to "solve" the Arab-Israeli conflict; there were fourteen U.S. government initiatives just during the two George W. Bush administrations. Might this time be different? Will trying harder or being more clever end the conflict?

No, there is no chance whatever of this effort working.

Without looking at the specifics of the Obama approach — which are in themselves problematic — I shall argue three points: that past Israeli-Palestinian negotiations have failed; that their failure resulted from an Israeli illusion about avoiding war; and that Washington should urge Jerusalem to forego negotiations and return instead to its earlier and more successful policy of fighting for victory.

I. Reviewing the "Peace Process"

It is embarrassing to recall the elation and expectations that accompanied the signing of the Oslo accords in September 1993 when Israel's prime minister Yitzhak Rabin shook hands on the White House lawn with Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader. For some years afterward, "The Handshake" (as it was then capitalized) served as the symbol of brilliant diplomacy, whereby each side achieved what it most wanted: dignity and autonomy for the Palestinians, recognition and security for the Israelis.

President Bill Clinton hosted the ceremony and lauded the deal as a "great occasion of history." Secretary of State Warren Christopher concluded that "the impossible is within our reach." Yasir Arafat called the signing an "historic event, inaugurating a new epoch." Israel's foreign minister Shimon Peres said one could see in it "the outline of peace in the Middle East."

The press displayed similar expectations. Anthony Lewis, a New York Times columnist, deemed the agreement "stunning" and "ingeniously built." Time magazine made Arafat and Rabin two of its "men of the year" for 1993. To cap it off, Arafat, Rabin, and Peres jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize for 1994.

As the accords led to a deterioration of conditions for Palestinians and Israelis, rather than the expected improvement, these heady anticipations quickly dissipated.

When Palestinians still lived under Israeli control, pre-Oslo accords, they had benefited from the rule of law and a growing economy, independent of international welfare. They enjoyed functioning schools and hospitals; they traveled without checkpoints and had free access to Israeli territory.

They even founded several universities. Terrorism declined as acceptance of Israel increased.

Oslo then brought Palestinians not peace and prosperity, but tyranny, failed institutions, poverty, corruption, a death cult, suicide factories, and Islamist radicalization.

Yasir Arafat had promised to build his new dominion into a Middle Eastern Singapore, but the reality he ruled became a nightmare of dependence, inhumanity, and loathing, more akin to Liberia or the Congo.

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Source: Daniel Pipes

What Palestinians Want

Amir Taheri | April 21

As Palestinians wonder about what they could do next, they would do well to remember that their starting point is a double failure shaped over the past decade.

The first of the two failures is that of Al Fatah, which has dominated Palestinian politics since the 1960s and exercised control over the Palestinian Authority in the wake of the Oslo accords.

At some point in its history, Al Fatah may well have devoted its energies to a grand, though so far futile, struggle to create a Palestinian state. Since 1991, however, Al Fatah has been principally interested in one goal: its own survival and the prosperity of the elite that sustains it. With the late Yasser Arafat showing the way, Al Fatah has kicked its former national aspirations into tall grass. Each time its narrow interests clashed with the broader interest of the national struggle, Al Fatah clung firmly to the former and jettisoned the latter.

Al Fatah, and beyond it the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which it controls, have danced to every tune of the day in the same way western teen-agers go for pop "tubes" of the season.

The Oslo accords were designed to drown the fish, that is to say bury the national aspirations of the Palestinians under tons of paper. The PLO adopted them with excessive zeal.

Then we had the so-called Road Map, presented by President George W Bush, a kind of political bikini, revealing everything except the essential. Again, the PLO, and Al Fatah, bought into it without a flutter.

Finally, we had the "two states" formula, also presented by Bush. The PLO adopted this as a slogan but did all it could to prevent any step towards achieving it.

Arafat's departure from the scene did not change the essentials.

Amir Taheri's new book, "The Persian Night", is published by Encounter Books, New York and London. More....

Source: Hudson New York

My Prayer for the Jewish People

by Sheikh Abdul Hadi Palazzi

As a Zionist Muslim clergyman and a friend of the Jewish people, I cannot keep silent. I feel a moral urge to declare that the nations of the world are once again preparing bad days for the Jewish people.

A US Administration, which pays lip service to a supposed "war on terror," is ready to bow to Saudi-funded Islamist terror and to accept the Saudi diktat compelling Jews to withdraw from the Land of Israel. The Jewish people is at risk of getting restricted by order of its American "friends," ever closer to what Abba Eban used to call "the Auschwitz borders."

People are rarely satisfied with their politicians, and the case of contemporary Israelis is no different. Most of them feel betrayed by both leftist politicians who try to introduce surrender to Abu Mazen as a "step toward peace," and by reputed nationalist politicians who declare they oppose Jewish deportation from Judea and Samaria, but who do not move a inch to prevent it.

The more time passes, the more moral leadership of the Jewish people at home is restricted to a powerless minority. The nightmare of Oslo returned and became even darker in Annapolis. That was the reason for the recent creation in Jerusalem of the New Jewish Congress, a federation of different authentic Zionist groups and organizations, blessed by the New Sanhedrin and by the most authoritative Israeli rabbis, and supported by 30% of concerned secular Israelis. I regretted being unable to attend the founding session, held in Jerusalem, Israel, on November 27, but I was thankful to Allah the Most High for giving me the opportunity to thank Prof. Hillel Weiss for the honor of the invitation and to send the participants my greetings.

I was glad to have been given the opportunity to reiterate that the territories of Judea and Samaria are the home Allah granted to the Jewish people, and that any attempt to steal them from their legitimate owners is a declaration of war against a Divine decree. In my humble view, each of my Jewish brothers and sisters is morally obligated to struggle for the integrity of the Land of Israel, in order to ease the task of the Jewish people to be a "light unto the nations" and to pave the way for Redemption.

The oil lobbies are imposing the follow-up of Oslo, and compelling the whole civilized world to bow to a leader of kleptocracy like Abu Mazen and to again fund his anti-Jewish terror. In these tragic days, my heart is with the Jews in Israel, with all those Jewish families at risk of deportation from Judea and Samaria to appease oil-sultans and their Western counterparts.

I pray that hardship is overcome and defeated by a new Jewish leadership, which will prove that the Zionist dream is still alive. The dream of the Jewish people to live in peace and security in the Land of Israel was not crushed by strong governments in the past, and will not be crushed even today, despite the attempts of Arab dictators, the American politicians who cave in to their demands, and the corrupt Israeli politicians who bowed down in submission in Annapolis. One might easily envision that the nightmare that began in Oslo will now reach its most terrific level, with a possible ascendancy of Hamas gangsters over the areas to be vacated by Israel, including even Jerusalem.

President George Bush claims he reads the Bible daily, but seems to forget that it is written there that the Land of Israel is G-d's gift to the Children of Israel, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. It was not given to anyone else, including the descendants of Ishmael, since they received plenty of territory in other locations. Even so, whoever attempts to steal any of the Divine inheritance of the Jewish people declares war not only on a particular nation, but on G-d and His decree. As long as the US stood up for the rights of Israel in her land, Allah rewarded them with a flow of abundance and blessings, while the Soviet Empire - which denied the national rights of the Jewish people - was canceled from maps. Now, the risk is that the US Administration wants to emulate the Soviet Union. I pray for a new US Administration, more respectful of the rights of the Jewish people over its land.

Sheikh Professor Abdul Hadi Palazzi is the Director of the Cultural Institute of the Italian Islamic Community, Muslim Co-Founder and Co-Chairman of the Islam-Israel Fellowship, Root & Branch Association, Ltd.

Source: Israel National News