Lessons for Israel from the Failed Peace Talks

By Abraham H. Miller, AMERICAN THINKER

Over the past two weeks, Israeli National Security Adviser Yossi Cohen sent letters to the White House and European leaders outlining the deceptive Palestinian strategy to exploit the peace talks for short-run, tangible benefits with no intention of achieving peace.

Accompanying the letters is a 65-page internal Palestinian document from Chief Negotiator Saeb Erekat to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas recommending that the Palestinians do an end run and move forward to join fifteen international organizations. The foundation and impetus for the current round of talks ensued from an agreement that the Palestinians would not go ahead on this front.

Erekat also recommended that the talks not extend beyond Kerry’s deadline, guaranteeing their demise.

While the Palestinians danced before the international media to the tune of peace, once out of the glare of the cameras’ lights, they were telling their own people that the talks were only being engaged in to obtain the release of Palestinian prisoners — many with innocent blood on their hands.

The strategy worked. Despite anguished outcries from the families of terrorist victims, Israel let dozens of terrorists return to a hero’s welcome in the Palestinian territories. They were showcased as role models for Palestinian children. Undoubtedly some of them will kill again, and some of the children they inspire will become future murderers.

But the Palestinians’ biggest victory was the American administration’s placing blame for the failure of the talks on Israeli’s reluctance to release another batch of murderers to be lionized as heroes. The Israelis knew the Palestinians were playing charades, and if there was any doubt, the forged unity agreement, during the negotiations, between Fatah and the terrorist group, Hamas, confirmed Israel’s fears.

Kerry’s capacity for showering blame on the Israelis reached obscene heights after the talks collapsed. His invoking the tired and worn Apartheid canard against Israel was not an error in judgment but a calculated act of mendacity befitting the man who deluded himself into believing that Israel ripped the Nobel Peace Prize from his hands.

Kerry also gave encouragement and legitimacy to the Palestinians whose public narrative is that the Israelis scuttled the talks, even though they themselves had no interest in their success.

Aside from the near impossibility of the talks succeeding, Kerry’s conduct further assured their failure.

He established a public deadline. He permitted the substance of the talks to leak. He openly condemned Israel as the talks were ongoing. He asked Israel to release prisoners with blood on their hands while demanding nothing from the Palestinians. He gave public testimony on the talks while they were in progress, blaming Israel as the world’s media captured and disseminated his remarks.

After the talks collapsed, Kerry had an apoplectic fit furiously denouncing Israel while joyfully contemplating the inevitable creation of yet another Judenrein dictatorship that will be dominated by thugs and kleptomaniacs allied with zealots posing as ambassadors of the Almighty. Not once, did Kerry address the incongruity of negotiating with an entity whose political infrastructure of corruption, authoritarianism, and manufactured hatred made it devoid of legitimacy among its own people and incapable of implementing anything except the division of the next Western aid package among its cronies.

The faux negotiations cost Israel dearly, but they cost America even more because no Middle East government could ignore that the Obama administration jettisoned Israel as easily as it helped topple Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and as quickly as it betrayed the interests of both the Saudis and the Emirates in its pursuit of a nuclear deal with Iran that everyone knows will be ultimately breached.

The strongest lesson for Israel is that a weak president, dismissed by his adversaries (witness Russian President Vladimir Putin’s imperialistic behavior), no longer trusted by his allies, and a man who has added the word “pink line” to the vocabulary of international relations will ultimately be incapable of enforcing any agreement.

If the Americans conclude an agreement with Iran, who will enforce it when it is inevitably broken? Can Israel trust its security to the incompetent, indecisive, puerile Barack Obama, whose true feelings toward the Jewish state were exposed by the conduct of his secretary of state?

The president has more than answered that question. All the remains is for Israel to listen carefully and act accordingly.

Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus professor of political science, University of Cincinnati. He has also served on the faculty of the University of California, Davis and the University of Illinois, Urbana.

May 12, 2014 | 5 Comments »

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  2. @ yamit82:

    Therefor Israel should:
    A-?

    B-?

    C-?

    D-?

    A- clearly identify the ENEMY.
    That is the ARABS, of the musloid type, (as being the vast majority)

    B- remove the enemy from within.
    Load them by bus loads (I would prefer cattle cars) and unceremoniously dump them at the Allenby bridge with a clear instruction to go east.
    – remove any and ALL foreign NGOs identified as inimical to the state (same method, or, allow one way flight)
    – start to instill a ZERO TOLERANCE to aiding and abetting the enemy by Jews (start by shutting down Ha’aretz)

    C- open the floodgates to building all across Judea Samaria the galilee the Negev…
    – the above points will practically GUARANTEE a massive Aliyah by hundreds of thousands of Jews that at the moment must be scratching their heads and wondering what ever happened to the Israeli Jew of ’67…
    – this will trigger a huge positive chain reaction where one success feeds on the previous

    D- give a farewell speech at the UN, where the kippah wearing speaker will give a speech outlining the blatant disgusting HYPOCRISY of the entire organization (world) . This kind of ‘honor’ Israel does not need.

  3. beniyyar Said:

    The reason the Israeli Palestinian peace negotiations failed this time, and for the past several decades is because while Israel wants to have peace, the Palestinians will only be satisfied with the destruction of Israel and the extermination of the Jewish People. This is not rocket science or brain surgery, this is quite simple, the Palestinians will never settle peacefully with Israel, the Palestinians want us Israeli Jews dead and buried and our nation destroyed!

    Therefor Israel should:
    A-?

    B-?

    C-?

    D-?

    😛 😛 😛 😛 😛 😛

  4. This letter by former Minister Katz (Ketzele) should be read and is very relevant.

    Op-Ed: An Open Letter to Martin Indyk
    Published: Sunday, May 11, 2014 7:59 PM
    High level discussions, conferences and negotiations did not help the Jewish people 70 years ago. And blaming the “settlement” movement for the conflict is, in effect, blaming the heroic pioneers of the last 130 years as well.

    Former MK Yaakov Katz
    Former National Union Party Chairman and Member of Knesset Yakov Katz,…
    ? More from this writer

    Now we are those holding the torch that was relayed to us to pass on to the idealistic pioneers of the next generation.
    To the Honorable Mr. Indyk

    Sir:

    Several days ago, you appeared on the Israeli media and blamed all the current ills, including the breakup of talks between our negotiators and the Arabs among us, on the “settlement” movement and the resumption of Jewish life in Judea and Samaria.

    We would have you know, that from the first days of the “Return to Zion movement”, over 130 years ago, and followed by the forming of Theodore Herzl’s Zionist movement, there was always – and still is – disagreement between the movement’s leaders and ordinary citizens, immigrants and pioneers, on the direction in which the movement must concentrate its efforts in order to reach the goal of the return to Zion, the building of a national home for the Jewish people and the re-establishment of a Jewish state in the Land of the Bible.

    Some felt that it was necessary to convince the world, and perhaps even the Arab residents of the Land of Israel, of the moral and legal rights of the Jews in the land of Israel, using solely intellectual, historical, logical and political explanations.

    As opposed to them, there were those who understood that there is no hope of persuading the Christian and Muslim worlds, consumed with hatred for our people and religion as they are, of the justice of our claims to the land. Accordingly, we must concentrate on creating facts on the ground, through engaging in Sisyphean agricultural work, erecting new settlements in isolated and peripheral areas, building up a defensive force, working to expand industry, creativity and educational institutions such as yeshivas and universities.

    The latter method is the one that proved itself, and has been the main method of dealing with the issue.

    This is the conceptual model whose application brought about the establishment of the State of Israel, our historic homeland from time immemorial, a Jewish state of which we are justly proud.

    What can one do, Mr. Indyk? Talks, intellectual discussions and political negotiations, such as there were, did not help us throughout our history and tragically, did not protect us 70 years ago when the most hellish of Holocausts befell our people. You, too, know what the results were when we limited ourselves to words.

    That is why the “settlement” movement, today’s wonderful pioneers in the lands of Judea, Samaria, the Golan and east Jerusalem, is a continuation of the messengers’ race that took off over a hundred years ago. Now we are those holding the torch that was relayed to us to pass on to the idealistic pioneers of the next generation.

    We are the descendants of the practical Zionists, those who refused to go to Uganda; we continue the path of those pioneers who built the first moshavim, the first kibbutzim, the “Shomer” watchman’s organization, the heroes of the Palmach and the martyrs of the Hagana and the Jewish Underground fighters..

    All of them, that’s right – all of them – Mr. Indyk, acted instead of talking.

    All of them, that’s right – all of them – enabled us to create, with the help of G-d, a glorious Jewish state whose 8 million-strong population includes six and a half million Jews. And 750,000 of those Jews live over the Green Line in parts of the Land of Israel that were liberated during the Six Day War.

    Mr Indyk, the Zionist train is travelling up the track at full power, returning our nation to health and normalcy, while you and other anachronistic Jews refuse to see the miraculous development of our country. As the train speeds on, you run towards the back carriages until you find yourself hitting the walls of the caboose, falling backwards and returning to your desperate and obsessive efforts to run in the opposite direction to that of the train – which is going on forward.

    The Jewish people are believers and the descendants of believers. Some have said, and I among them, that G-d’s plan for Redemption is being brought to fruition through our actions; others say that it is all due to the pioneers, soldiers, builders and immigrants. What is certain, Mr. Indyk, is that a majority of he Jewish nation living in Zion wishes for a large and strong Jewish state that deals equitably with minority groups within it.

    That is why your blaming the “settlements” is the same as blaming all the pioneers and heroes of the past 130 years, for we are only continuing their work. The views you expressed have remained a minority view throughout the years and because the majority acted otherwise, we survived, prospered and moved forward.

    I feel that it was my duty to write the above words to you. Thank you for reading them.

    http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/14987#.U3Ia1Sh46So

  5. The reason the Israeli Palestinian peace negotiations failed this time, and for the past several decades is because while Israel wants to have peace, the Palestinians will only be satisfied with the destruction of Israel and the extermination of the Jewish People. This is not rocket science or brain surgery, this is quite simple, the Palestinians will never settle peacefully with Israel, the Palestinians want us Israeli Jews dead and buried and our nation destroyed!