That phony settlement excuse

What really happened in Jerusalem

By Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post,March 28, 2013

    “I honestly believe that if any Israeli parent sat down with those [Palestinian] kids, they’d say, ‘I want these kids to succeed.'”

    — Barack Obama, in Jerusalem, March 21

Very true. But how does the other side feel about Israeli kids?

Consider that the most revered parent in Palestinian society is Mariam Farhat of Gaza. Her distinction? Three of her sons died in various stages of trying to kill Israelis — one in a suicide attack, shooting up and hurling grenades in a room full of Jewish students.

She gloried in her “martyr” sons, wishing only that she had 100 boys like her schoolroom suicide attacker to “sacrifice .?.?. for the sake of God.” And for that she was venerated as “mother of the struggle,” elected to parliament and widely mourned upon her recent passing.

So much for reciprocity. In the Palestinian territories, streets, public squares, summer camps, high schools, even a kindergarten are named after suicide bombers and other mass murderers. So much for the notion that if only Israelis would care about Arab kids, peace would be possible.

That hasn’t exactly been the problem. Israelis have wanted nothing more than peace and security for all the children. That’s why they accepted the 1947 U.N. partition of British Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state. Unfortunately — another asymmetry — the Arabs said no. To this day, the Palestinians have rejected every peace offer that leaves a Jewish state standing.

This is not ancient history. Yasser Arafat said no at Camp David in 2000 and at Taba in 2001. And in 2008, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered a Palestinian state on all of the West Bank (with territorial swaps) with its capital in a shared Jerusalem. Mahmoud Abbas walked away.

In that same speech, Obama blithely called these “missed historic opportunities” that should not prevent peace-seeking now. But these “missed historic opportunities” are not random events. They present an unbroken, unrelenting pattern over seven decades of rejecting any final peace with Israel.

So what was the point of Obama’s Jerusalem speech encouraging young Israelis to make peace, a speech the media drooled over? It was mere rhetoric, a sideshow meant to soften the impact on the Arab side of the really important event of Obama’s trip: the major recalibration of his position on the peace process.

Obama knows that peace talks are going nowhere. First, because there is no way that Israel can sanely make concessions while its neighborhood is roiling and unstable — the Muslim Brotherhood taking over Egypt, rockets being fired from Gaza, Hezbollah brandishing 50,000 missiles aimed at Israel, civil war raging in Syria with its chemical weapons and rising jihadists, and Iran threatening openly to raze Tel Aviv and Haifa.

Second, peace is going nowhere because Abbas has shown Obama over the past four years that he has no interest in negotiating. Obama’s message to Abbas was blunt: Come to the table without preconditions, i.e., without the excuse of demanding a settlement freeze first.

Obama himself had contributed to this impasse when he imposed that precondition — for the first time ever in the history of Arab-Israeli negotiations — four years ago. And when Israel responded with an equally unprecedented 10-month settlement freeze, Abbas didn’t show up to talk until more than nine months in — then walked out, never to return.

In Ramallah last week, Obama didn’t just address this perennial Palestinian dodge. He demolished the very claim that settlements are the obstacle to peace. Palestinian sovereignty and Israeli security are “the core issue,” he told Abbas. “If we solve those two problems, the settlement problem will be solved.”

Finally. Presidential validation of the screamingly obvious truism: Any peace agreement will produce a Palestinian state with not a single Israeli settlement remaining on its territory. Any settlement on the Palestinian side of whatever border is agreed upon will be demolished. Thus, any peace that reconciles Palestinian statehood with Israeli security automatically resolves the settlement issue. It disappears.

Yes, Obama offered the ritual incantations about settlements being unhelpful. Nothing new here. He could have called them illegal or illegitimate. It wouldn’t have mattered — because Obama officially declared them irrelevant.

Exposing settlements as a mere excuse for the Palestinian refusal to negotiate — that was the news, widely overlooked, coming out of Obama’s trip. It was a breakthrough.

Will it endure? Who knows. But when an American president so sympathetic to the Palestinian cause tells Abbas to stop obstructing peace with that phony settlement excuse, something important has happened. Abbas, unmasked and unhappy, knows this better than anyone.

March 31, 2013 | 7 Comments »

Subscribe to Israpundit Daily Digest

Leave a Reply

7 Comments / 7 Comments

  1. They wont make peace even if Israel disappear. They are after the whole world. And the rot increases at vv’ speed in many if not most Muslim countries! The (religious) oppression of the poor, ignorant, illiterate masses is on the move. Thanks the liberal West and antisemites.

  2. Krauthammer writes:

    “Israelis have wanted nothing more than peace and security for all the children. That’s why they accepted the 1947 U.N. partition of British Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state.”

    Why do even our allies keep writing about the “1947 U.N. partition” as if it really happened? Krauthammer should be referring to the 1947 U.N. partition recommendation, partition proposal, or partition plan, since the only binding U.N. resolutions are those made by the Security Council under Chapter VII, which has to do with maintaining peace between nations. The partition plan (Resolution 181) was a non-binding General Assembly resolution and, as such, functioned only as a recommendation, requiring the agreement of both affected parties, Jews and Arabs, in order to become binding. Immediate rejection of Resolution 181 by Arabs and attacks against Jews in Palestine invalidated the partition plan.

    People who think that Palestine was actually partitioned by the U.N. will obviously think that the Jews are stealing Palestinian land. The one idea follows naturally from the other! This is why it behooves all of us to be careful when we speak of the U.N.’s 1947 partition idea.

  3. “Obama officially declared them (settlements) irrelevant”

    No he did not, he just expanded his former request to abolish Judea and Samaria to include all of Israel by making Israel apologize for the crime of defending itself.


  4. The Obama visit: Did anything change?

    Exactly what transpired in the talks between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, or between Obama and PA President Mahmoud Abbas, or between Obama and Abdullah, is unknown. These discussions were, of course, off the record and journalists’ interpretation of what occurred at these meetings was based on the public comments made by the leaders at joint press conferences or appearances,

    Lost among the themes of the trip, was whether Obama and Netanyahu moved any closer on coordinating policy on Iran’s nuclear program. Israelis have become highly skeptical about progress in the peace process with the Palestinians, but are very focused on the Iranians’ progress towards joining the nuclear club.

    While columnists like Tom Friedman of The New York Times always see some final window of opportunity closing on the two-state solution (inevitably because of alleged Israel settlement expansion in the West Bank), Israelis seem to have become accustomed to the no war, no peace stalemate with the Palestinians. Terrorism from the West Bank has subsided, and most Israelis see no reason to offer concessions that could endanger the security of Israelis, as many think occurred after the withdrawals from southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip. The Israelis also see the behavior of the PA in real time, not as Americans do when attention is focused by a presidential visit to the region. They do not see a partner for peace in the PA, but a movement still much more fixated on discrediting Israel internationally than on negotiating either an interim or a more substantive agreement.

    They also understand that Hamas, which controls Gaza, where 40 percent of the Palestinians live, has not reconciled to the permanence of Israel in any sense, but is committed to continued violence and the destruction of the Jewish state. Many Israelis think the PA is closer in philosophy to Hamas than is acknowledged abroad, or too weak to differentiate itself, since radicalism, and anti-Israeli hysteria still govern the political thinking of a large number of Palestinians.

  5. Obama virtually calls Israeli Jews nazis: Leftist “Jewish” Israeli students applaud wildly

    Obama gave a speech to “the Israeli youth”. It was pre-arranged that only leftist students (Jew-hating Jews who are Jews in name only) would be in attendance. Only left-leaning universities (because of Israeli history there are a lot of them in Israel) were invited to send students, and only Obama-loving students were picked.

    Like the godfather, Obama said lots of nice things about Jewish Israel, while giving them the judas kiss in the middle of his speech:

    “Look at the world through their eyes. It is not fair that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of their own. Living their entire lives with the PRESENCE of a FOREIGN ARMY that controls the movements not just of those young people but their parents, their grandparents, every single day. It’s not just when SETTLER VIOLENCE against Palestinians GOES UNPUNISHED….”

    Obama implies that the Jewish “settlers”, who live over an artificial truce-line made between Israel and Jordan in 1949, are actually nazi-like colonialist occupiers of land stolen from the “palestinians”. The Israeli Defense Forces, who protect both the settlers and the Jewish Israelis inside the truce-line, are a nazi-like FOREIGN ARMY of OCCUPATION who turn a blind eye to nazi-like SETTLER VIOLENCE.

    He may have said this just for “balance”, but it gives the savage palestinians a presidential justification for killing Jewish women and babies, since Obama turns the palestinian killers into legitimate resistance fighters against a nazi-like Jewish Israeli occupation.

    And leftist Jewish Israeli students applauded.

    By the way, the Hebrew name for settlers (mitnakhlim) actually translates as “reclaiming our rightful inheritance”.

  6. The Arabs won’t make peace with Israel even if every single settlement disappeared.

    They didn’t make peace when Israel foolishly uprooted the Jews of the Gush Katif and gave itself Hamas as a reward.

    You’d have to have a million Jews live somewhere. Where?

    It should be pointed out if Israel can get by with a 20% Arab minority there is no reason in the world the Arabs can’t get along with a 20% Jewish minority on their side of the border.

  7. I rarely disagree with Krauthammer (his dim view of Sarah Palin was one of my biggest differences), but he is seeing unicorns here. Perhaps too much time spent with the Jew-hating lefties at WaPo.