It is not Barak’s fault he couldn’t deliver. There were no guarantees. It is the fault of the US that she tried to go around Netanyahu. According to this report, the US now has low expectations and is only staying involved to forestall violence which would suck them in again. Ted Belman
The U.S. administration is furious with Defense Minister Ehud Barak over the stalled peace talks, sources have told Haaretz. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama’s senior advisers say that for more than a year and a half Barak misled them about his persuasive powers with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu regarding the peace process.
The Americans will continue working with Barak on security issues, but he will no longer receive special treatment.
A senior Israeli official, who requested anonymity, told Haaretz about his recent hour-long meeting with a senior U.S. official who detailed the reasons Clinton and the White House are so disappointed with Barak.
The accusations were confirmed over the past few days by four other sources close to the situation, all of whom requested anonymity.
The Israeli official said his U.S. interlocutor stressed that the infuriation with Barak reached as high as Obama and Clinton.
This came after Barak reached an understanding with Washington over extending the settlement construction freeze by three months in exchange for a written pledge of diplomatic and military guarantees in September.
Barak promised that Netanyahu would approve the deal, but did not deliver the goods.
“We put all our money on him a year and a half ago,” the Israeli official quoted his U.S. colleague as saying. “The entire administration bet on Barak because he said he could nudge Netanyahu toward an agreement with the Palestinians, but he deceived us and led us down the garden path.”
According to the U.S. official, as soon as Netanyahu formed his government, the White House decided to open all its doors to Barak, and Obama took the unusual step of meeting with him there.
“He charmed us with his intelligent analyses; the president listened to Barak like a student with his teacher and trusted him, but he didn’t meet any of his promises over the peace process and the building freeze,” the official told the Israeli.
The latter said he left the meeting “in shock …. I almost burst into tears.” Barak’s last visit to Washington, two weeks ago, was depicted as the watershed in Barak-Washington ties. The brevity of Clinton’s meeting with him at the Saban Forum last month – 15 minutes – was intended to signal Barak’s loss in status.
The U.S. official said Barak’s disappointing behavior evoked a sense of deja vu in Washington, especially at the State Department, recalling his failures as prime minister in the peace talks at Shepherdstown and Camp David.
Barak’s office said in a statement on Saturday that he maintains continuous ties at the top of the U.S. administration, detailing Barak’s meetings with Clinton, Vice President Joe Biden and Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
According to the statement, the accusations in the report were not raised in any of these meetings, nor did they appear in reports by diplomatic sources.
“Defense Minister Barak is punctilious about presenting situations accurately, without beautifying the facts,” the statement said.
Washington is expected to resume its efforts this week to restart the peace process, but its expectations are low. The administration is not walking away only because of its fear of renewed violence that would suck in the United States.
“We lost our hope in this coalition,” the U.S. official told the Israeli. “We simply have no more expectations.”
Both Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas are firmly entrenched in their positions, and a renewal of direct talks is not on the horizon.
The Palestinians are busy with their campaign against the settlements and for winning recognition of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders.
This week they will renew efforts to push through a UN Security Council resolution denouncing the settlements.
Netanyahu, for his part, continues to blame the Palestinians for the paralyzed peace process.
Sorry, my comments are inside the two smaller rectangles.
Clinton as well as Soetoro are unhappy with Barak. And so is the livni lass. Now that we are heading to be self sufficient on energy they will be further upset for sure. Be that as it may, the more upset they all are and that includes that publication, the happier we should all be.
Sometime in the future we may fathom if the Netanyahu gambit was planned or not but for now it pleases a fast growing number of people here and in the US.
Islam is a cult of death and has proven that robustly. Consequently peace will be ours when that murderous system is defeated and its adherents removed from Eretz Israel.
We must remove control over YESH away from the “military” until such as time when TZAHAL returns to trusted command.
There is NO ‘peace process”.
The day Israel, America and whatever is left of the civilized world say to the Palinazis:
“It’s over. No more money. No more support. No more food. No more help, period.
Grow your own vegetables and cattle, feed your own families, and look after yourselves. Build grocery stores instead of bomb factories. And for every terrorist incident you perpetrate upon us, we will kill 1000 of you for every Israeli victim and raze one of your towns.”
may be the day the Palinazi terror begins to end.
Palinazis are the world’s violent, barbaric spoiled children. The more they’re coddled and appeased, the worse they behave. And the less self-reliant they are, the more self-loathing they are.
The origin of Islamism is Islam, the command of the Qur’an. So terrorism will NEVER be eradicated as long as Islam exists. But if WE don’t feed them, they’ll have to spend more time figuring out how to produce goods and services, feed themselves, and the Palinazis will have less time to concentrate on killing Jews. And maybe, just maybe, they’ll comprehend that there’s pride to be gained from feeding oneself, thus attenuating their self-hatred.
Maybe…
Upon long reflection, I really would not fully trust any Israeli government not led either by Feiglin of the Manhigut faction of Likud and/or by Katz of the National Union, and supported by the Sfardi Jews of Shas and by Liberman’s tough-minded Russians. Laborites and other leftist worms need not apply. The only coalitions that I think could serve Israel’s national interests at this juncture are strictly right-wingers like the ones I support now for national office in the USA.
What I want is an Israeli government that is not willing to compromise in any way, shape or form regarding the national borders of the Jewish state. And I want that state’s ministry of the interior to administer Israel’s territorial interests in Shomron and Yehuda, not Israel’s defense establishment which is led by one of the country’s leading leftist appeasers.
I think by now most people who comment on this blogsite understand that Israel can have no peace with Arabs such as those who comprise the Hezbollah gang in Lebanon, the Mamas gang in Gaza, or the PLO operated out of Ramallah and which has pretensions to yet another “Palestian” state.
I think we also understand that the whole of Shomron and Yehuda must be annexed, and as much as possible of the Arab population west of the Jordan River must be bought out or forced out — without which, they shall forever be thorns in the sides of the Jewish nation, a topic that I recall was discussed at some length in Tora some 3400 years ago.
And I think it is further obvious that Israel’s friends in the United States are neither the liberal Jews of this country nor the African Moslem presidential leadership they so strongly pushed to get elected to power in 2008; instead, Israel’s strongest and most committed friends here are now mostly right-wing Evangelicals whose own religious beliefs fundamentally require authentic Jewish dominion over the whole of Aretz-Yisrael in order to pave the way for what they consider the coming of their own meshiach.
Please note that I am not interested in debating with anyone here the respective merits of belief either of religious Jews or religious Christians. I am interested solely in Israel obtaining support from powerful pressure groups or even governments whose overall goals serve the interests of the Jewish nation. I am interested solely in national power and the utilitarian purposes that can be accomplished by such power. Cold-blooded pragmatism, I think it is termed.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Your accusation of hyperbole is nothing more than hyperbole. Here, have a parallel:
“By accepting the legitimacy of this proposal, Netanyahu is telling Israel’s supporters abroad that the Palestinians are right. Israel belongs to the Arabs more than it belongs to the Jews. With this message, the only thing supporters of Israel can do is encourage the Israeli government to make territorial concessions that are suicidal for the country.
This disastrous belief has been engendered since the inception of the Oslo process in 1993. Its deleterious influence abroad is evidenced by the flood of statements over the years by Israel’s supporters claiming that Israel must vacate Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem, the Jordan Valley and the Golan Heights.”
– Caroline Glick, We are not for sale.
And I view Glick as a softee on Netanyahu.
Yamit:
“Peace(a meaningless concept).” Go tell that to the mother of a vet who perished in war.– go tell that to a holocaust survivor who had her whole family wiped out in the second world war. — go tell that to a returming soldier who lost his limbs, or was blinded by war… go tell that to a soldier who has returned from overseas suffering the after effects of severe psychological trauma…go tell that to the wives of returning vets whose marriages were shattered from having a spouse that could not adjust to civilian life.
Whoever said that words are cheap, knew very well what he was talking about.
Hmmmm: US denies anger at Barak over peace process problems
By HERB KEINON
01/02/2011 23:02
Sources close to PM and Defense Minister accuse political rivals of trying to undercut Barak.
Forget Peace (a meaningless concept) and go all out after Land. Arabs out and I don’t care whether you tranfer them or expel them but the must go, all of them. Any who resist should be killed.
I don’t think the nations of the world will like us if we did those things.
So what?
Sanctions? We’ll herd sheep for a few years till it all blows over and it will.
Military threats? We intelligently flaunt our nukes.
Si vis pacem, para bellum. If you seek peace, prepare for war.
That’s still true…
SG,
I plainly disagree with your assessment of the present Netanyahu government compared with Rabin’s 1992 governing coalition. Hyperbole is never a good substitute for careful and focused thinking.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
I got my multiplication tables wrong in the above comment. At about $25,000 per Arab family, only $2.5 billion would be enough to pry loose 100,000 such Arab families from Aretz-Yisrael. (Certainly not $2.5 million.) That’s still somewhat less than Israel has been getting from the USA each year for a number of years, and would be a far better public investment than any other I could think of.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
You don’t get it. The coalition is about as “right-wing” as Rabin’s 1992 government – even less so.
Yamit,
I’m still enough of a disciple of Rav Meir Kahane to agree that the optimal way of solving the Arab problem not only in Shomron and Yehuda but also in Galilee is simply to expel them. Not “transfer”, not “relocate”, just expel, partly because I don’t like euphemisms.
But I’m also enough of a disciple of Dr Israel Eldad to know that the first thing needed is to thoroughly control all parts of Aretz-Yisrael, and that can be guaranteed only by the presence of a large and growing Jewish population in these territories.
The general idea behind all this was once neatly explained for Prime MInister Levi Eshkol, who said the policy for Shomron and Yehuda should be to keep the dowry but get rid of the bride.
Because I am a nationalist and not a democrat, I would never extend citizenship privileges to any Arabs except for the relatively small number of them who have willingly served Israel’s military forces or border guard units. This would certainly include the Druzim and Bedawi. And without political rights extended to the rest, it will prove easier in the future to buy out large numbers of them so they can resettle themselves and their families elsewhere in the world. But my one point of fundamental disagreement with Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman is that I would never agree to trade away any part of Aretz-Yisrael simply because of the presence there of large numbers of Arabs. Land, and lots of it, is one of the few considerations that will keep Israel and the Jewish nation alive in the future.
In any case, some recent opinion poll of Arabs in the territories showed that some 60 per cent of them see no real future for another Palestine state, and that given the right circumstances and financial means to get out, that’s exactly what they would want to do. At about $25,000 per Arab family, only $2.5 million would be enough to pry loose 100,000 such families from their land, with sufficient grubstakes to transplant themselves elsewhere. Which, of course, is $25,000 more than any Jewish family ever got to walk or ride out of Russia, Poland, Hungary, Romania, the Baltic states, or just about anywhere else.
Getting back to Ehud Barak. None of us can know for certain why Netanyahu dragged him into an otherwise right-wing, nationalist, religious ruling coalition. But one positive thing that could be done is for all Netanyahu’s coalition partners, including and especially Feiglin’s Manhigut, Katzele’s National Union and the whole Shas bunch, to induce force a cabinet vote to take away dministration of Shomron and Yehuda from the Defense Ministry and turn it over to the Ministry of the Interior. That could be done without formally annexing the territories. And that would remove Barak and his leftist and frequently anti-settlement mentality from determining the future course of the development and national control of Aretz-Yisrael.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Obama and Clinton fail to grasp or are unwilling to acknowledge that neither Bibi, Barak or any Israeli official can bring about peace since the other side does not accept the existence of the Jewish state within any borders.
Almost burst into tears? Why do Israeli officials become so emasculated when confronted by this admin? Especially with Hillary.
Thank you, thank you, Sam I Am!
I side with Fistel’s take over the guy from Mt. Horeb 😉
The Arabs will bever give uop theiur collective desire to regain their lands or what at least they believe is their lands. If all they were concerned about was better life style and indoor flush toilets they could have had those long ago. over 60% of the Arab population is under the age of 20 and they are radicalized and not fearful of anyone. There is is only one way and that is get rid of them. How? First get rid of BB and anyone like him and replace someone more fearful of the Boss upstairs than the boss in Washington.
Barak’s role in the Netanyahu coalition:
1. Barak’s presence has always been a bit mysterious. He is a center-leftist, and is out of sync with Netanyahu’s fairly right-wing coalition.
2. Supposedly, Netanyahu wanted Barak to make his coalition look more centrist.
3. But the rumor that Barak joined the coalition to work with Obama and H. Clinton to destroy Netanyahu from within is believable.
4. If so, he could use his position to keep pulling Netanyahu leftward (that may have succeeded).
5. As Defense Minister, he could slow down building permits in the settlements to a trickle (that may have happened).
6. So it is indeed possible that Barak tried to sabotage Netanyahu.
7. It is also possible Netanyahu is a closet leftist, and allowed Barak to do his dirty work for him.
8. If Barak leaves the coalition, Netanyahu can bring in the far-right parties, and have a truly right-wing government, which all the goyim will despise even more than they do now (if that is possible).
9. I think Netanyahu loves power too much to call for new elections.
We see over and over again that, as small as Israel is, and as small as the Israeli government is, it remains totally opaque, unresponsive, and un-democratic. It was designed that way by the original “enlightened” Labor Zionists who were sure they knew better than the primitive superstitious Jewish people, who “stubbornly clung to their Judaism”, to paraphrase Obama.
(Why is it that comments on Israpundit almost instantly drift far off-topic, which all but invites commenters to hi-jack front-page posts and drive them off into multiple unrelated wildernesses? The topic at hand here plainly is the Obama administration’s now all but total mistrust of Defense Minister’s Ehud Barak’s ability either to charm prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu into caving into PLO demands from Ramallah in absence of direct negotiations of any type, or to put the skids under Israel’s current right-wing + religious governing coalition.)
——
For my part, I am pleased about the present stand-off. I agree totally with Ted Belman’s front-page theme, that there is no diplomatic solution to the protracted conflict between Israel and the local Arabs. Both Jews and Arabs want the same pieces of land. And in the long run, that land will belong solely to the side that can muster enough force, both societal and military, to hold onto the land, or to take it away from the other side and keep it. If Israel is strong enough to hold Yehuda, Shomron, Golan and East Jerusalem, there never will be yet another Palestianian state in addition to those in Transjordan and Gaza. But if Israel’s resolve is insufficient for this purpose, the stage will be set for the eventual destruction of the State of Israel by these same Arabs. This fundamental question, therefore, is as existential as that of Iran armed with nuclear weapons and means of detonating them in or over Israel’s cities.
The only way I can see to relieve so-called international pressure against Israel is to bolster the Jewish population of all those territories on a continuing basis. If a population growth rate of 5 per cent, as has recently been the case, can be maintained, the Jewish populations of the aforesaid districts of land will double in approximately 14.5 years. There are now approximately 550,000 Jews in East Jerusalem, Yehuda, Shomron and Gaza, according to what I think is reliable Israeli data. By 2025, there could easily be in place 1.1 million Jews on these lands, many of them spread more evenly across Yehuda, Shomron and Golan. And further out into the 21st century, there is no reason that Jewish population cannot or will not double again. Where will the water come from? Sea-water desalination plants powered by nuclear energy, and totally controlled by the State of Israel.
As the world watches this process, which is based on a combination of our Zionist national imperative and fully-predictable urbanization trends of Israel as a unitary geographic entity, any expectations of reversing the long-term results of the Six Day war fought almost 44 years ago will simply evaporate. Even now, who seriously expects Israel to dismantle its presence of some 200,000 Jews in the eastern half of its own capital city and its suburbs, or for the growing Golan population to be evacuated, or any other Jewish city to disappear at the snap of somebody’s fingers? In any case, as the finality of world peak oil sets in during this decade, and as developed societies inevitably scramble to convert their energy needs to dependence on anything other than petroleum, the basic relationship of the Arabs to the rest of the world will normalize to what it was before the British and Americans exploited their newly discovered oilfields throughout the last century. In other words, they will cease to be as important as during the OPEC era. In addition, Israel itself now finds itself with large undersea sinks of natural gas offshore in the Mediterranean Sea. It truly has been a long time since Israel’s exports largely comprised oranges and cut diamonds.
Within a few years of this, the local Arabs themselves will clearly see that that the PLO cannot and never will be able to deliver on its clearly-understood promise over victory over what they consider the “Zionist occupation”. As that perception sinks in, it will become possible for Israel to negotiate local autonomy terms separately with each of the Arab-inhabited cites of Shomron and Yehuda: Hevron, Beit-Lehem, Aricho, Shchem, Jenin and Tulkarem — totally by-passing the PLO; which could imply even a local government in Ramallah that Israel could separately deal with.
Even now, Arab local officials all but ignore the fact of Arabs earning high wages which they earn as employees of Jewish contractors who construct residential additions in all the new Jewish cities and villages. And all this despite the official line that death sentences be meted out to local Arabs who help our people — their Jewish Zionist enemy. The same will apply when more such Arabs will seek and obtain employment in Jewish owned industrial parks that are sure to develop around Shomron and Yehuda. Don’t even try to tell me the money these people make is not welcome in the shuks where they all shop in the Arab cities.
In the long run, of course, those cities will be ringed by belts of Jewish communities.
As a trained city and regional planner, I think in relatively long-range terms. And what I have described above is what I see not only as possible, but as likely trends for much of the rest of this century.
So forget about peace, and turn Israel’s full attentions to “build, baby; build”.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
I agree with #1 Yossi
Countless Jewish graves have been dug as a result of the Clintonian prostitution to foreign gods and foreign idols, and so they share in common with communists, socialists and God hating countries that common Satanic bond of HATING Israel and doing everything they can to destroy the State of Israel.
the State of Israel should not ever trust the current US admnistration, as the presidency is occupied by an enemy of the United States of America and has collaborated with enemies of the US to destroy the US and Israel and the world.
Israel will need the new appointment of new leaders who can stand up to the world community and just tell them all to go to hell.
This is just another internal Israeli political move towards forcing Barak to resign from the coalition.
None of the sources are named, the specific paper in question has been hounding Barak to resign ever since he decided to join the coalition.
The unnamed U.S. official who has lost hope with this coalition is somehow magically implying exactly what Ha’aretz have spouting for the last two years, that a different Israeli coalition should be elected instead.
On the other hand if the American Government did actually decide to bet on a has been politician who managed to garner a smidgen of seats in the Knesset, and drop his political party from 2nd largest to 5th they really do deserve what they get…