Thursday, December 29, 2016
Elder of Ziyon
The original headline of this New York Times article about Kerry's speech read:
Expiration Date for Israeli-Palestinian 2-State Solution May Be Jan. 20
Soon after, they changed the headline to:
Two-State Plan Nears the End Of Its Shelf Life
This was the headline in today's front page, but online it changed again to "In John Kerry’s Mideast Speech, a Clash of Policies and Personalities."
At least one thing is accurate about the NYT coverage: the speech was directed at Israel, and gave Palestinians a pass, outside of the obligatory "we tell Palestinians that they really should stop incitement and terror. Pretty please" disclaimer to make the position of the outgoing US administration appear even-handed.
As I documented in my previous post, it is Israel and only Israel that has made any concessions for peace since the Oslo process began. The Palestinian leadership has not only consistently bragged about its intransigence, it has hardened it, to the point that it even threatens its own citizens who visit Jewish-owned stores and it refuses to even speak to Israeli negotiators. EU-funded programs to promote peace between Israelis and Palestinians have essentially all failed because of official PA policy against "normalization"; their funds have been redirected into internal Israeli peace programs between Jews and Israeli Arabs.
Now in a last gasp effort, Obama and Kerry are perversely claiming that it is Israel that is imperiling the two state solution, not the Palestinians. The New York Times and the rest of the mainstream media barely report about the things I just mentioned, solidifying the myth of Israeli culpability and Netanyahu's secret desire for annexing the territories.
What the White House and the media don't understand is that they are the ones who have emboldened Palestinian intransigence and the failure of negotiations, not Israel.
By consistently giving Palestinian leadership a pass - by ignoring the stream of antisemitism and support of terror that the current generation of Palestinian young adults have been barraged with since they were born in the 23 years after Oslo, ignoring that Mahmoud Abbas' party praises terrorists literally every day on Facebook, by placing the blame for the failure of successively generous (and successively foolhardy) Israeli peace plans onto Israel, the media and the world governments have given Palestinians a pass for their outrageous behavior.
And the Palestinian leadership is more than happy to pocket their political gains that resulted from their refusal to compromise.
Very few Israelis want to rule over Palestinians. But they don't want to imperil their security for a piece of paper, either.
At this point, no one knows that a Trump administration will do. But it is very possible, if they play their cards right, that they could do more for peace than Obama and Kerry could do in a lifetime.
It is this coddling of Palestinians by the international community and the media that have caused Abbas and Erekat to harden their positions while even the Likud party has softened its own. When faced with a United States that tells them that this gravy train is over and that if they want a state they need to act like it, it might prod them into action.
Or it will reveal that their true desire isn't really to have a state of their own but to destroy the Jewish state. President Trump will not be afraid to say that once he is convinced of it, and all Palestinian actions to this point have pointed in that direction.
A Trump administration that ends this coddling of a group of terror supporters rebranded as peacemakers will certainly do more for real peace than anything - and I mean anything - that Obama or Kerry has done.
