Monday, December 04, 2017
Elder of Ziyon
The New York Times has a bombshell report:
In a mysterious trip last month, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, traveled to Saudi Arabia’s capital for consultations with the hard-charging crown prince about President Trump’s plans for Middle East peace. What was said when the doors were closed, however, has since roiled the region.
According to Palestinian, Arab and European officials who have heard Mr. Abbas’s version of the conversation, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman presented a plan that would be more tilted toward the Israelis than any ever embraced by the American government, one that presumably no Palestinian leader could ever accept.
The Palestinians would get a state of their own but only noncontiguous parts of the West Bank and only limited sovereignty over their own territory. The vast majority of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which most of the world considers illegal, would remain. The Palestinians would not be given East Jerusalem as their capital and there would be no right of return for Palestinian refugees and their descendants.
... the prince had offered to sweeten the agreement with vastly increased financial support to the Palestinians.The reaction to this plan by everyone is to reject it out of hand. The highlighted portion of the NYT article shows that even the reporters cannot help but to say that the plan is unworkable - consciously taking as a given that the Palestinian demands for Jerusalem as their capital and ceding large areas where Jews already live as well as giving up on the nonexistent "right of return" are non-negotiable.
And it isn't only Hamas being quoted as being dead-set against such a plan.
[W]ord of the plan has worried even some of the United States’ closest allies, who are eager for clarification from the White House.Jerusalem and "right of return" to Israel - both of which have nothing to do with the possibility of an independent Palestinian state - are considered by Westerners to be reasonable demands by Palestinians, so much so that floating an idea of a Palestinian state without those two orthogonal demands is considered absurd by Western leaders.
An adviser to President Emmanuel Macron of France, speaking on condition of anonymity, said French officials had heard a version of some of the Saudi proposals, which sounded very similar to Israel’s opening bid and not acceptable to Palestinians.
He said that France had told the Americans that if they wanted to start discussions, they should proceed, but should remember that France and many other countries also have interests and concerns in the region.
What's wrong with this picture? Palestinians have never had their own nation, and they are yet again being offered one for free - but their other demands that have nothing to do with nationhood are considered by people who supposedly thirst for a real peace to be reasonable, and Israeli concerns that both of those demands are unacceptable are dismissed.
The world has accepted Palestinian propaganda as fact.
Details of Salman's plan aside, it shows that the goal of Palestinians is, as always, not to have a state. their desire for an independent state is the biggest myth of them all. They could have one. They could have had one a half dozen times over the years.
Their goal is the "right of return" to destroy the Jewish State demographically and control of Jewish holy places in Jerusalem to destroy the Jewish State spiritually. The demand for a state is secondary, not primary.
The problem is that decades of Palestinian "red lines" over those two issues that have nothing to do with statehood are considered to be part and parcel of the Palestinian state that Westerners pretend is needed to push for a wider regional peace.
Palestinian propaganda since 1967 has made the entire world believe the myth that these two issues are critical to a two-state solution, not proof that Palestinians aren't really interested in a two-state solution. Prince Salman is showing that the emperor has no clothes - and the entire world is saying that he is insane and Abbas is clothed in the finest of silks and gold-threaded fashion.
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