Showing posts with label Ariel Sharon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ariel Sharon. Show all posts

Sunday, September 03, 2023

Diplomacy and peacemaking is not a smooth process. It requires a huge amount of preparation, planning and flexibility. 

It is always illuminating to look behind the scenes of the Oslo process. Gidi Grinstein, the youngest person at Camp David in 2000, is releasing his account of the events that he witnessed as well as his opinions of what to do moving forward to mark the 30th anniversary of Oslo.

His book, "(In)sights: Thirty Years of Peacemaking in the Oslo Process"  is his attempt to set the record straight after so many others gave their own versions of what happened at Camp David. 

Grinstein writes from the perspective of someone who truly wants to see peace. No one can doubt his love of Israel and Zionism - he was part of the team that founded Birthright Israel - but his perspective is decidedly on the Israeli Left.

I found his account fascinating, but perhaps not for the reasons he intended.

Obviously Grinstein tries to spin the events towards his own politics. Instead of giving a straight chronological account of what happened, he spends a great deal of time on the "sausage" behind each negotiating point and then an overview of what has happened since then, along with his own opinions as to where things failed and what Israel should have done instead, in retrospect.

While Grinstein was the junior member at Camp David, he is perhaps the one person with the most knowledge of the big picture. He served as the Secretary and Coordinator of the Israeli Delegation for the Negotiations with the PLO from 1999-2001 under Ehud Barak.

Grinstein admires Barak a great deal, but his description of Barak is of someone who is cold and calculating, who is more than willing to throw his own people under the bus for his own ends. He keeps his own cards close to his vest, so no one working for him has a clear idea of what their goals are. Grinstein extols Barak as "the smartest man in the room" who keeps his people working in a "matrix" of smaller tasks, while only Barak knows his real plan. This means that Barak creates his own backchannels to undermine the people officially working for him when he deems it necessary, he bypasses the chain of command, and he ensures plausible deniability.

Which, when you think about it, is a lot like Yasir Arafat. 

Before he worked for the Prime Minister's office, Grinstein worked for the Economic Cooperation Foundation. The ECF, founded in 1990, was itself one of those backchannels for creating relationships with, and building a peace plan with, the PLO. It was a power that helped bring about the Oslo Accords. 

To me, one of the most jarring parts of the book was where Grinstein describes how the ECF helped end Bibi Netanyahu's first term as prime minister. The ECF, which worked hand in glove with Yitzchak Rabin, opposed Netanyahu - and this Israeli think-tank colluded with the PLO to bring him down. Netanyahu demanded more concessions from the PLO in order to keep the Oslo process going, and the ECF convinced their friends in the PLO to pretend to agree to Netanyahu's demands, prompting him to sign the Hebron Agreement and the Wye River Memorandum based on lies. This caused the right wing of his coalition to revolt and new elections were called that brought Barak into office, just as the ECF intended.

Grinstein seemingly has no compunction about Israelis collaborating with the US and PLO to bring down an Israeli prime minister. The cause of peace justifies all.

Even Grinstein admits that the peace negotiators never really seriously thought about the possibility that Arafat had no intention to really sign a permanent agreement that would end the conflict and what would follow. They became friends with the PLO negotiators, and he lovingly describes how well his team would be treated when they visited Bethlehem or Ramallah and the personal friendships they struck up with the Palestinian team. He mentions and is fully aware of the wave of terror attacks during the 1990s, Arafat's incendiary speeches in Arabic, his actions being fully consistent with his "phased plan" to destroy Israel, but all of that is brushed aside in the pursuit of peace, just as using underhanded methods to bring down an Israeli prime minister is framed as a positive thing.

The only person who predicted the failure of the Oslo process, and that it would lead into war, was US Ambassador to Egypt Daniel Kurtzer, who hosted the negotiators for a Shabbat dinner. He had better insight than the entire Israeli peace delegation, who didn't even consider this.

Barak bet everything on the idea that Arafat could be pressured into signing an agreement. He was wrong. But there is very little hand-wringing on that mistake that brought about the second intifada. In fact, Grinstein emphasizes that Arafat was not the direct instigator of the intifada - even as he admits that Arafat had planned for such an event months ahead of time, and that his own security forces, trained and armed by the US, turned their weapons against Israeli forces in the first days of the fighting. He emphasizes that Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount that supposedly triggered the war was fully coordinated with the PA but still doesn't blame the PA for its role - instead noting that the Jerusalem police response to the violence helped escalate it. 

Again, Grinstein isn't blind. But he seems to purposely keep one eye closed. 

Similarly, he emphasizes that, in retrospect, Barak should not have pushed for an all or nothing deal, and worked towards a provisional Palestinian state that could be further refined with later negotiations. This, of course, would have been a huge concession by Israel to recognize a Palestinian state up front. But while he praises the Quartet for employing that idea in their Road Map for Peace, he glosses over that the Palestinian leaders rejected the Road Map out of hand, and have consistently said that they do not want a provisional state. 

Also jarring is that, as far as I can tell, the Israeli peace negotiating teams -- both Track I and Track II - apparently were exclusively made up of non-religious males, overwhelmingly if not exclusively Ashkenazic. He notes that the only Israeli woman at Camp David was a secretary. He never mentions that any of the participants in the many meals hosted in the West Bank or Europe had to make accommodations for kosher food. Most of Israeli society is not represented by these peacemakers, who all seem to believe that they are smarter than anyone else in how to look at the big picture, and not really self-critical when it comes to their miscalculations and false assumptions that led to the failure of the peace process. Diversity was not a priority for these liberals. 

There is a lot of good information in this book, and it is illuminating - sometimes in ways that it is not meant to be. It is not edited well, unfortunately - for example,  it talks extensively about the ECF without explaining what it is, and there are still numerous typos and misspellings (French Premier "Shirak"), it repeats the same anecdotes a couple of times. Hopefully these will be fixed by the time it goes to press. 

The book is planned to be released in Israel in two weeks and in the US in December.




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Wednesday, February 22, 2023

Itamar Ben Gvir caused a furor when he visited the Temple Mount back in January. But not really. All the umbrage regarding his “provocation”—walking while Jewish—was manufactured  by bored reporters who have nothing else to write about; by left-wing reporters who lust to smear Israel in print; by Hamas, the PA, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Jordan, and yes, the United States of America. The latter, of course, demanded that Israel maintain the “status quo” at holy sites, which means that the Jordanian Waqf remains in charge; Arabs get the full run of the Temple Mount; but Jews are rushed through the compound under guard and may not linger or pray. The thrust of all this is that Jews are somehow intruders in their own land, in their holiest city, on their holiest spot, and that they are stealing them from the Arabs.

It’s not a new accusation. As Alex Sternberg noted in a recent piece, ‘Al-Aqsa is in danger’ The history of a 100-year-old lie, the libel that Jews are taking over the Al-Aqsa Mosque is old. The falsehood, motivated by politics, originates with Haj Amin El-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem:

An early enemy of Zionism, Husseini regularly engaged in incitement against the Jews of then-Palestine. In 1920, this resulted in five deaths and 211 injured. In 1929, Husseini used the occasion of Tisha B’Av to tell an Arab crowd that the Jews were coming to destroy Al-Aqsa and rebuild the Temple in its place. “Al-Aqsa is in danger!” he shouted, pointing to throngs of Jews squeezing into the narrow alleyway at the Western Wall to commemorate the Temple’s destruction.

Angry mobs surged through the Jewish communities of then-Palestine, attacking peaceful Jews and raping, killing and looting. Hundreds were killed in Hebron, Safed and Jerusalem.

Husseini was jailed by the British, released shortly after and then appointed Mufti of Jerusalem. This new title gave him a coveted position within the Arab community.

Dr. Sternberg goes on to discuss Ariel Sharon’s infamous visit to the Mount which has long been said to be the catalyst for the Second Intifada, also known as the “Al-Aqsa Intifada”:

Following [Sharon’s] visit, the Palestinians launched a terrorist war that resulted in thousands of Israeli and Palestinian deaths.

Despite the claim that Sharon started the intifada, the truth was revealed years later and confirmed by Arafat’s wife and Nabil Shaath, a Fatah Central Committee member.

Sternberg’s otherwise excellent account of the events here falters. The truth was not revealed later, but immediately after the peace talks. Or at least to the Israeli army, who sent IDF representatives to brief the members of the small Judean hilltop settlement where I resided at the time, Metzad.

Sternberg description of events taking place at that time offers us the background for that briefing:

In July of 2000, Arafat returned from peace talks at Camp David with then-President Bill Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Barak had offered Arafat 97% of Judea and Samaria, which Arafat refused.

One of the sticking points was sharing the Temple Mount with the Jews. While Clinton considered this reasonable, it was a condition Arafat was unwilling to accept. Clinton was furious and blamed Arafat for the breakdown of the talks. Needing a diversion to deflect Clinton’s anger, Arafat ordered his underlings to plan the new intifada. Sharon’s trip to the Temple Mount took place two months later, providing a convenient excuse to launch the wave of terror.

Here too, Sternberg’s account appears to miss a crucial point: that Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount was an annual visit. This fact was well known to all, up to and including “Arafat and his underlings.” Sharon went up to the Temple Mount every year before the High Holidays—and that yearly visit was factored into the planning of the intifada from its very inception.

I know this because the same July that Arafat returned from Camp David in a tizzy, I sat among the other 30-some residents of Metzad, waiting to hear why we had been assembled. We soon learned that the army had come to warn us of a large and serious wave of Arab terror planned for September, around the time of the High Holidays (and my due date). The IDF not only had intelligence that the intifada would occur, but they had that intelligence already in July, when the intifada would have been in the earliest stages of its planning.

Already then, the Israeli army knew the Arabs would justify their unbridled slaughter of the Jews by blaming it on Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount. This was alluded to by the IDF at that meeting of July 2000 on Metzad. You might have called it a guess—the prediction that terrorists would use the annual Sharon Temple Mount visit as a pretext for violence. It wouldn’t have been a difficult guess, considering it was Sharon’s custom to visit the Temple Mount every year before the holidays. But the army didn’t need to guess, because they had cold, hard intelligence. Right from the very beginning, as things were going down.

For argument’s sake however, let’s stipulate that my memory is faulty. Let’s say the army did not know and did not actually tell us that Ariel Sharon’s impending, regularly scheduled visit to the Mount would be used to justify the slaughter. It would still have come as no surprise: El-Husseini did it 100 years ago when he incited the mobs to slaughter Jews by telling them that the “Yahud” were taking over Al-Quds. That same 100-year-old excuse was still going strong in 2000 when Sharon dared walk on the Temple Mount and it is still strong now in 2023, when Ben Gvir does the same.

Terrorists like to accuse Jews of taking over the Mount and the mosque. As much as many Jews wish that were true, the reality is that the Temple Mount is administrated by the Jordanian Waqf; and Jews aren’t even allowed to pray on the Mount, let alone enter or even go near the mosque.

Ariel Sharon, for example, did not enter the mosque or even approach it. Yet this is how his visit—the planned excuse for the intifada—was reported by the Guardian (emphasis added wherever the Guardian fudged the truth, outright lied, engaged in hyperbole, or omitted salient facts—the “people” are JEWS, the “riots” are TERROR, the “West Bank” is Judea and Samaria, the “Haram” is the Jewish Temple Mount, and so on and so forth):

Dozens of people were injured in rioting on the West Bank and in Jerusalem yesterday as the hawkish Likud party leader, Ariel Sharon, staged a provocative visit to a Muslim shrine at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Surrounded by hundreds of Israeli riot police, Mr Sharon and a handful of Likud politicians marched up to the Haram al-Sharif, the site of the gold Dome of the Rock that is the third holiest shrine in Islam.

He came down 45 minutes later, leaving a trail of fury. Young Palestinians heaved chairs, stones, rubbish bins, and whatever missiles came to hand at the Israeli forces. Riot police retaliated with tear gas and rubber bullets, shooting one protester in the face.

The symbolism of the visit to the Haram by Mr Sharon - reviled for his role in the 1982 massacre of Palestinians in a refugee camp in Lebanon - and its timing was unmistakable. "This is a dangerous process conducted by Sharon against Islamic sacred places," Yasser Arafat told Palestinian television.

All of this was and remains a lie. There was no provocation resulting in a “riot.” The intifada and its pretend catalyst had all been meticulously planned two months earlier. You might even say 100 years earlier, when El-Husseini launched the time-honored tradition of Arab terrorists blaming their Jewish victims for getting dead, a popular sport for more than 100 years.

Ben Gvir should have sold tickets.



Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 



Friday, November 04, 2022

The headlines in Haaretz alone makes one wonder when they will be predicting a plague of locusts in the wake of the Likud bloc victory.

All of these are from today.






Yes, Bibi has destroyed Judaism!

The thing is, we've seen this before. We saw similar warnings from the media, pundits, "experts" and American Jewish leaders every single time a right wing government won an election in Israel. 




Yet is was the Israeli Right that made peace with Egypt, the helped drive the Abraham Accords, that has given record amounts of monetary support for Arab Israelis.

I cannot predict what this government will do. However, the fears are quite clearly overblown, and too many people are buying into the insane and inane predictions.

Here's what I do know:

* Israel is a strong democracy with checks and balances in its government. It cannot turn fascist because of a minister or two.
* Netanyahu is a brilliant politician and the leader of the largest elected party. He will make deals to keep his larger agenda moving, but if there is something he opposes, it will not happen.
* Netanyahu already has a long record of leadership. We know his opinions and positions. The concern that he will suddenly change his political opinions - which have been quite moderate, despite the media coverage - is ridiculous.
* Newspapers and pundits gain readers by making up predictions that are extreme, and they rarely get punished for being wrong - so there is little incentive for sober analysis in the the more prominent outlets.

My opinion of Netanyahu has gone down since the previous election, but he has made his positions and vision clear. He is not going to be manipulated by any other MK or minister - he's the one who manipulates them. Things will largely be the way they were during his previous terms, which were largely pragmatic.

The sky isn't falling, and those making the overblown predictions are as unreliable as the ones that predicted Begin and Sharon were going to start wars. 




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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

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