Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: intransigence

Showing posts with label intransigence. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 10, 2023

Everyone knows Abbas is a dictator - except the clueless West

Mahmoud Abbas was elected on January 9, 2005 to a four year term term as president of the Palestinian Authority, scheduled to end January 15, 2009.

He is about to start the 19th year of his "four year term."

During his time in office, he has not only stopped any possibility of further elections. He also has taken over the legislative and judicial branches of government, changed laws to ensure that his people remain in all leadership roles, and consolidated his hold on Fatah, expelling any potential threats to his power either within his party or within his government. And he remains the head of the PLO, which is the real political leadership of the Palestinians, an organization that the Palestinian Authority reports to.

He has used the people of Gaza as hostages in his attempts to defeat Hamas there, regularly blocking delivery of medicines and fuel. He has mercilessly jailed and murdered protesters. He has passed laws that make any criticism of him or his cronies into crimes. He has played potential successors against each other.

He's a dictator in every sense of the word, every bit as ruthless as Bashar Assad or Vladimir Putin.

Yet how many Western articles about him mention the word "dictator?" They dance around it, they will sometimes quote a critic or two, but you won't hear the "D" word in mainstream Western media or analysis.

Arab analysts, on the other hand, have no such qualms.

The latest comes from an interview of several analysts in (Hamas') Felesteen news site.

Omar Assaf, a member of the National Democratic Assembly, confirms that Abbas fears losing power, so he prevents anyone from the Fatah movement or other factions from gaining any.

"Abbas monopolizes the three centers of power; executive, legislative and judicial, and enshrines the one-man rule that was tried in many countries of the world, and its results were disastrous, and the continuation of this situation means further deterioration at all levels," he said.

The writer and political analyst, Rashid Al-Bably, says that after 18 years of monopolizing the position of the head of power in an unconstitutional manner, and in light of the clear absence of the Legislative Council, Abbas has become the only figure in control of the three authorities, and even increased his power with his leadership of the PLO, the Fatah movement, and other positions. Ultimately,he is a dictatorial figure controlling all aspects of all official decisions.

Activist and political researcher Suhaib Zahda says Abbas constitutes a model of dictatorship and authoritarian rule by refusing to hold general elections and allow the renewal of the leadership.

"Abbas is using the security services and the outside to continue clinging to the rule and power, refusing to hold any elections, and continuing his work as president illegally."

The article notes a number of times that Abbas postponed the planned elections last year after it became apparent that he would lose. Abbas' excuse that he postponed the elections because it wasn't clear that Jerusalem Arabs could participate is not even considered to be an issue in any Arab media - everyone knows that the issue could have been resolved if there was any political will.

So why are the Western media and politicians so reluctant to criticize a dictator? There are two, related reasons.

One is that the alternative is probably worse. If elections were held, Hamas would likely win, and no one wants that - Hamas is a designated terror group in the West.

The other, more compelling reason is that there is a deep narrative of Israeli intransigence embedded in Western discourse. As long as the West can pretend that Abbas is a moderate - the word attached to him in the media far more often than dictator - they can continue to blame Israel for any tensions or lack of peace. If they would admit that Abbas is not a peace partner, Israel's position since the collapse of talks in 2001 is proven to have been correct all along. Moreover, if Hamas wins an election that is forced by the West, no one can blame Israel for there not being a horizon for peace.

The willful blindness of the West about Mahmoud Abbas is meant, above all, to keep alive the fiction that Israel is the obstacle to peace.

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

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Read all about it here!

What you can learn from Fatah's anniversary slogan

Fatah's pro-violence logo

On January 1, Fatah will celebrate its 58th anniversary.

Well, not really. It is the 58th anniversary "of the launch of the contemporary Palestinian revolution," meaning the anniversary of their first terror attack, That attack was meant to disrupt Israeli's access to water. It was a direct attack on civilian infrastructure, and those terror roots are an inherent part of Fatah, today.

It came up with a typically unwieldy slogan for the occasion: "Just as we dropped the deal of the century and the annexation project...we will defeat the neo-fascists."

Fatah is taking credit for Donald Trump's "Deal of the Century" not being successful.

How did they accomplish this Herculean task?

By saying "no."

The same way they "defeated" every other chance for peace and an end to conflict with Israel.

Their desire to keep the conflict going is something they are very proud of!

What happened after their latest rejection of any peace plan without a counter-offer? Bahrain and the UAE said, we've had enough of the Palestinians acting like spoiled babies, so we will normalize our own relations with Israel, ignoring their long standing demand that they hold veto power over our foreign policy.

But we want something in return - so they demanded that Israel rescind a partial annexation plan. The far-right extremist Netanyahu, wanting peace, agreed.

So I guess, in a convoluted way, the Palestinians were responsible for the shelving of that plan! I somehow doubt this is what they intended, though.

And how will they defeat the "neo fascists" of Israel's new government? Well, in a few years there will be new elections again, with different ministers, so then the Palestinians will claim that they "defeated" them.

The Palestinian leadership is incompetent and impotent, supporting terror to the last penny and unable to do anything remotely constructive. But they want to pretend that they are in the center of everything.

For a long time, much of the West believed it. Now, even the most hardened Israel hater realizes that the Palestinian leaders have become irrelevant, which is the worst thing that can happen to you in an honor/shame society.

Fatah still holds on to that pretense.

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!

Thomas Friedman almost gets it right about the Abraham Accords

You know things are weird when Thomas Friedman is practically the only voice of relative sanity at the New York Times.

The left-leaning media has been trying very hard to ignore the Abraham Accords as a meaningless event from the Trump era. This is to placate the Israel hating contingent who have been positioning it as yet another manifestation of Zionist evil.

Thomas Friedman, for all his faults, sees how big a deal the new peace deals are.

[S]omething big seems to be stirring. Unlike the peace breakthroughs between Israel and Egypt, Israel and Lebanon’s Christians and Israel and Jordan, which were driven from the top and largely confined there, the openings between Israel and the Gulf States — while initiated from the top to build an alliance against Iran — are now being driven even more from the bottom, by tourists, students and businesses....

If the Abraham Accords do thrive and broaden to include normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia, we are talking about one of the most significant realignments in modern Middle East history, which for many decades was largely shaped by Great Power interventions and Arab-Israeli dynamics. Not anymore.

Today, “there are three powerful non-Arab actors in the region — Iran, Turkey and Israel — and they have each constructed their own regional axis,” argues Itamar Rabinovich, the Israeli Middle East historian, who just co-wrote “Syrian Requiem,” a smart history of the Syrian civil war. Those three axes, Rabinovich explains, are Turkey with Qatar and their proxy Hamas; Iran with Syria and Iran’s proxies running Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen; and Israel with the U.A.E., Bahrain and tacitly Saudi Arabia and Oman.

It’s the interactions of these three axes, says Rabinovich, that are really driving Middle East politics today. And because the U.A.E.-Israel axis brings together the most successful Arab state with the most successful non-Arab state, it’s radiating a lot of energy.

With Israel and the U.A.E., “what you are seeing are two ecosystems fusing together,” says Gidi Grinstein, head of Reut, the Israeli strategy institute. Israel is a society that for many years faced hostility from its neighbors and had no oil. “So, over the years, Israel learned to go from isolation and scarcity to abundance and global influence by developing its own explosive innovation economy in areas such as water, solar, cyber, military, medical, finance and agriculture.”

The U.A.E., by contrast, is transitioning from decades of oil abundance to an era of oil scarcity by building its own ecosystem of innovation and entrepreneurship in the same fields as Israel.

The U.A.E.’s population consists of one million citizens and nine million foreigners, most of them low-wage, non-unionized laborers from India and other parts of South Asia and the rest professionals largely from America, Europe, India and the Arab world. The U.A.E.’s growth strategy for the 21st century — of which the opening to Israel is a key part — is to become THE Arab model for modernity, a diversified economy, globalization and intra-religious tolerance.

To that end, in November the country announced a major liberalization of its Islamic personal laws — allowing unmarried couples to cohabitate, which, among other things, makes the U.A.E. more accepting of gay and lesbian people; criminalizing so-called honor killings of women who “shame” their male relatives — as well as made divorce laws much more equitable for women and loosened restrictions on alcohol.

The U.A.E. is still an absolute monarchy, and a multiparty democracy is not on the menu. But greater gender equality, a more open education system and religious pluralism are. It still has work to do in all those areas, though — witness the embarrassing saga around the leader of Dubai, whose daughter is reportedly being held hostage in her father’s palace. But the U.A.E.’s new social laws constitute a big leap forward in its quest to attract the talent needed for a non-oil economy.

All the neighbors are watching, and they are particularly watching how Iran and Saudi Arabia react.

If you are a Lebanese Shiite living in the poor southern suburbs of Beirut having to scramble every day to barter eggs for meat — as the economy teeters on collapse — you’re asking, Why are we stuck with Iran and its axis of failing proxies like Hezbollah, which just keep letting the past bury our future?

That is a dangerous question for Iran and Hezbollah. And more Lebanese are asking every day.

The importance of the accords has been obvious to anyone who isn't saddled with a reflexive anti-Israel ideology. Which is exactly why articles like this have been few and far between in mainstream media.

Friedman, being Friedman, still has his own baggage, still trying to resurrect vestiges of the Saudi peace plan that he relentlessly pushed in 2002.

The U.A.E., Bahrain, Morocco and Saudi Arabia need to understand that they have more leverage now to influence Israeli-Palestinian relations than they realize. Israel does not want to lose them. Imagine if Saudi Arabia agreed to join the Abraham Accords, but only on the condition that it could open the Saudi Embassy to Israel in Israeli West Jerusalem while, at the same time, opening an embassy to the Palestinians in an Arab neighborhood of East Jerusalem.

Just that one move would help preserve the possibility of a two-state deal, would revitalize the 2002 Saudi peace initiative and would further isolate Iran’s axis of failure. And Israel would find it very hard to reject.

Friedman still doesn't get that the Palestinians themselves have made the Palestinians irrelevant, and the Arab states no longer want to coddle them when they can't get their own act together, split between the old guard that wants to destroy Israel politically and the terrorists who still dream of destroying Israel militarily. The Gulf states realized that Israel is not only a permanent part of the Middle East but it is an ally that they can have a mutually beneficial relationship with, and they are disgusted that Palestinians who could have taken advantage of that dynamic instead rejected it time after time - while demanding more money.

Nevertheless, Friedman does a good job here in laying out how earth shattering the new alliances are, and the Israel haters really cannot argue.

It's the peace, stupid

One of the biggest complaints by the anti-Israel crowd against the Trump plan is the supposed "bantustans" of Palestinian territory only connected by roads, bridges or tunnels. This is said to be intolerable for a sovereign nation

Yet if you look at Wikipedia, you can see that there are literally hundreds of examples where the territory or territories of one state is fully or functionally within the territory of another, known as enclaves, exclaves, or variants of those. The largest example in the world (which is really a semi-enclave) is Alaska, only accessible to the rest of the US via land through Canada.

We mentioned one example in passing, that of the border between the Netherlands and Belgium at Baarle-Hertog:

This is the possibly the most complicated one but there are a huge number of others. Up until 2015, the border between India and Bangladesh had not only over a hundred enclaves but enclaves within enclaves (and one parcel of land that was a piece of India within Bangladesh, within India, within Bangladesh.)

There are even some small Canadian land parcels that are only accessible through the United States.

If there are hundreds of examples of such arrangements working perfectly well, then why is there such an uproar over a pathway to peace that would do the same for Palestine?

The answer is in the question. The Israel-haters have no desire for peace.

It is no coincidence that the Trump plan is named "peace to prosperity." Unlike every single previous plan, this is the first one that is focused on peace, not land.

If there is real peace, then no one would care about the enclaves of Palestinian lands in Israel and Israeli lands within Palestine (i.e., "settlements.")

The ideal, which the plan envisions, is that Israel and Palestine would be like Belgium and the Netherlands - two partners in peace. Any Arab can visit the Temple Mount, any Jew can visit the synagogues in Jericho and Joseph's Tomb in Nablus, without the need of heavily armed security protecting the visitors.

When there is real peace, the borders are not important.

This is the fundamental reason why Israel supports the plan and the Palestinians are so dead-set against it. Only Israel has ever desired real peace, just as Israel has thirsted for real peace with Jordan and Egypt and the rest of the Arab world.

The "pro-Palestinian" activists, although many belong to groups with "peace" in their names, do not want peace with Israel. They want Israel to be destroyed one way or another, and they - as well as Palestinian leaders - look at an independent Palestine as a weapon to end Israel, not as a goal in itself.

If Palestinians wanted a state, they would have had one in 2000, 2001 and 2008. If they wanted peace, they could have a state tomorrow.

It has been 26 years since Oslo, but in all that time no Palestinian school - not one - has taught students that they should thirst for peace with Israel. On the contrary, Israel is always the enemy and it must one day be reclaimed as "Palestine."

For some reason, the world thinks that the existence of two states would automatically bring peace. Everyone has it backwards. It is peace that would bring two states, because Israel would happily give the responsibility of governance to a Palestinian state that was friendly, where the borders are as open as those between EU states.

The Trump plan is a true peace plan - a vision of how peace and prosperity can bring about a political solution. The reason it is unrealistic is because Palestinians are taught hate from birth.

And that is the real obstacle to peace.

The world seems to have forgotten that peace is the goal.

(h/t Ian)

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Peter Beinart's nonsensical NYT op-ed

Peter Beinart in the New York Times has another incredibly misleading article about - well, you know what its about.

TO believe in a democratic Jewish state today is to be caught between the jaws of a pincer.

On the one hand, the Israeli government is erasing the “green line” that separates Israel proper from the West Bank. In 1980, roughly 12,000 Jews lived in the West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem). Today, government subsidies have helped swell that number to more than 300,000. Indeed, many Israeli maps and textbooks no longer show the green line at all.

In 2010, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel called the settlement of Ariel, which stretches deep into the West Bank, “the heart of our country.” Through its pro-settler policies, Israel is forging one political entity between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea — an entity of dubious democratic legitimacy, given that millions of West Bank Palestinians are barred from citizenship and the right to vote in the state that controls their lives.

For Beinart's thesis to be correct, you must believe that the Palestinian Authority and the PLO has no political legitimacy, or power.

Yet it is recognized as a full state by 129 nations; its citizens vote (at least in theory) to elect their leaders, it has autonomy, a territory that all accept as controlled by its own security forces, a court system, an Olympic team, and its own passports. According to at least one distinguished legal scholar, it is considered a full state under international law. The World Bank is putting out reports about how ready the territories are for statehood. The entire Oslo process - that Israel still supports - was designed to give full self-determination to Palestinian Arabs in the territories, and (more recently) statehood. For Beinart to turn around and state that all of these don't exist, and that for some reason the territories are (as he tries to coin the term) "nondemocratic Israel," is nonsense. Israel has no intention of integrating Ramallah or Jericho into Israel. And as recently as January, Israel tried to hold negotiations with the PLO, and the other side refused.

Beinart, in his attempt to sound an alarm for Israeli democracy, chooses quite deliberately to ignore everything that happened to the Palestinian Arabs since 1994.

It is Palestinian Arab intransigence, not Israeli settlements, that has stopped a Palestinian Arab state. Beinart's willingness to blame only one side shows that he is not being as evenhanded and "pro-Israel" as he tirelessly claims to be.

But, you might counter, what about Area C? Israel does indeed control all aspects of the lives of Arabs who live there, and while they vote in PA elections, they do not have much say in their own political affairs. Doesn't Israel's presence there endanger Israeli democracy?

The number of Palestinian Arabs in Area C is about 150,000 (about 2.5% of all Palestinian Arabs.) Which means that the percentage of people living under Israeli sovereignty who do not have political rights is, today, about 1.9%.

By way of contrast, the percentage of people living in US territories who are not represented in Congress and who cannot vote in presidential elections - those in Puerto Rico, Guam, the US Virgin Islands and elsewhere - is about 1.3%.

So is Israel's control of Area C a danger to Israeli democracy? Not unless you think that US territories endanger US democracy too. The idea is ridiculous. It is an issue, it is not a death-blow to democracy.

To go further, if Israel would decide to annex Area C, wouldn't that solve all the problems? No demographic issue, giving the Arabs there full citizenship - and Beinart's argument is down the drain.

Somehow, I don't think that Beinart would support that solution, or even a modified version of that solution. Because he has bought into the Palestinian Arab narrative that the artificially constructed 1949 armistice lines - which were not considered international borders before 1967 and were always meant to be modified in a final peace agreement between Israel and the Arab world - are somehow special, and that no peace can possibly result from a change in those lines that would include, say, Ariel. (He sort of says that he agrees that some of the border settlements would end up in Israel, and then tells those "settlers" to throw the more "ideological" settlers under the bus. Yay for Jewish unity!)

But there is no proof that this is true. Is is simply an assertion on the part of Palestinian Arabs, who repeat it over and over again so much that people like Peter Beinart believe it. And, whether they realize it or not, "pro-Israel Jews" like Beinart - by writing op-eds that accept this false premise - end up increasing Palestinian intransigence.

They are not helping peace at all.

What does Beinart think about the Clinton parameters, or the Olmert offer? They were clearly sufficient to demolish all of his arguments about a threat to Israeli democracy. Yet instead of slamming the PLO for its rejection of those peace plans, he continues insistence on the 1967 lines. Beinart buys into the Palestinian Arab narrative. Instead of telling them that they should compromise and bring a lasting peace, he is telling them implicitly that they should buckle down and wait for American Jews like himself to pressure Israel to accept all of their demands.

The eventual border between Israel and a Palestinian Arab state must be negotiated. Moving it a bit to the east does not endanger Israeli democracy nor does it endanger Palestinian statehood. It doesn't even endanger Palestinian Arab contiguity, as any glance at a map would prove. This is self-evident, but repeated Palestinian Arab assertions that it is not "acceptable" are swallowed whole by a lot of otherwise smart people who believe they are pro-Israel.

I'm sorry, but this is not a pro-Israel argument, and op-eds like this do not bring peace any closer. Quite the contrary.

(h/t Avi for some ideas)

Hamas responds to Obama: "We will never recognize Israel"

Hamas' Palestine Times newspaper quotes Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri, reacting to President Obama's speech.

He called it bereft of content and said that Obama's speech was a failure, and "the nation does not need to take lessons from Obama."

Zuhri added, "Reconciliation is an internal affair and we reject the American intervention, and Hamas will not recognize Israel."

If it was Islamic Jihad, this wouldn't be news. And for Hamas, this shouldn't be news, because they have been nothing but consistent in their adamant rejection of the concept of recognizing Israel. But since so many clueless journalists and others are insisting that Hamas actually does support a two-state solution, and since this is part of the government that Israel is being cajoled to turn into a state, I am afraid that I need to post every time I see Hamas repeat what it has been saying, practically daily, for years.

NYT's Tom Friedman endorses Abbas' intransigence

Yet more idiocy from Thomas Friedman in the guise of being a concerned observer:

Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu of Israel is always wondering why his nation is losing support and what the world expects of a tiny country surrounded by implacable foes. I can't speak for the world, but I can speak for myself. I have no idea whether Israel has a Palestinian or Syrian partner for a secure peace that Israel can live with. But I know this: With a more democratic and populist Arab world in Israel's future, and with Israel facing the prospect of having a minority of Jews permanently ruling over a majority of Arabs - between Israel and the West Bank, which could lead to Israel being equated with apartheid South Africa all over the world - Israel needs to use every ounce of its creativity to explore ways to securely cede the West Bank to a Palestinian state.

I repeat: It may not be possible. But Netanyahu has not spent his time in office using Israel's creativity to find ways to do such a deal. He has spent his time trying to avoid such a deal - and everyone knows it. No one is fooled.

Israel is in a dangerous situation. For the first time in its history, it has bad relations with all three regional superpowers - Turkey, Iran and Egypt - plus rapidly eroding support in Europe. America is Israel's only friend today. These strains are not all Israel's fault by any means, especially with Iran, but Israel will never improve ties with Egypt, Turkey and Europe without a more serious effort to safely get out of the West Bank.

The only way for Netanyahu to be taken seriously again is if he risks some political capital and actually surprises people. Bibi keeps hinting that he is ready for painful territorial compromises involving settlements. Fine, put a map on the table. Let's see what you're talking about. Or how about removing the illegal West Bank settlements built by renegade settler groups against the will of Israel's government. Either move would force Israel's adversaries to take Bibi seriously and would pressure Palestinians to be equally serious.

Once again, Friedman tries to sound even-handed - he understands Israel's precarious position, he doesn't know if Israel has a peace partner, he knows that the situation is complex and fluid.

Yet he does not ever mention that all of the intransigence is from the Palestinian Authority. He doesn't point out that even the dovish Israeli governments got nowhere with Abbas, even with specific maps and plans.

To Friedman, there is but one goal: Israel caves to Palestinian Arab territorial demands. And if the PA refuses to make a deal, then Israel must give more, and more, and more until they do.

In Friedman's fantasy world, once Israel shows it is "serious," then somehow some magic pressure will appear that will force the PA to respond. Unfortunately this has never happened. In fact, Abbas' position hardened not during Netanyahu's time in office - but during Olmert's!

What is particularly galling is that Friedman, like J-Street, couches his calls for Israel and Israel alone to make concessions as if he is doing it out of love for Israel. This is garbage. If he loves Israel, he needs to wake up and use his bully pulpit to expose the Palestinian Arab intransigence and constant calls to destroy Israel via "return" - a demand that has not changed one bit since 1948. He needs to expose the incitement in Palestinian Arab society. He needs to expose the fact that the PA has not changed its position one bit since 1988 - and brags about it. He needs to point out that previous Israeli creativity to reach a peace agreement was met not with flexibility but with more demands. All of this is well-known, even to a know-it-all like Thomas Friedman.

That's what someone who cares for Israel would do.

UPDATE: The Islamic Jihad newspaper "Palestine Today" loved this column, quoting it extensively. Which is exactly what one would expect them to do with something written by such a concerned friend of Israel, right?