Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Follow-up on Defensible Borders

I blogged about the book Israel’s Critical Security Needs for a Viable Peace recently. It turns out that the JCPA's new book on "Defensible Borders" is downloadable. The download is not working at this moment, but a great executive summary is available, which in seven pages pithily puts all the main points together. For example:

Until now, the Palestinians have only been asked for a “top-down” peace process, throughout which their leaders have held meetings, shaken hands, attended peace conferences, and even signed agreements with Israeli leaders. But when a peace process does not sprout from the grassroots of a society, it is both pointless and useless. Until three year- old children in Ramallah stop being taught to idolize “martyrs” who blow themselves up for jihad against Israelis and Jews, there will only be a “peace process” in the imaginations of the self-deluded.

If the West Bank were to fall into hostile hands, the resulting situation would pose a constant threat to Israel’s national infrastructure, including Ben-Gurion International Airport, the Trans-Israel Highway toll road, Israel’s National Water Carrier, and its high-voltage electric power lines.

A major problem Israel faces in dealing with a non-state actor such as the Palestinian Authority is that, unlike state actors such as Egypt or Jordan, classic principles of deterrence and punishment are far less effective, as there is no unified government that asserts control over people, weapons, and terrorist groups. This is illustrated by the split between Fatah in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza.

In the past, prior to a planned Iraqi mission to carry out an aerial attack on Israel’s nuclear research compound in Dimona, Jordan permitted Iraqi combat planes to use its airspace and to fly on a route parallel to the Israeli border in order to take aerial photographs of Israeli territory. Thus, despite the current relative calm, Israel cannot entrust its security to the goodwill of the Jordanians or the Palestinians.

A Palestinian entity located on the central mountain ridge enjoys a topographical advantage compared to largely coastal Israel. A small Palestinian transmitter station on Mount Eival, near Nablus, for example, could jam virtually the entire communication system in Israeli areas broadcasting on the same frequencies.

It would be a serious mistake to believe that Israeli requirements for verifying complete Palestinian demilitarization could be guaranteed by international forces operating in the West Bank. International forces have never been successful anywhere in the world in a situation where one of the parties was ready to ignore the fulfillment of its responsibilities.:

Just before the 1967 Six-Day War, UNEF, the United Nations Emergency Force in Sinai, retreated from the area just before hostilities broke out. European monitors stationed along the Egyptian border with Gaza in accordance with the 2005 agreement brokered by Secretary of State Rice fled their positions when internecine fighting between Hamas and Fatah heated up.

UNIFIL in Lebanon has never caught any Hizbullah terrorists. When Hizbullah moved its artillery positions to within 50 meters of a UN position and then fired on Israeli targets, UNIFIL did nothing. But if Israel employed counter-fire against the very same Hizbullah artillery, then the UN Division for Peacekeeping Operations would issue a formal diplomatic complaint.

Yaacov Lozowick sums up his skepticism nicely:

Since 1993 Israel has performed a series of concrete actions on the ground, changes in the reality, which have weakened its control over the Palestinians. Not one of them resulted in any advantage durable enough to survive two days of violence in September 2000, when the Palestinians launched the 2nd Intifada. Since 2000 the pendulum has swung both ways, with Israel reconquering the West Bank in 2002, and slowly lifting its hand since 2004; with Israel fully evacuating Gaza in 2005, then reconquering less than a third of it in 2009 and again relinquishing direct control and now, slowly, also indirect control. The wary recognition of having an independent Palestine next door, which was the expression of Rabin's position, has been replaced by a Likud prime minister publicly accepting the goal of a sovereign Palestine.

And in all that time, I dare you to find one single concrete step taken by the Palestinians to assure us they, too, are ready for partition. Not words, which can be uttered in English today and denied in Arabic today. Actions. Find me one. Because I could easily write a 10,000-word article about all the things they've done which prove the opposite; actually, I expect I could limit myself to the first half of 2010.

This is of crucial importance. Reaching peace with the Palestinians will mean Israel gives up all those essential security measures spelled out by the JCPA. It will require a gamble with our lives, in the immediate meaning that people we know will die if it goes wrong, if not we ourselves. There's nothing theoretical or hypothetical about this: it will be real people, really dead, just as it already has been. For this to happen the Palestinians need to convince us they can be trusted with our lives. At the moment, nothing comes to mind - nothing - to indicate they can be trusted.

Freedom of the Press, Jordanian-style

Al Quds al Arabi reports that Jordan has banned the publication of any information about its army and even its military retirees, under threat of legal action.

What prompted this move? Was it a major leak of Jordanian military secrets? Was there an embarrassing scandal they want to hush up?

The answer, apparently, lies in the expansion of the ban to include stories about retired soldiers.

Last month, as we reported, a group of retired Jordanian army veterans came out with a call for Jordan to strip the citizenship from its Palestinian Arab population.

They were concerned that Israel might succeed in re-opening the "Jordanian option" giving Jordan responsibility for helping solve the Palestinian Arab "refugee" problem, by wither declaring Jordan to be Palestine or to ask Jordan to take over parts of the West Bank. To forestall this threat, the generals suggested to sever all ties with the majority of Jordanians who are considered Palestinian and to leave Jordan for "Jordanians" (another artificial construct) and "Palestine" for "Palestinians."

The group is hardly a tiny fringe organization. According to its website, it represents some 140,000 retired veterans. The statement to strip Palestinian Jordanians of their rights was generally applauded by members.

This was deeply embarrassing to Jordan, which is trying to walk the line between ensuring that its Palestinian majority keeps their rights but also not to effectively become the de facto caretaker of the entire Palestinian Arab population.

(The counter-petition, signed by thousands, calls on Jordan to keep civil rights for Palestinians but also to use Jordanian-Palestinian Arab unity to fight Israel, sever all relations with Israel and, by implication, move more towards Hamas' vision. )

So the easiest thing to do is to shut up the people who are proposing to do what Jordan has already begun on a small scale - separating Palestinian Jordanians from other Jordanians.

Since they cannot ban a group of retired officers, it does the next best thing - it bans any of their statements from being publicized.

As of this moment, there is nothing on the website about this ban.

Today's PalArab news (7/13/2010)

There are reports that the Shin Bet is meeting directly with Hamas representatives in prisons in the Negev to negotiate a prisoner swap for Gilad Shalit. This comes from Palestine Press Agency, which uses reports like these to discredit Hamas' credentials as being jihadist, as this indicates that Hamas is more pro-Israel than Mahmoud Abbas. Of course, at the same time Hamas is slamming the PA for reported meetings that the Shin Bet had with them!

Palestinian Arab and Israeli journalists met in Cyprus to discuss their competing narratives. The Arab journalists "took part at their own risk," as the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate bans such meetings as "normalization."

Hajj is coming up, and pilgrims from Gaza are trying to iron out their passport issues to be able to travel to Saudi Arabia. In the past, Hamas terrorists often used Hajj as a means to travel to Iran to get cash and weapons training.

The Libyan ship meant to break the blockade is scheduled to arrive in Gaza on Wednesday afternoon, according to a Hamas spokesman.

The Al Aqsa Foundation not only makes a stink when Jews peacefully visit the Temple Mount, but also when they stay outside the gates.

German journalists were given tours of the Hamas Koran-based summer camps.

Palestine Today has another news story about Islamic Jihad summer camps, where the kids are taught "the culture of resistance and resilience, and links to the land and holy places which are being Judaized and raped by gangs of Zionist terrorism."

Kumbaya!

Russia admits Iran might be pursuing nuclear weapons

From All Headline News:

Russia, a key Iranian ally, has publicly admitted for the first time that the Islamic nation may be moving closer to creating nuclear arms.

Speaking at a meeting of ambassadors in Moscow, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said, "Iran is moving closer to possessing the potential which in principle could be used for the creation of nuclear weapons."

Iran responded characteristically:

A senior Iranian lawmaker blasted the recent allegations by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that Iran is moving closer to the acquisition of military nuclear capability, and cautioned Moscow officials not to be fooled by the "false information" presented by the US and British spy agencies.

"We expect Russia, as a powerful country, not to be fooled by the false information of the American and British spy agencies," Head of the parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Commission Alaeddin Boroujerdi told FNA on Tuesday.

Noting that Medvedev's comments on Iran's nuclear program are "unreal", Boroujerdi advised Moscow not to follow the policies of the US and Britain.

He also referred to the presence of approximately 3,000 Russian experts at Iran's first nuclear power plant in the southern city of Bushehr as well as the vast cooperation between the two countries in this field, and said, "They (the Russians) are well aware that our nuclear activities are peaceful."

PA: No direct negotiations before full Israeli capitulation

Saeb Erekat, speaking to a Syrian newspaper, emphasized yet again the intransigence of the Palestinian Authority - a word that the Western media applies exclusively to Israel.

He said that the PA will not enter into direct negotiations with Israel unless there is a full, and permanent, end to building in Jerusalem and the West Bank.

He said that Barack Obama made a direct phone call to Mahmoud Abbas asking for direct negotiations, but that the Palestinian Authority would not agree to that no matter how much international pressure is applied.

This is, of course, exactly the attitude that the world ascribes to Israel - of ignoring the international community and acting arrogantly. Yet when the PA does this, explicitly, there is no public criticism to be heard anywhere.

It hardly needs to be mentioned that the PA used to negotiate with Israel directly and that these demands are completely new conditions that were unilaterally added by Mahmoud Abbas - the so-called "moderate" who expects to get all his demands met without a single concession.

In fact, Mahmoud Abbas, that man of "peace" who is pushing to get a Nobel Peace Prize, is more intransigent than Yasir Arafat was in his negotiating positions.

The IDF timeline on the Mavi Marmara

The IDF put out videos (Hebrew only so far) and an English description of the events that happened on the Mavi Marmara, based on the results of the Eiland team investigation:

The IDF forces were divided and each group boarded a different ship. The soldiers arrived at the Mavi Marmara at 4:28 AM, but could not board the ship due to metal objects being thrown at them, and electric buzz saws used by the demonstrators to slice the ladders IDF soldiers needed to board the Marmara. After an unsuccessful attempt to board the ship by smaller boats, a helicopter arrived at 4:30 AM with 15 IDF soldiers. The first rope dropped by the helicopters was tied by the demonstrators to the deck of the ship in order to prevent the soldiers’ descent.

Soldiers that descended down the second rope were met by 2-4 demonstrators each who wielded knives, axes, and metal poles. The second soldier to descend was shot in the stomach by a demonstrator. The soldiers who were in danger of their lives were forced to use their live weapons. Five soldiers were injured by stabbing, blows and live fire by the demonstrators. Within seconds of boarding the ships, three soldiers were thrown off the deck by demonstrators. The injured were dragged to the hull of the ship.

A reinforcement of soldiers arrives from a second helicopter, which is also attacked by demonstrators, and the soldiers are met with violence when they attempt to access the lower deck of the ship.

At 4:46 AM a third helicopter arrives to the Mavi Marmara, and the two groups of soldiers combine forces on the ship roof and descend to the other parts of the ship, where they are also met with lethal violence, and thus respond with live fire.

Many of the demonstrators enter inside of the ship as the smaller boats arrive at the side of the ship, however some still violently attack the incoming boats and the soldiers respond with live fire.

The Commander of the Special Navy Forces boards the ship, and while evaluating the forces, it is discovered that three soldiers are missing. The missing and injured soldiers are discovered to have been abducted by a number of violent demonstrators, who abandon the soldiers and run back into the ship when fired at.

Two of the injured soldiers jump off the ship so that they can be picked up by the IDF boats. The third injured soldier is on the bow of the boat and slipping out of consciousness. IDF soldiers remaining on the boat come to his aid.

At 5:17 AM the situation is evaluated and some of the findings: live fire was used by demonstrators towards IDF soldiers who were on the ship, including one soldier who descended down the rope and was shot in the abdomen. Live fire by the demonstrators was also aimed at the soldiers on the small Israeli Navy boats next to the Marmara. The first occurence of live fire was that used by the demonstrators. In addition, a gun with emptied magazines was found in the hull of the ship.

IDF forces had boarded the other ships without incident. Treatment and evacuation was carried out for the injured soldiers and demonstrators alike. 38 injured were airlifted, 7 of them soldiers.

The three soldiers who had been attempted to be kidnapped and were taken to the hull of the ship were witness to an argument between the violent demonstrators, and other passengers of the Marmara who asked the violent demonstrators to cease their violent activity.

24 of the injured passengers were diagnosed at the Ashdod Port and treated in hospitals in Israel.

After the operation ended, the ships arrived at the Ashdod Port accompanied by Israeli Naval forces. An intelligence investigation following the flotilla incident found that 40 of the IHH activists previously boarded the Marmara ship from Istanbul before joining the others.

The 8 of the 9 demonstrators killed were members of the IHH or other allied groups. Around half of those killed had declared in front of their families their aspiration to die as martyrs (“shahids”). Footage on the Marmara shows that the violence had been prepared: metal poles and chains were prepared, slingshots, buzzsaws, gas masks, tear gas, bulletproof vests, knives, and more. A briefing had taken place before the IDF had boarded the ship, with the leader of the violent demonstrators telling the group to attack the IDF soldiers at any cost.

There were 718 total passengers of the flotilla ships. Most were released without undergoing any investigation. The last passenger left on June 6th.

Are German IHH and Turkish IHH related?

Today we saw many news stories about the German government banning the IHH - the Internationale Humanitäre Hilfsorganisation - "charity" organization because of its ties with Hamas:

Germany's government has banned an organization it accuses of collecting donations that are sent to Hamas-related welfare projects. The Islamist movement is included on the European Union's terror group blacklist.

German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said in a statement that the International Humanitarian Relief Organization was banned Monday because it has used donations to support projects in Gaza that are related to Hamas – while presenting their activities to donors as humanitarian help.

"Under the guise of humanitarian aid, the IHH has long backed, with significant financial assistance, so-called social welfare organizations based in the Gaza Strip that can be linked to Hamas," he said.

"Donations to so-called social welfare groups belonging to Hamas, such as the millions given by IHH, actually support the terror organization Hamas as a whole."

All of these stories take pains to say that this IHH is not related to the Turkish organization with the same initials, which was involved in attacking IDF soldiers on the Mavi Marmara.

The Turkish IHH actually does stand for something different: İnsan Hak ve Hürriyetleri ve İnsani Yardım Vakfı,[2] in English: The Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief. Wikipedia has a link to the German IHH site (not available today but retrieved last month) where they issued a clarification that they were not associated with the Turkish IHH.

So even though both groups apparently have the same Islamist goals and support the same terror organizations, they appear to be different.

And yet, their logos are strikingly similar, down to the number of leaves:

Even if they do not have the same pedigree, it is a distinction without a difference - the very same rules that prohibit IHH Germany apply to IHH Turkey.

But I think that it might be a good idea, as a pre-emptive measure, to ban all Islamist-leaning organizations that have logos with the same number of leaves around a globe meant to symbolize the world:

UPDATE:

The organization was founded in 1992 in Freiburg, Germany, the ministry said. In 1997 the group split in two, IHH Germany and IHH Turkey, which are now two separate entities, it said.

(h/t Lucy Lips)

The Eiland report on the Mavi Marmara, plus more

Maj. Gen. (Res.) Giora Eiland had the task of examining, from a military perspective, the conduct of the IDF in the Mavi Marmara incident. He gave his report today, and here are some highlights - not only from the IDF report on his debriefing but also some details given by a senior IDF official that I received via email.

In terms of the intelligence effort, the team concluded that not all possible intelligence gathering methods were fully implemented and that the coordination between Navy Intelligence and the Israel Defense Intelligence was insufficient. At the same time, the team emphasized that it is not certain that an optimal intelligence effort would create a complete intelligence picture. The team also pointed out that the anticipated level of violence used against the forces was underestimated.

In terms of situation assessments towards the flotilla, the team clarified that the operation relied excessively on a single course of action, albeit a probable one, while no alternative courses of action were prepared for the event of more dangerous scenarios.

Regarding technological alternatives, the team determined that on the day of the incident, decision makers were not presented with alternative operational courses of action other than a full boarding of the flotilla. The team emphasized the fact that as far as is currently known, no country in the world holds the ability to stop a vessel at sea in a non hostile manner. Therefore statements made on this matter following the incident are unfounded and irresponsible. At the same time, the team determined that alternative courses of action could have existed had the process of preparation begun enough time in advance, and recommended to accelerate the process of examining alternative methods....

The team determined that the Navy Commando soldiers operated properly, with professionalism, bravery and resourcefulness and that the commanders exhibited correct decision making. The report further determines that the use of live fire was justified and that the entire operation is estimable.

The additional points I have found out are perhaps more interesting:

* Nine IDF soldiers were injured in all, 3 of them seriously
* There were at least four and perhaps as many as six separate incidents where IDF soldiers were fired upon by "peace activists". In one case a soldier shot in the knee was shot by a weapon which was not IDF issued, and shell casings were found on the ship of bullets that did not come from Israeli weapons.
* In every situation where IDF soldiers used their weapons they were in life-threatening situations.
* The first Israeli soldier shot was the second one who rappelled down. This was almost certainly the first use of live fire by anyone in the incident - in other words, Mavi Marmara passengers shot first. The bullet that hit him came, apparently, from an Israeli gun that had been stripped off one of the other soldiers. He was not shot while going down the rope but soon thereafter.
* 3 soldiers were taken hostage. All of them were taken to the lowest deck. Two of them managed to escape and jump overboard where they were rescued; the third one was too badly injured and was rescued later.

After the soccer match Netherlands vs. Spain in the World Cup finals of 2010 in South Africa, which ended in Spain winning the World Cup (0-1), not everyone was coping well with it.

Now, I should say that in general the many Dutch supporters behaved nicely, even though in sorrow after the loss. There were not many reports of riots. However, in the Hague, the seat of the Dutch government, Dutch supporters showed their sorrow quite differently.

If you listen carefully, at 0:40 the crowd starts to shout: "Hamas, Hamas, Joden aan het gas" (translation: "Hamas, Hamas, send Jews to the gas"). We've heard that one before.

But wtf? Really, what has this to do with football?

More shocking was the news that hundreds of miles farther, in Uganda, at least 74 people watching the finals got killed in a trio of bombings. A Somali Islamist militant movement claimed responsibility today.

Today, I'm in mourning. Not because the Dutch lost, but because of our fallen humanity.

Open thread

Real life intruding on blogging. Have fun in the comments.

Gas pains ahead

Dar al Hayat has an article that begins to discuss the issues with the new, large natural gas fields that have been discovered or are expected to be discovered in the Mediterranean.

Briefly, gas fields have been discovered off the coasts of Egypt, Gaza ("Marine"), southern Israel ("Mary B") and northern Israel near Haifa ("Tamar.")

Chances are good that the Marine and Mary B are a shared field. Chances are also pretty good that Tamar field extends into Lebanese waters, with Lebanon technically at war with Israel with no demarcated borders - especially at sea. The Tamar field may also reach Cypriot waters.

And to make things more complicated, Turkey would assert rights over offshore Cypriot gas fields, and Syria might want to get in on the action as well.

A recent US Geological Survey indicates that the entire Levant basin might hold 227 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, as well as billions of barrels of oil.

This could get very, very dicey.

Notable quote from Dar al-Hayat

A few weeks ago there were rumors, immediately denied, that Saudi Arabia would allow Israel to use its airspace (or even to build an airbase!) in order to attack Iran. While the airspace story might have some plausibility in a situation where the Saudis could maintain deniability, an analysis by a rabid Israel-hater in Dar al Hayat includes a paragraph that needs to be studied:

Perhaps the Saudi government has a thousand objections to the practices of the Iranian government. However, it would never help Israel against a Muslim country. This is impossible with Abdullah bin Abdulaziz as King, Sultan bin Abdulaziz as the Crown Prince, and with his brothers, their children, grandchildren, ministers and the entire people.

It takes a lot for an Arab country to accept help from the US against another Arab country - as in the case of Kuwait against Iraq. But to accept help from the hated enemy Israel? Sorry, it will never happen in any sort of public way. It is inconceivable that even Egypt or Jordan would accept military help from Israel. Under the table, away from the public, in the back rooms, with absolute deniability - perhaps. But the citizens of any Arab country, raised for generations with implacable hate against the Jews cum Zionists, would not stand for such an absolute betrayal from their leadership. The Arab hate against Israel is palpable (as can be seen in the remainder of the article linked to here.)

The desire for symmetry doesn't mean it exists

James Carroll, in the Boston Globe, defines the Palestinian Arab/Israeli conflict neatly symmetrical terms that are very elegant, and very false.

Against the usual perception, the Israeli and Palestinian stories are not contradictory but parallel. Jews and Arabs did not dig the ditch that keeps them apart.

To shift the analogy, Israelis and Palestinians are trapped in a corner. But the walls of that corner were constructed by someone else — an unacknowledged third party. Those walls are anti-Semitism and colonialism, each of which is thought to be well understood. But their recombination begets something new — a lethal feedback loop, as the historic hatred of Jews mixes explosively with the contempt for native peoples that defined imperial expansion.

Now Europe, together with its legacy culture America, sends representatives, such as Mitchell and Blair, claiming to offer disinterested “help” to the stubbornly warring parties. Yet that broader culture is fully complicit as the source of the two momentous animosities. Because that complicity is never reckoned with, energetic diplomatic interventions, going back past Jimmy Carter and Henry Kissinger to successive British “white papers,” have come to nothing....

The return to the land of Israel was momentous for people who had prayed for most of two millennia, “Next year in Jerusalem.” From the Arab point of view, however, Zionism could only be taken as a manifestation of the colonialism that native Palestinians had by then every reason to detest. Just as it is wrong to take Zionism as colonialism, it is wrong to take Palestinian hatred of Jewish arrival — and, even more pointedly, of Israeli occupation — as anti-Semitism....

Carroll seems to be a nice guy, and he is not the first to think he has come up with a unique perspective that could help break the impasse.

Creating false equivalences does not help to solve the problem, though.

The Zionist viewpoint is not that Palestine was filled with anti-semites as Jews returned from exile. To be sure, there was anti-semitism among the Arabs - to deny that it exists is as foolhardy as to compare it to the far worse traditional European anti-semitism. Even so, today the problem is not the underlying implicit anti-semitism that still festers in the Arab world, but the explicit and festering anti-Zionism - the utter inability to accept a Jewish state under any circumstances in what they consider Arab land. That is a problem that cannot be wished away. Whether modern anti-Zionism is congruent with traditional anti-semitism is not the pertinent issue - rabid anti-Zionism, which I once termed misoziony, is in itself a roadblock to any chance for peace. When Palestinian Arabs are claiming that Jews in Israel are colonialists, it is not merely the opposite of the truth - it is a manifestation of an underlying hatred that is endemic and every bit as toxic as traditional anti-semitism.

When Carroll tries to create a symmetry between Arab views of Zionism as colonialism, and Jewish views of anti-Zionism as anti-semitism, he is missing the point. Even if anti-Zionism is not a specific manifestation of anti-semitism, it is no less hateful and no more tolerant.

When Palestinian and Israeli negotiators finally face each other across one table, these common notes of experience should be paramount — but only for the sake of moving beyond them. Two peoples who have each defined themselves positively by negative hatred of the other have been at the mercy of a broad culture that created this very habit of mind. Jews and Arabs can renounce this history without renouncing themselves. Each can then receive the other’s account of the past, and, perhaps for the first time, hear it respectfully.

Again, he is ascribing to the Zionist side the hate that exists on the Arab side. While it is undoubtedly true that Palestinian Arabs define themselves in negative terms, by their shared hate of Israel, Jewish nationalism is a far richer and naturally positive historic trend. Before 1948, and even before modern Zionism, no one doubted that the Jewish people were a nation as well as a religious group. Jew and Gentile alike recognized this fact as a given, and newspaper clippings from the 19th century are as likely to use the term Israelites as they were to use Jews. While modern Zionism was partially a reaction to anti-semitism, it was European anti-semitism that the Jews were trying to find an antidote to: Arabs were considered irrelevant to the issue, and often even regarded as potential allies in creating a parallel national movement.

Carroll also errs when he tries to imply that misoziony is merely a Palestinian Arab phenomenon - it is at the very least a pan-Arab psychosis, perhaps the only true pan-Arab mindset that exists. There is precious little else that the Arab world can agree upon.

Another problem is that Carroll (and many others) think that Zionist Jews' false understandings of the Palestinian Arab narrative is partially to blame for there being no peace, when in fact Zionism has almost always shown an almost superhuman ability to empathize with the other side. Consistently, Zionist peace plans have attempted to address the purported issues in a way that would support a win-win solution. The real problem is that the other side has shown zero interest in a solution that still allows a Jewish state to continue to exist, and these continuous attempts to compromise will inevitably fail because they are not regarded as confidence building gestures or goodwill measures, but as steps on the way to the annihilation of Israel. There is a vast gulf between the Western perception of a solution being a win-win for everybody and the Arab mentality of the zero-sum game.

The unfortunate truth is that the Arab world will never accept Israel except as an entity too strong to defeat or dislodge. The only thing protecting Israel is its strength. Pretending that there are myths on both sides that can be transcended to reach peace is not realism, but another case of wishful thinking. It assumes that peace is the goal for both sides, and that is simply not the case.

Israel Channel 2: Assad lied to Mitchell's face

According to Israel's Channel 2 news, George Mitchell accused Bashir Assad of transferring weapons in convoys to Hezbollah. When Assad denied it, Mitchell showed him satellite photos - and Assad still denied it.

Finally, after a number of such iterations, during which Mitchell informed Assad that he had seen incontrovertible proof, Assad asked Mitchell, "And if we are transferring - so what?"

A senior US official is quoted as saying that Assad is a liar and that it is impossible to reach an agreement with him.

But, meanwhile, Syrian weapons still pour into Lebanon.

(h/t Jed)

Peace partner Abbas would love to see Arab war on Israel

From Palestinian Media Watch:

The PA daily reports that Abbas said this at a meeting with writers and journalists in the home of the Palestinian Ambassador to Jordan.

The following is the transcript from the official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida:

"'We don't accept the statement [of Hamas]: a [Palestinian] state of resistance and refusal. What we hear from everyone is that the basis is negotiations, at a time that the entire world agrees about this, despite the absence of other options, we either have negotiations or no negotiations, what has put Israel in the corner.
We are unable to confront Israel militarily, and this point was discussed at the Arab League Summit in March in Sirt (Libya). There I turned to the Arab States and I said: 'If you want war, and if all of you will fight Israel, we are in favor. But the Palestinians will not fight alone because they don't have the ability to do it.' He [Abbas] said: 'The West Bank was completely destroyed and we will not agree that it will be destroyed again,' in addition to 'the inability to confront Israel militarily.'"
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida (Fatah), July 6, 2010

I saw this on Friday and couldn't find the original article in Al Hayat al Jadida online, so I emailed PMW, who provided me with a facsimile of the print page, with the quote highlighted in yellow:

Once again we see that peace is not a goal for even the "moderate" PA. The goal is to destroy Israel; peace (or, more accurately, the "peace process") is a strategy towards achieving that goal.

Somehow, I don't think that there will be any angry requests from the White House demanding that Abbas explain or disown his statements. They reserve those actions for things that are really heinous, like announcements of Jews building houses in their capital city.