Friday, September 23, 2011

  • Friday, September 23, 2011
  • Elder of Ziyon
From the Simon Wiesenthal Center:
  • Friday, September 23, 2011
  • Elder of Ziyon
How many lies can fit into one speech?
We entered those negotiations [in 2010] with open hearts and attentive ears and sincere intentions, and we were ready with our documents, papers and proposals. But the negotiations broke down just weeks after their launch.
They entered them kicking and screaming after 9 months of a 10-month settlement freeze.
After this, we did not give up and did not cease our efforts for initiatives and contacts. Over the past year we did not leave a door to be knocked or channel to be tested or path to be taken and we did not ignore any formal or informal party of influence and stature to be addressed.
Except for Israel.
The core issue here is that the Israeli government refuses to commit to terms of reference for the negotiations that are based on international law and United Nations resolutions, and that it frantically continues to intensify building of settlements on the territory of the State of Palestine
The settlements have no expanded in years. The core issue is that Abbas refuses to compromise - on borders, on Jerusalem, on "refugees." And he bragged about his intransigence, in Arabic, less than two months after he broke off the talks.
Settlement activities embody the core of the policy of colonial military occupation of the land of the Palestinian people and all of the brutality of aggression and racial discrimination against our people that this policy entails. This policy, which constitutes a breach of international humanitarian law and United Nations resolutions, is the primary cause for the failure of the peace process, the collapse of dozens of opportunities, and the burial of the great hopes that arose from the signing of the Declaration of Principles in 1993 between the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel to achieve a just peace that would begin a new era for our region.
Guess what? If the PLO would have accepted the peace proposal in 2000, there would have been no more new "settlers" on "Palestine"! Imagine that! Also, as Abbas knows, Israel signed no agreement to limit settlement activity. Nothing in Oslo mandated that.
The occupying Power also continues to undertake excavations that threaten our holy places, and its military checkpoints prevent our citizens from getting access to their mosques and churches, and it continues to besiege the Holy City with a ring of settlements imposed to separate the Holy City from the rest of the Palestinian cities.
So Abbas is saying that Jews have no rights to Jerusalem. Nice. As he also well knows, Jerusalem was not meant to be part of the Arab state in the 1947 partition plan, but rather an international city. He is using Jordan's illegal occupation as a legal basis for his own claim to the city. Yet Israel's annexation is, to him, illegal.
The occupation is racing against time to redraw the borders on our land according to what it wants and to impose a fait accompli on the ground that changes the realities and that is undermining the realistic potential for the existence of the State of Palestine
Define "realistic." They never have. They just insist on "1967" borders and Jerusalem. But exactly why can a Palestinian Arab state be on less land then that and still be "realistic"? It is mere assertion, the repeated mantra of "1967 border plus Jerusalem" that make people believe it - but there is not a shred of truth in that statement.
In recent years, the criminal actions of armed settler militias, who enjoy the special protection of the occupation army, has intensified with the perpetration of frequent attacks against our people, targeting their homes, schools, universities, mosques, fields, crops and trees. Despite our repeated warnings, the occupying Power has not acted to curb these attacks and we hold them fully responsible for the crimes of the settlers.
I know of lots of Jews in Judea and Samaria who have been killed by Palestinian Arabs in recent years. I am not aware of any Arabs killed by settlers in the same timeframe. By Abbas' logic, he is responsible for the deaths of the Fogels and others.
These are just a few examples of the policy of the Israeli colonial settlement occupation, and this policy is responsible for the continued failure of the successive international attempts to salvage the peace process.
He likes to use the word "colonial" - which is just another lie. Israel's interest in territory isn't colonialist; it is a recognition of the historic Jewish national home.
In addition, we now face the imposition new conditions not previously raised, conditions that will transform the raging conflict in our inflamed region into a religious conflict and a threat to the future of a million and a half Christian and Muslim Palestinians, citizens of Israel, a matter which we reject and which is impossible for us to accept being dragged into.
Abbas is claiming that by calling Israel a Jewish state it will turn the war into a religious war - yet his own constitution says that "Islam is the official religion in Palestine."! And of course, Jews are a nation, not just a religion - but that is something that Abbas will never, ever admit.
In 1974, our deceased leader Yasser Arafat came to this hall and assured the Members of the General Assembly of our affinnative pursuit for peace, urging the United Nations to realize the inalienable national rights of the Palestinian people, stating: "Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand."
And he was responsible for the deaths of countless people even after he made that statement. Yet Abbas considers him a hero.
When we adopted this program, we were taking a painful and very difficult step for all of us, especially those, including myself, who were forced to leave their homes and their towns and villages...
Lie - Abbas himself admitted his family left voluntarily and never saw an Israeli soldier.
The 1948 AI-Nakba [was] one of the worst operations of uprooting, destruction and removal of a vibrant and cohesive society that had been 3 contributing in a pioneering and leading way m the cultural, educational and economic renaissance of the Arab Middle East.
Essentially all of the economic strides made by Arabs in Palestine before 1948 came because of the Jews. It was the booming economy that the Jews created that prompted at least 200,000 Arabs from other countries to emigrate to Palestine in the decades before 1948. Those people are all now knows as "Palestinians" - and many of them are desperately trying to prove they are really Lebanese or Egyptian in order to gain citizenship and stop being pawns from people like Abbas.
Thus, we agreed to establish the State of Palestine on only 22% of the territory of historical Palestine - on all the Palestinian Territory occupied by Israel in 1967.
No such thing as "historical Palestine" that coincides with the British Mandate - and this is proof that there is no real "Palestinian" history.
The occupying Power also continues to refuse permits for our people to build in Occupied East Jerusalem, at the same time that i t intensifies its decades-long campaign of demolition and confiscation of homes, displacing Palestinian owners and residents under a multi-pronged policy of ethnic cleansing aimed at pushing them away from their ancestral homeland.
See here. "The Arab population of Jerusalem quadrupled between1967 (when Israel annexed East Jerusalem) and 2008, from 68,600 to 268,600, while the city’s Jewish population rose by a factor of 2.5. Consequently, Arabs now constitute 35 percent of Jerusalem’s population, up from 26 percent in 1967. Since ethnic cleansing is normally meant to reduce the target population, if Israel were actually attempting such cleansing, it is surely the most incompetent ethnic cleanser in human history." (h/t CHA)
I confirm, on behalf of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, which will remain so until the end of the conflict in all its aspects and until the resolution of all final status issues...
He is trying to have his cake and eat it too...to say that even after a state is declared, it would be subservient to the PLO - which he conveniently runs. So when it helps his cause to pretend to be a state, he will, when it hurts his cause legally (especially with "refugees") he reverts to the PLO.

What kind of state is run by an organization?
...a just and agreed upon solution to the Palestine refugee issue in accordance with resolution 194
He is knowingly lying about what (nonbinding) UNGA resolution 194 says.
The PLO and the Palestinian people adhere to the renouncement of violence and rejection and condemning of terrorism in all its forms, especially State terrorism, and adhere to all agreements signed between the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel.
But at the exact same time, they want to be "unified" with Hamas - which rejects those conditions explicitly and repeatedly. Not a word about Hamas in the entire speech. Yet they are supposedly his "partners".
Our people will continue their popular peaceful resistance to the Israeli occupation and its settlement and apartheid policies and its construction of the racist annexation Wall.
His definition of "peaceful resistance" includes Molotov cocktails, high-velocity slings and dropping boulders from the Temple Mount onto worshippers at the Kotel.
...the strength of this defenseless people, armed only with their dreams, courage, hope and slogans in the face of bullets, tanks, tear gas and bulldozers.
Now, why didn't he mention Kalashnikovs, suicide bomb belts, Grad rockets or laser-guided anti-tank missiles that are aimed at school buses?
Our efforts are not aimed at isolating Israel or de-legitimizing it; rather we want to gain legitimacy for the cause of the people of Palestine. We only aim to de-legitimize the settlement activities...
Only two weeks ago Abbas said "we have been under occupation for 63 years." Which is before 1967. So how is that not delegitimizing Israel?
I come before you today from the Holy Land, the land of Palestine, the land of divine messages, ascension of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) and the birthplace of Jesus Christ (peace be upon him), to speak on behalf of the Palestinian people in the homeland and in 6 the Diaspora, to say, after 63 years of suffering of an ongoing Nakba: Enough.
He cannot even bring himself to admit that Jewish people find the land he demands is holy to them, too. Only Muslims and Christians, not the People who came before them.

As far as 63 years of suffering, let's quote Abbas from 2009, when he told the Washington Post that he is not interested in negotiating and is happy to allow Obama to pressure Israel:
He says he will remain passive. "I will wait for Hamas to accept international commitments. I will wait for Israel to freeze settlements," he said. "Until then, in the West Bank we have a good reality . . . the people are living a normal life."
And this is Abbas in a nutshell. Not willing to make any hard decision, instead he tries to set up situations where others will do what he wants without him losing anything. That was his strategy with Obama in 2009 and that is what he is doing at the UN today.

 Anything to avoid compromising.
  • Friday, September 23, 2011
  • Elder of Ziyon
Including the UN choir singing the classic song, "Somebody to Hate."

  • Friday, September 23, 2011
  • Elder of Ziyon
From Naharnet:

A Hizbullah member escaped to Israel last June after the Shiite party’s leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah unveiled that the group had captured three spies among its members, two of whom were allegedly recruited by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, An Nahar daily reported Friday.
Nasrallah said at the time that CIA members at the U.S. embassy had recruited at least two Hizbullah members and the group was investigating whether the intelligence agency or another foreign agency recruited a third.
On Thursday, Hizbullah denied media reports about the arrest of new members on charges of spying for the Mossad and said a man named Abou Abed Salim has never been a party official.
But An Nahar quoted informed sources as saying that the third member of the spying network that Nasrallah had talked about is Salim who escaped to Israel a few days after the Hizbullah leader’s speech.
Media reports said Thursday that five Hizbullah members had escaped to the Jewish state.
An Nahar’s report came as informed sources told pan-Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat that Hizbullah had arrested four of its members on charges of spying while a fifth had escaped.
Other sources said that a top Hizbullah official had gone missing “for allegedly collaborating with the Mossad.”
The man who was identified by his initials as M.S. was allegedly a top official in Hizbullah’s military operations and was questioned in April 2010 by the U.N. commission investigating ex-Premier Rafik Hariri’s assassination.
The sources said the man’s parents and wife don’t know his whereabouts since he disappeared from the family home in the Ghobeiri district of Beirut’s southern suburbs.
According to rumors, the man is an Israeli spy and was involved in the assassination of Hizbullah military commander Imad Mughniyeh. Other rumors say that the party distanced him for unknown reasons.
More rumors than facts, but if Hezbollah believes that it cannot trust its own people, that can only be a good thing.

  • Friday, September 23, 2011
  • Elder of Ziyon
CiFWatch does a great job tracking down the source of this Guardian story:

12.22pm: Unconfirmed reports are coming in that Israeli police have begun fining Palestinian drivers for flying flags from their cars. The Ma'an news agency is saying that Israeli police placed a checkpoint in the north of the West Bank and imposed fines of $40 for small flags and $68 for large ones.

The Palestinian Authority media centre issued a statement saying:

It is reported that the Israeli authorities are imposing fines on Palestinians for flying flags on their cars in support of our campaign at the United Nations. It is not a crime to show pride in your country, nor to support the cause of freedom, with symbols that do no harm. Israel seems incapable of understanding the idea of peaceful protest at its illegal occupation.
They found the original story at WAFA, quoting an unnamed "security source." Read the whole thing.

CiFWatch concludes:
It seems as if the sole “source” of the Guardian allegation against Israel was the claim of one official from the PA -controlled Palestinian security service, as relayed to the PA-controlled media.

Moreover, anyone not blinded by ideologically inspired antipathy towards Israel would immediately be skeptical of such a rumor, as it flies in the face of the most rudimentary understanding of the rights of free expression in the Jewish state – which explains, of course, why it was published in the Guardian.
The story is indeed absurd, and the desire by the anti-Israel crowd to automatically accept any crazy story that demonizes the Jewish state is bottomless.
  • Friday, September 23, 2011
  • Elder of Ziyon
From Ha'aretz:
The world's first colloquium in the Arab world for the study of the Holocaust took place this week, in large measure thanks to the groundwork laid by a program that seeks to educate American high school graduates about the history of cooperation between Jews and the other nations. The symposium, hosted by Al-Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco and co-sponsored by the Israel gap-year program Kivunim, included three days of presentations and panels on the Nazi genocide, its repercussions for Morocco, and the historical relationships between Jews and Muslims in the Middle East.

The only Holocaust conference held in the Muslim world prior to this took place in Tehran, Iran in December 2006, and was widely denounced by Jewish leaders as an attempt not to gain a greater understand of those events, but to cast doubt on their ever having taken place. The groundbreaking Ifrane conference received the support of local Jewish community leaders and was attended by mainstream historians of the Holocaust, coexistence facilitators, government representatives - including the American Ambassador and emissaries of the Moroccan king - and ordinary Moroccan Muslims and Jews.

The conference was originally the idea of a group of Muslim students at Al-Akhawayn University in the Atlas Mountains, who formed a "Mimouna Club" -- named for the post-Passover holiday of Jewish-Arab fraternity. The club shared their idea with students from the Kivunim program that they had met who were visiting the country to learn about Moroccan Jewish history. Kivunim Founding Director Peter Geffen, who accompanied the group, realized the historic importance of such an opportunity and agreed to help organize the event, bringing some of those same Kivunim students back to Morocco this week to attend the conference.

During World War Two, when Morocco was occupied by the French, who were in turn occupied by the Vichy regime that collaborated with the Nazis, Moroccan King Mohammed V is said to have protected the Jews living in his domain from suffering the fate that befell the Jews of Europe. On March 18, 2009, his grandson, the ruling monarch Mohammed VI, honored that tradition of inter-religious solidarity when he publicly proclaimed that he and the Moroccan people perceive the Shoah "as a wound to the collective memory, which we know is engraved in one of the most painful chapters in the collective history of mankind."
I don't see anything about the Holocaust conference specifically on the website of the school. All I can find is that over the same three day period the Mimouna Club is celebrating "Jewish Days" where there are lectures, debates, visits to museums and kosher meals in Ifrane and Casablanca. The word "Holocaust" isn't mentioned in their program, but it must be the same one that Ha'aretz is reporting on.

Which means that this is not exactly a public conference on the Holocaust.
  • Friday, September 23, 2011
  • Elder of Ziyon
From Israel HaYom:
Sunday, Aug. 21, was a tough day for the communities on the Gaza periphery. Sirens sounded in Ashkelon and Beersheba as well. Grad and Qassam rockets left destruction and traumatized people in their wake, and residents were told to remain in protected areas. While most of the media attention was directed southward, at the same time, police and soldiers in Jerusalem were in a race against time, trying to capture Qawasmeh, 20, a would-be suicide terrorist from Hebron who, according to intelligence, was on his way to Pisgat Zeev.


The bomb that Qawasmeh was supposed to use had been captured 24 hours earlier. It comprised a sprinkler filled with 6 kilograms of explosives, with ball bearings glued around it. Azhak Arrafa, a resident of east Jerusalem who was supposed to transport Qawasme to his destination, was the one who led the police officers and the security services to the bomb, which had been hidden near his home in the Ras al-Amud neighborhood. 
Security officials did not know whether Qawasme was carrying additional explosives on his person. A nerve-wracking 24 hours passed. It seemed that the earth had swallowed Qawasmeh. In the end, one long-time detective guessed that Qawasme was hiding inside a mosque, perhaps even the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount. He based his guess on past experience: Over the years, there had been several incidents in which mosques in general, and the mosques on the Temple Mount in particular, have served as hideouts in which terrorists who had perpetrated attacks, or were about to carry them out, met, organized or hid.
The last connection to the Temple Mount that the detective remembered had to do with two terrorists who had allegedly planned to fire a rocket at Teddy Stadium during a Betar Jerusalem game. (One of them has since been tried and convicted, and the other’s trial is still in progress.} According to the Shin Bet, the two men served as Hamas’ representatives on the Temple Mount and were employed there at high salaries for three years. In Qawasmeh’s case, the shot in the dark proved accurate. He was indeed hiding on the Temple Mount and even stayed there overnight. He was captured the next morning near the Al-Aqsa Mosque thanks to intelligence that came from the Temple Mount.
How dare the Israelis enter such a holy spot - to stop a man from his holy mission? It is simply islamophobic. 
  • Friday, September 23, 2011
  • Elder of Ziyon
From Al Masry al Youm:

Security forces are currently investigating the possible involvement of two well-known politicians in instigating the recent attack on the Israeli Embassy and the events that accompanied it, said a security source on Thursday.
The source pointed out that surveillance cameras located in the embassy building and photographic evidence collected by security forces from regular citizens had prompted their suspicions.
The source explained that investigations indicated the involvement of the two politicians, one of whom was involved in inciting and angering the protesters, while the other gave money to some of the defendants. He added that the evidence included “15-minutes of video footage, which includes a full account of the Israeli Embassy events”.
“The defendants' are close in age but live in different districts,” said the source. “The defendants confessed that two politicians were are among the masterminds behind the events, which included the Giza Security Directorate, two police stations at Cairo University, and a Nahda Square Traffic Department, in addition to the embassy."
The traffic authorities are looking for three cars that were in the vicinity of the Israeli Embassy whose drivers the defendants claimed “were handing out money to them.
Al Ahram last week reported that an Egyptian millionaire was paying the core group of protesters; it is not clear if he is one of the people mentioned.

Meanwhile, there are reports that Egyptian youth are organizing a similar attack against the US embassy in Cairo if the US vetoes the PLO statehood bid.

(h/t Victor Shikhman tweet)

  • Friday, September 23, 2011
  • Elder of Ziyon
Palestine Press Agency reports on a speech that Mahmoud Abbas gave last night to 200 representatives of American Arabs of Palestinian descent in New York.
In the name of God the Merciful, and with appreciation for the brothers and sisters here, each seeking the truth and to advocate for the free State of Palestine, God willing, I am with you to say, God willing, we will have the state of Palestine with its capital in Jerusalem.

My brothers, in a few hours I will head to the United Nations, but I have come to tell you something important. We are under huge pressure to change our decision to claim the recognition of the State of Palestine, but I tell you I am going to the Security Council and will never retract whatever the pressures. [applause]

We're going to implement the decision of the Palestinian leadership whatever the pressures and, of course, the U.S. administration has done all it can to pressure us not to go, but we continue to go no matter what the pressures and obstacles they put in us by our decision.

We are the only people who remained under occupation on this earth and I think that no one can bear more than we endured....

...I assure you that the negotiations with Israel has not achieved any progress at all, despite the fact that Israel and America, the Quartet and all brokers ask us to go back to negotiations, but we tell them again we will not [negotiate] without Netanyahu declaring his recognition of the State of Palestine on the borders of 1067 and his announcement and implementation of a settlement freeze.

Talking about the Jewish state, I tell them a final answer: We will not recognize the Jewish state .... [long applause]

They talk about many other issues they want to negotiate with us around for several more years, and I say we will not go back to the negotiations in this way; we will only accept that Palestine be free of settlers and soldiers and by the occupation, and it is better for Israel to get out of the agreement with us [than accept any Israeli Jews in the territories]. This is what we have said for all, this is our opinion and we will not give in at all.

Sarkozy made a proposal, and I'll tell you my response: I am the President and am not authorized to examine any suggestions other than the decision of the State of Palestine at the United Nations. If there are any other suggestions, then I am to go back to the Palestinian leadership, and study it first, I have here with a clear task to have the State of Palestine become a full member [of the UN.] As for any other suggestions, I say: I am not authorized, I am not authorized to accept them. I am only authorized to drive one thing, the State of Palestine becoming a full member at the United Nations.
That last part is very disingenuous - he did not seek approval from other Palestinian Arab leaders to do the UN stunt to begin with, only a close set of Fatah cronies.

Abbas has always used this gambit of saying that he must consult with others - often the Arab League - when he doesn't want to do something, but when he wants something done he does it without any consultations.

This way he can claim helplessness when it is to his advantage and then he can act like a ruthless dictator the rest of the time.

Even more ironic, Abbas accused Netanyahu of "acting like a child hiding behind his father" in the run up to the UN stunt.

Western diplomats don't call him on this.
  • Friday, September 23, 2011
  • Elder of Ziyon


Also, the same person who made that video also just released this one showing how "peaceful" the protests were this week:



(h/t Mesarim Today)
  • Friday, September 23, 2011
  • Elder of Ziyon
From Eli Lake at The Daily Beast/Newsweek:
While publicly pressuring Israel to make deeper concessions to the Palestinians, President Obama has secretly authorized significant new aid to the Israeli military that includes the sale of 55 deep-penetrating bombs known as bunker busters, Newsweek has learned.

In an exclusive story to be published Monday on growing military cooperation between the two allies, U.S. and Israeli officials tell Newsweek that the GBU-28 Hard Target Penetrators—potentially useful in any future military strike against Iranian nuclear sites—were delivered to Israel in 2009, just several months after Obama took office.

The military sale was arranged behind the scenes as Obama’s demands for Israel to stop building settlements in disputed territories were fraying political relations between the two countries in public.

The Israelis first requested the bunker busters in 2005, only to be rebuffed by the Bush administration. At the time, the Pentagon had frozen almost all U.S.-Israeli joint defense projects out of concern that Israel was transferring advanced military technology to China.

In 2007, Bush informed Ehud Olmert, then prime minister, that he would order the bunker busters for delivery in 2009 or 2010. The Israelis wanted them in 2007. Obama finally released the weapons in 2009, according to officials familiar with the still-secret decision.

U.S. and Israeli officials told Newsweek that Israel had developed its own bunker-buster technology between 2005 and 2009, but the purchase from the U.S. was cheaper.

While the Obama administration has touted some public cooperation with the Israeli military, Newsweek’s article Monday will reveal other covert efforts by the U.S. military to aid Israel in the volatile Middle East region, and the impact the improving military cooperation has had on the sometimes chilly relations between Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and the president’s popularity in the American Jewish community.
The leak must be intentional.

The story is quite believable. US military cooperation with Israel has remained high even as diplomatic relations appeared strained.  It also makes sense that this is why Netanyahu would have agreed to a settlement freeze to begin with.

According to a Wikileaks cable, the transfer of the GBU-28s were described as "upcoming" in November 2009. The freeze started in December 2009.

However, it looks like the Bush administration did send GBU-28s to Israel during the Lebanon war and even beforehand.

(h/t Yoel, T34, JD)

Thursday, September 22, 2011

  • Thursday, September 22, 2011
  • Elder of Ziyon
Here is the best list I could piece together of nations that walked out when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad started spouting about the Holocaust.


  • Australia
  • Austria 
  • Belgium 
  • Bulgaria 
  • Canada (boycotted the speech)
  • Cyprus 
  • Czech Republic 
  • Denmark 
  • Estonia 
  • Finland 
  • France 
  • Germany 
  • Greece 
  • Hungary 
  • Ireland 
  • Israel (boycotted the speech)
  • Italy 
  • Latvia 
  • Liechtenstein
  • Lithuania 
  • Luxembourg 
  • Macedonia
  • Malta 
  • Monaco
  • Netherlands 
  • New Zealand
  • Poland 
  • Portugal 
  • Romania 
  • San Marino
  • Slovakia 
  • Slovenia 
  • Somalia
  • Spain 
  • Sweden 
  • United Kingdom 
  • United States



 And here's the video:

 
  • Thursday, September 22, 2011
  • Elder of Ziyon
From Foreign Policy:
Who's to blame for the continued failure of the Middle East peace process? Former President Bill Clinton said today that it is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu -- whose government moved the goalposts upon taking power, and whose rise represents a key reason there has been no Israeli-Palestinian peace deal.
Clinton, in a roundtable with bloggers today on the sidelines of the Clinton Global Initiative in New York, gave an extensive recounting of the deterioration in the Middle East peace process since he pressed both parties to agree to a final settlement at Camp David in 2000. He said there are two main reasons for the lack of a comprehensive peace today: the reluctance of the Netanyahu administration to accept the terms of the Camp David deal and a demographic shift in Israel that is making the Israeli public less amenable to peace.
"The two great tragedies in modern Middle Eastern politics, which make you wonder if God wants Middle East peace or not, were [Yitzhak] Rabin's assassination and [Ariel] Sharon's stroke," Clinton said.
Sharon had decided he needed to build a new centrist coalition, so he created the Kadima party and gained the support of leaders like Tzipi Livni and Ehud Olmert. He was working toward a consensus for a peace deal before he fell ill, Clinton said. But that effort was scuttled when the Likud party returned to power.
This is a bit of wishful thinking on Clinton's part. Sharon's goal in giving up Gaza was to help strengthen Israel's hold on the settlement blocs in Judea and Samaria,and this is why he was so keen on the letter from Bush that said that  the 1967 borders are a non-starter. I do not believe that Sharon would have been nearly as generous as Barak was before him and as Olmert was afterwards.
"[Palestinian leaders] have explicitly said on more than one occasion that if [Netanyahu] put up the deal that was offered to them before -- my deal -- that they would take it," Clinton said, referring to the 2000 Camp David deal that Yasser Arafat rejected.
 From all publicly available information, the Olmert offer in 2008 went even beyond the Clinton parameters, and the Palestinian Arabs kept on asking for more. So on this point I am calling BS - the PalArabs might have told Clinton this but it is not true.
But the Israeli government has drifted a long way from the Ehud Barak-led government that came so close to peace in 2000, Clinton said, and any new negotiations with the Netanyahu government are now on starkly different terms -- terms that the Palestinians are unlikely to accept.
"For reasons that even after all these years I still don't know for sure, Arafat turned down the deal I put together that Barak accepted," he said. "But they also had an Israeli government that was willing to give them East Jerusalem as the capital of the new state of Palestine."
The reason is simple, and it is the same reason that Abbas didn't accept any peace offers as well - because in the end, they want to ensure that they can continue to make more claims against Israel even after "peace." Whether it is the "right to return" or a demand for 1947 borders or whatever, there has been no desire on the Palestinian Arab side to truly end the conflict.
The Netanyahu government has received all of the assurances previous Israeli governments said they wanted but now won't accept those terms to make peace, Clinton said.
"Now that they have those things, they don't seem so important to this current Israeli government, partly because it's a different country," said Clinton. "In the interim, you've had all these immigrants coming in from the former Soviet Union, and they have no history in Israel proper, so the traditional claims of the Palestinians have less weight with them."
The Russian aliyah took place before Camp David. However, one thing is true - the Russian Jews know a thing or two about dealing with totalitarianism, and they recognize it in the Palestinian Arab leadership and their partners in Hamas. They know the tricks and the subterfuge that they experienced firsthand.
Clinton then repeated his assertions made at last year's conference that Israeli society can be divided into demographic groups that have various levels of enthusiasm for making peace.
"The most pro-peace Israelis are the Arabs; second the Sabras, the Jewish Israelis that were born there; third, the Ashkenazi of long-standing, the European Jews who came there around the time of Israel's founding," Clinton said. "The most anti-peace are the ultra-religious, who believe they're supposed to keep Judea and Samaria, and the settler groups, and what you might call the territorialists, the people who just showed up lately and they're not encumbered by the historical record."
Clinton has fallen into the lazy trap of regarding all Jewish residents of the territories as being religious Jews from Brooklyn!
Clinton affirmed that the United States should veto the Palestinian resolution at the U.N. Security Council for member-state status, because the Israelis need security guarantees before agreeing to the creation of a Palestinian state. But the Netanyahu government has moved away from the consensus for peace, making a final status agreement more difficult, Clinton said.
"That's what happened. Every American needs to know this. That's how we got to where we are," Clinton said. "The real cynics believe that the Netanyahu's government's continued call for negotiations over borders and such means that he's just not going to give up the West Bank."
Why is Israel the only state in the world who is not allowed to change its politics to the right? After all, Netanyahu and his coalition did get more votes than their opponents. That is what would be considered  a mandate in any other democratic context.

Turkey can decide on a whim to shut down diplomatic relations with other countries and to start threatening them. People aren't thrilled but no one says that Turkey must always adhere to the most dovish of its previous behaviors. Nations change, populations change, opinions change. And between Camp David and today there was a little matter called an intifada, that was enthusiastically embraced by the majority of Palestinian Arab society until they started losing. That is what made Israeli society move to the right, far more than anything else. To blame Netanyahu means to blame Israel for electing him. (And he has moved his positions leftward as well since he's been elected.)

This is why the goalposts were moved - the majority of Israelis were not comfortable with the direction that Kadima was going in giving up rights of Jewish self-determination.

Clinton is not stupid, and I respect him. But this analysis smacks more of egomania and nostalgia, a refusal to admit that it was Palestinian Arab terror that pushed Israel to the right - terror that was Arafat's strategic choice instead of accepting the Camp David offer. He doesn't even mention the slight problem of a split government between Gaza and Ramallah, and the terrorists that control 40% of the population.

Clinton wants to turn back the clock and pretend that nothing has changed in the past eleven years. It would be nice, but it is fantasy.

UPDATE: read the comments - there are some very good ones.

Also Elliot Abrams slams Clinton in The Weekly Standard.
The errors and misstatements in Clinton’s interview with bloggers are sufficient to change his reputation from that of a firm supporter of Israel into that of a firm supporter of Israelis who agree with his twisted version of the facts. Clinton simply blames the Israeli right for killing peace efforts. He appears entirely—in fact, embarrassingly— unaware of what has actually happened to the Israeli right over the last ten years, where the change has been extraordinary.
(h/t Noah)
  • Thursday, September 22, 2011
  • Elder of Ziyon
Here is a version of my Eldertoons poster as a 4' x 6' banner at the StandWithUs anti-Durban three-ring circus protest:


I hope it gets on the news....
  • Thursday, September 22, 2011
  • Elder of Ziyon
From Getty Images:

 Reuters shows some of them leaving;


I wonder if the representative of "Palestine" left too? After all, aren't they seeking a free, democratic state just like the nations that did leave?

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