By Barry Rubin
It’s truly remarkable about how international diplomacy on the Middle East, especially Israel-Palestinian issues, is so out of touch with reality. Consider the Quartet’s response to the mess at the UN. The proposal is for Israel-PA talks to start within a month, both sides to present proposals on borders and security within three months, and to reach a final agreement by the end of 2012.
This is insane. The premise here is that the PA is really eager to negotiate a compromise agreement with Israel. Everything that’s happened in the past three years—indeed the last 18 years since the Oslo agreement was signed—shows the exact opposite. The PA spent a year building its campaign for unilateral independence at the UN precisely to avoid negotiating with Israel at all.
Why then create a Western policy that is not only doomed to fail but certain to fail in the most obvious and humiliating way? The Palestinians won’t negotiate in a month, they won’t rush to present any proposals in three, and they certainly won’t reach a peace treaty in a year. It looks like the PA will reject the whole proposal—a step for which they will pay no penalty but in fact will get more rewards and concessions, and thus will be encouraged to ignore the West even more.
The dumbest possible thing to do is to put a strict time limit on talks when your spoiled and rejectionist “client” doesn’t want to cooperate. The outcome will make the PA look very bad but “fortunately” the media and Western governments won’t point that out. Instead, the PA will run out the one-year deadline, then complain that Israel is at fault and doesn’t really want peace. and then urge speedy Western concessions to the PA and pressures on Israel.
Could anything possibly be more predictable? Perhaps the only possible explanation is that the U.S. government, UN, and EU (I doubt the Russians do so) believe their own propaganda. They really think the PA can’t wait to make a deal if only Israel is forced to negotiate and some more concessions are offer. Haven’t they learned anything?
In addition, perhaps in a time when claimed victimhood is the only measure of what is just, morale, and proper for foreign policy, the Western governments can’t get out of the rut of seeing the Palestinians only as victims. This requires the West to “help” them escape victimhood as fast as possible. Instead, the Palestinian leadership’s goal is the “old-fashioned” concept of total victory and turning their adversaries into total victims.
They don’t want to cease being “victims”; they want to start being conquerers. Consequently, the Western governments think the Palestinians are in a hurry to improve their lot while, in fact, they are patient in seeking instead to grind Israel into the dust.
Meanwhile, veteran Fatah leader Abbas Zaki has openly explained that the whole UN gambit is an effort to get an independent state as a step toward wiping Israel off the map. If Western journalists, experts, government official, and various “peacemakers” understood how this truly represents the Palestinian position a lot of money, time, and lives would be saved.
Negotiations are never going to happen. Israel has endorsed the Quartet proposal but the Palestinian Arabs are certain to reject it because it does not give them everything they want up front.
This is PR theater designed to make Western governments look good. Nothing will come of it since Western Middle East policy is based on the misconception the Palestinians are eager for – no desperate for a state – and are willing to make concessions to get one. In three to six months, the falsity of it will become obvious to the media.
What’s safe to say is the status quo is quite sustainable, indeed.
Israel has negotiated peace treaties, and yielded territory, to Arab states. Abbas has never negotiated peace with anyone…except Hamas.
Back in May, we read that the Palestinians had finally negotiated a peace agreement…with themselves. The Hamas terrorists in Gaza formed a “unity” alliance with the Palestinian Authority/Fatah government in the West Bank, so that they can work together for their common aims. The news stories did not mention what those aims are.
One clue might be found in the remarks of “moderate” leader Abbas in New York last Friday. Not at the UN, where he blamed Israel for, well, everything. But earlier that day, reported on Ynetnews.com:
“They talk to us about the Jewish state, but I respond to them with a final answer: We shall not recognize a Jewish state,” Abbas said in a meeting with some 200 senior representatives of the Palestinian community in the US, shortly before taking the podium and delivering a speech at the United Nations General Assembly.”
There you have it. His “final answer”. One wonders what his final solution might be?
And the great minds of the West simply urge the parties to negotiate!
Since Abbas refuses to negotiate until his pre-conditions are met, and since the US and the West seem to support these pre-conditions (no more Jew houses in
“Palestine”, and agreement to indefensible pre-1967 borders), Israel is once again the problem, and capitulation is the only solution.
Perhaps it is time for those 200 supporters in the US to show their faces and state their position. Only when the Pals begin to understand that their hardline positions are getting them no-where will they change those positions (presumably to just a different set of hardline positions).
The UN, the EU, Russia, and it seems more and more the US, have taken the immoral position that Israel has no right to keep any of the “settlements” without “permission” from Palestinian Arabs. Witness Catherine Ashton’s psychotic “condemnation” of Israeli building plans in Jerusalem. Under this view, the most painful Israeli concession, including the permanent renunciation of claims to real territory and the forcible removal of tens of thousands of Jews, is seen merely as a return of what is owed. At the same time, any pseudo-concession by the Palestinian Arabs, like abandoning their claim to the absurd “right of return,” is considered almost to be ex gratia, something the Israelis have no right to demand.
Dear Jews,
We want you dead. But, even if you agree to this, it’s no good to do it all Masada-like. We really want the pleasure of killing you ourselves.
Of course, you’ll have to help us, because we really can’t do anything for ourselves. You’ll have to set up a system with, perhaps, a hydraulic guillotine, and a conveyor belt to automatically feed you into it. And you can’t have any buttons on it, at least not any we have to press, because we are a passionate people, and will probably break it in ten minutes. When you are ever shooting AK-47s and rockets in the air, stuff gets broken, and killed.
Someone also needs to pay for this, because our leaders steal every penny from us, especially the American Dollars, which go to private Swiss accounts, so we never even see it. But we love our leaders. Like dogs. Rabid dogs.
Well, we’d like to say it’s been swell, but Allah doesn’t like us to lie. To other Arabs, anyway.
Hey! This thing’s stuck! Can you fix it, Achmed? No? Don’t kill that Jew too soon. He’s an engineer.
Your pal,
Mahmoud Abbas
“Death to the Jews since 1947″
Allah Ahkbar!
“Truces are permissible, not obligatory….Interests that justify making a truce are such things as Muslim weakness because of lack of numbers or materiel, or the hope of an enemy becoming Muslim…” – Umdat al-Salik, o9.16
All the accords must be signed from a position of force since the Language of the Bigger Fist is the only one an Islamist could understand. And even after an accord is signed it is only temporary and unbinding.
In 1993 the Oslo were signed, few months later-the Afula attacks. Israel withdrew from Gaza, few months later Gaza becomes Hamastan.
Each concession is a sign of weakness and honor-shame is a deeply embedded mentality inthe Islamic tradition and to negotiate with them first must understand their mentality. To put it in French: il faut le réduire à plus simple.
And just to be in line with the title of Mr. Rubin essay:
“Before Israel dies, it must be humiliated and degraded. Allah willing, before they die, they will experience humiliation and degradation every day.”-Khalid Mishal
“Instead, the PA will run out the one-year deadline, then complain that Israel is at fault and doesn’t really want peace. and then urge speedy Western concessions to the PA and pressures on Israel.”
That’s not a bug, that’s a feature!
This reminds me of the sunk cost concept. This describes the case where an investor behaves irrationally when their favorite stock plummets. Instead of selling and cutting loses, they watch their investment go down the tubes while praying and hoping for the stock to go back up.
I think it’s possible that the West’s power brokers have spent so many billions and invested so much into the peace now narrative that changing course is too intellectually and emotionally difficult. They will drive this stock into the ground before selling and cutting their loses!
The MEMRI video shows that:
1) The West pampers ultra-right wingers as long as they work under the cover of a politically correct narrative.
2) While the political spectrum in Western countries ranges from the secular left to the religious right, the spectrum in the Palestinian framework is from ultra secular right-wing nationalists to ultra right-wing theocratic fascists.
Now why doesn’t Ron Prosor, Israel’s UN ambassador, show this MEMRI clip to the UN Security Council?
Mladen, the majority at the U.N. would applaud.
Thank goodness for MEMRI. Here, the truth is exposed!
The policy of the Western left makes perfect sense if you can admit what their goal is – the eradication of Israel and the final, final solution to exterminate every Jew off the face of the earth.
Indeed, that is the ONLY explanation that makes sense. In particular, Prof. Rubin’s explanation (they just don’t understand) makes no sense at all, simply because nobody able to tie his own shoelaces could possibly be that dense and stupid. I am not a devotee of conspiracy theories, but the only way to explain the constant Western currying of the Palestinian cause is that the West has concluded that Israel was a mistake that needs to be undone. That may be a bitter pill to swallow, but it had better be internalized if we are to survive.
It can’t be any more explicit than what Zaki said on that TV clip. Even though they’ll never openly say it in any language other than Arabic, the fact a Fatah leader dares say it so explicitly on Al-Jazeera, the largest Arab TV channel, where so many people can hear it, is evidence of complacency, of security in the knowledge that saying it explicitly in Arabic can’t affect their international standing or the international position regarding Israel. And that complacency, that carelessness about disguising their true intentions, is evidence of either Western utter ignorance and gullibility or cooperation with these intentions. Do you believe it’s ignorance?
The West has the best intelligence services that can gather top secret information shared by only a few in the top civilian and military leaderships of both friends and foes, but they can’t discover an open “secret” shared with tens of millions on the largest Arabic TV channel? They can find Bin Laden and find Saddam hiding in a hole in the ground in some small village in Iraq, but they’ve never heard anything about what Arab leaders say openly on TV? They never got the rumor? No informant ever told them what he heard on TV or read in a newspaper? No Westerner who ever saw such clips on MEMRI website, or on the thousands of websites quoting MEMRI, or in the links in thousands of emails, ever passed it on? Nobody in any Western government, political party, media outlet or intelligence gathering service ever saw such tapes in spite of them being easily available to the general public? The Israelis never passed on such information to anyone in any position of power anywhere in the West?
That’s impossible. There’s no way that so many people in Western governments, media and intelligence services don’t know anything about it. As Abbas Zaki said, “everybody knows”. Ignorance can’t be the explanation to Western behavior, so it must be collaboration.
I’ve read Barry Rubin’s blog for a few years and witnessed his gradually growing frustration and gradually diminishing trust. The reason voices like Rubin’s don’t matter to decision makers is that he doesn’t tell them anything they don’t already know. They must know. The silent agreement is that as long as the Arabs don’t say it any language the average Westerner can understand, the show can go on.
Pnina, honey, the Palestinians could go on CNN or the BBC with the same message. They could put up billboards on all major highways. They could hire loud-speaker trucks and scream it out in every major city in Europe & the U.S.
It wouldn’t make a bit of difference. This is called, ”willful blindness” …
What you should be wondering is why our own government maintains this charade & refuses to take the appropriate action. Why are we still bullshitting about negotiations? Why do we still transfer funds to the PA? Why don’t we annex Area C & B + the Jordan Valley? Why don’t we lobby the US Congress to cut off money to the Palestinians?
Shana Tova.