Seven Reasons Kerry's Mideast Talks Are Delusional

By Jeffrey Goldberg, Bloomberg, July 31, 2013

Well OK, then: In about nine months, the Arab-Israeli conflict will be over, and we can all move on to something else.

Here's what John Kerry, the U.S. secretary of state, said yesterday at a news conference in Washington, in the presence of the lead Palestinian and Israeli peace negotiators: "The parties have agreed here today that all of the final status issues, all of the core issues, and all other issues are all on the table for negotiation. And they are on the table with one simple goal: a view to ending the conflict, ending the claims. Our objective will be to achieve a final status agreement over the course of the next nine months."

Just to be clear, this is what will need to happen by next April, in time for the White House signing ceremony:

1. Jerusalem, the holiest city in Judaism and the third-holiest in Islam, will have to be divided in a way that doesn't cause a global religious war. A Palestinian capital will have to be established in the eastern half of the city, and the world's Muslims must agree to the continued control over much of the Old City, including and especially the Western Wall, by Israel. For their part, the Israelis must agree to cede permanent control of the Temple Mount, Judaism's holiest site, to Muslim religious authorities. That or the parties must agree to international control over the so-called Holy Basin, which contains the most important sites of monotheism.

2. The Jews who live in Hebron, Judaism's second-holiest city, must be made to leave, because the city will be part of Palestine. Or the Palestinian Authority must be convinced to grant them citizenship. The stated position of the Palestinian Authority is that Palestine will be empty of Israelis.

3. The descendants of the Palestinians who either fled or were expelled from what is now Israel during the 1948 Arab attack on the fledgling Jewish state must be told that they aren't moving to Israel. The president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, must also survive the inevitable attempts on his life if he agrees to give up the Palestinian claim of "return." Also, the Palestinians will have to agree never to lodge claims against Israel again.

4. A plan must be formulated to remove anywhere from 50,000 to 80,000 Israelis from the settlements on the far side of the West Bank security barrier. Among these settlers are thousands of fanatics who sympathized with the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the former Israeli prime minister, for negotiating with the Palestine Liberation Organization. Also, Israel will have to stop building new settlements and thickening others. The current Israeli government is possibly the most pro-settler one in the country's history, and a good percentage of the Israeli officer corps, the soldiers who would have to remove Jews from settlements, lives in settlements.

5. Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu must be persuaded to trust each other. As Avi Issacharoff writes in the Times of Israel, "Abbas believes Netanyahu is unwilling to make peace, while Netanyahu believes Abbas is unable to. Both are sending out pessimistic vibes, giving those around them the feeling that nothing much will come of all this. This can be seen in their decision to send representatives to Washington instead of holding a high-level summit."

6. Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, where almost half the future citizens of Palestine live, must either dissolve itself or be dissolved by force or change its ideology in such a way as to conform to the Palestinian Authority's vision of compromise. If Hamas refuses to change, then Israel and the Palestinian Authority must have an effective plan to counter the mass acts of terrorism that often come during periods of heightened hopes for peace.

7. Hezbollah and Iran must be convinced not to start a war designed to interrupt the peace process. Also, Iran must be stopped from going nuclear, which would further destabilize an already destabilized Middle East. Also, Egypt must not collapse, the Syrian civil war must not spill over into the Israeli-Palestinian arena, Lebanon must remain a unitary state and Jordan must stay under control of the Hashemite monarchy.

I'm sure I'm missing some things. I'll mention those later, whatever they are. I actually admire Kerry's chutzpah a great deal. It's important, for the sake of the Israeli and Palestinian peoples, that a compromise is constructed in a way that prevents further bloodshed. I just hope that there's a secret Plan B -- some sort of interim arrangement that could forestall further tragedy even in the absence of a permanent accord.

Because if there isn't, and Kerry's negotiations fail, then the situation next year may be even unhappier than it is now.

 

The Five Flaws of Kerry's Mideast Peace Process

By Noah Beck, The Algemeiner, August 1, 2013

1) No Palestinian reciprocity at the outset. Israel agreed to release 104 convicted terrorists just to get the Palestinians to talk peace. Would the U.S. agree to release 104 Guantanamo prisoners for talks with anyone?

Israel will undoubtedly be blamed if negotiations fail, so it's unlikely that fair judgment by the international community motivated the release. Perhaps it was the price that Israel had to pay for a U.S. promise to prevent Iranian nukes and/or support Israel's efforts to stop them. If so, is the U.S. good for its word (despite Obama's repeated demonstrations that his Mideast "red lines" are meaningless)?

Whatever the explanation for Israel's good-faith opening, there were plenty of ways for the Palestinians to reciprocate: removing anti-Israel incitement from their textbooks and/or official media, recognizing Israel as a Jewish state, promising to "freeze" their anti-Israel diplomatic offensives, etc. But Secretary of State John Kerry preferred to establish that Palestinian reciprocity is optional: if Israel isn't volunteering what the Palestinians demand, they need only threaten to leave the talks and Kerry will compel the Israelis to comply.

2) No Palestinian good faith. The Palestinians will be represented by Saeb Erekat and Mohammad Shtayyeh. Shtayyeh's Facebook page displays a map of Israel's internationally recognized borders, plus the West Bank and Gaza – all emblazoned with the Arabic letters for "Palestine." So the person entrusted with negotiating a "two-state solution" openly admits that his Mideast map has room for only a Palestinian state. Just as alarming, during a recent sermon attended by Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas and broadcast on Palestinian television, Religious Endowments Minister Mahmoud al-Habbash compared the PA's decision to negotiate with Israel to the Prophet Muhammad's Treaty of Hudaibiya (in the year 628 CE): "in less than two years, based on this treaty, the Prophet returned and conquered Mecca. This is the example. It is the model."

3) No religious freedom in a future Palestinian state. Palestinians insist (ironically) that "peaceful coexistence" means no Jewish settlers in their state. But, on principle, why should Jews be banned from living in a future Palestinian state -- particularly when Muslims constitute over 17% of Israel's population? Will the future Palestinian state be as hostile to religious minorities as other Muslim majority states are? Unfortunately, recent history gives little reason to hope otherwise. Khaled Abu Toameh, an award-winning, Arab journalist reported the following about a year ago:

According to the Greek Orthodox Church in the Gaza Strip, at least five Christians have been kidnapped and forced to convert to Islam in recent weeks...Church leaders...accused a prominent Hamas man of being behind the kidnapping and forced conversion of a Christian woman, Huda Abu Daoud, and her three daughters. Radical Islam, and not checkpoints or a security fence, remains the main threat to defenseless Christians not only in the Palestinians territories, but in the entire Middle East as well.

While Gaza is ruled by Islamists, the PA has also shown its hostility to Christians. On March 12, 2012, Algemeiner reported that

"A week after Prime Minister Salam Fayyad told an [international] audience of Evangelical Protestants...that his government respected the rights of its Christian minorities, [PA] officials...informed Bethlehem pastor Rev. Naim Khoury that his church lacked the authority to function as a religious institution under the PA...[T]here is a sense among Christians in Bethlehem that anti-Christian animus has gotten worse in the city...Khoury said."

A few weeks ago, Palestinians vandalized the Cave of the Patriarchs, Judaism's second holiest site. How safe will non-Muslim holy sites be if there is no more Israeli presence in the West Bank? Will a future peace agreement specifically guarantee protection of and Israeli access to Jewish holy sites?

If Israel's presence in the West Bank has helped to moderate Muslim rule there, will Israel's complete departure mean that West Bank Christians can expect their persecution to worsen to Gazan levels (with abductions and forced conversions)? Palestinian insistence that their future West Bank state be "Judenrein" doesn't bode well for the indigenous Christians there (or for religious freedom).

4) No Palestinian mandate to negotiate peace. There are about 2.1 million Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank and 1.7 million in the Gaza Strip. But Hamas-ruled Gaza vehemently opposes peace negotiations and denies Israel's right to exist. Islamic Jihad and Hamas recently lambasted PA leaders for meeting with Israelis to talk peace. The last time that the PA announced direct talks with Israel, Hamas announced plans to launch terrorist attacks at Israel, in coordination with 12 other Gaza terrorist organizations.

And it's not even clear that West Bank Palestinians favor these talks. Last Sunday, they rallied against peace until PA police violently suppressed the protest. Human Rights Watch has urged the Palestinian government to investigate the police beatings. Moreover, Abbas himself has no legal mandate, as his term of political office expired long ago yet he continues to rule with no elections in sight.

At best, the PA can deliver only half of any peace that it promises, which lets Palestinians have their cake and eat it too: the PA can extract painful territorial concessions from Israel at the negotiating table, while Hamas can continue terrorist attacks to achieve the one-state solution embraced on Facebook by PA "peace negotiator" Mohammad Shtayyeh.

5) Transferring the West Bank could be Israel's geostrategic undoing. Jordan could collapse any day from a flood of about 500,000 Syrian refugees (and growing daily); severe poverty; popular discontent over corruption, inequality, and lack of freedom; acute water shortages; and/or Muslim Brotherhood action to overthrow King Abdullah's monarchy. These factors make the Abdullah regime's survival increasingly uncertain. After Israel militarily withdraws from the West Bank, will Hamas topple the PA there as it did in Gaza (two years after Israel's 2005 Gaza withdrawal)? What if the Hamas-allied Muslim Brotherhood then takes over Jordan? If Jordanian-Palestinians -- the largest ethnic group in Jordan -- create a Palestinian state there (as advocated by this Jordanian-Palestinian writer), would Palestinians effectively have two states? The range and severity of threats to Israel from the combination of a post-Abdullah Jordan and a Palestinian West Bank state are considerable. Is it even possible to address these Israeli security concerns in a way that leaves Palestinian negotiators satisfied enough to sign a peace treaty?

With so many inherent defects in the current peace talks, why would the U.S. push its most reliable Mideast ally (and the only Middle East democracy) into such perilous waters or inevitable blame? One explanation is the increasingly fashionable idea (promoted by Arab governments) that settlements are blocking a peace deal that would produce Mideast stability. But inconvenient facts completely contradict this idea: Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, Bahrain, and Yemen (etc.) would remain the same conflict-torn mess as they are now after any Israeli-Palestinian peace.

Noah Beck is the author of "The Last Israelis," a submarine thriller about the Iranian nuclear threat and the doomsday scenario that it could produce.