Friday, February 7, 2014

What happens after the Palestinians once again give a thumbs-down to an American proposal for "peace"?

Jonathan Tobin at Commentary asks the big question:

The majority of Israelis are rightly concerned about the consequences of a West Bank withdrawal and the very real possibility that the Hamas terror state in Gaza will be replicated in any other land that the Jewish state surrenders.
But the key question that those, like Kerry, who are urging the Netanyahu government to do just that is not about the merits of a pact that would make the Jewish state more vulnerable. Rather, it is about what Kerry and his minions will do after the Palestinians once again say, “no.” After all, they’ve already done it three times. And, if news reports are correct, they may be on the verge of a fourth rejection of American-imposed terms in the wake of Israel putting an offer of 90 percent of the West Bank while being compensated for the remaining ten percent with land swaps inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders, or other exchanges.
Though most in the news media treat this information as being only slightly more arcane than the details of the Peloponnesian Wars, the fact is, Israel has already offered the Palestinians an independent state in almost all of the West Bank, Gaza, and a share of Jerusalem three times. And three times they refused to say yes to Israel. The first two refusals were straightforward “no’s” from Yasir Arafat in 2000 and 2001, who answered Ehud Barak’s peace offers with a terrorist war of attrition called the second intifada. The third time, Arafat’s successor Mahmoud Abbas was so worried about being forced to say no again that he fled the U.S.-sponsored negotiations with Israel in 2008 as soon as the Israelis made their offer in order to avoid giving an answer at all.
If Abbas finds another reason to avoid accepting a generous deal that would give the Palestinians the independence they claim is their goal, it raises the question of how Israel’s critics will justify the BDS campaign that Kerry threatened the Jewish state’s punishment if an agreement is not reached. Will they dismiss Israel’s offers as insignificant or not worthy of an answer? Or will they claim the difference between 90 percent of the West Bank plus swaps and every inch of the territories that Israel won in a defensive war in 1967 is so significant that it justifies an economic war on the Jewish state, terrorism, or both?
It will be another display of the  chasm between good old reality and the utopian vision of the FHer overlords.


2 comments:

  1. I am staying tuned here at http://beastwatchnews.com/

    ReplyDelete
  2. Kind of an interesting roundup of developments.

    ReplyDelete