Israelis and Saudis Reveal Secret Talks to Thwart Iran - Eli Lake - http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-06-04/israelis-and-saudis-reveal-secret-talks-to-thwart-iran
Since the beginning of 2014, representatives from Israel and Saudi Arabia have had five secret meetings to discuss a common foe, Iran. On Thursday, the two countries came out of the closet by revealing this covert diplomacy at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.
Among those who follow the Middle East closely, it's been an open secret that Israel and Saudi Arabia have a common interest in thwarting Iran. But until Thursday, actual diplomacy between the two was never officially acknowledged. Saudi Arabia still doesn't recognize Israel's right to exist. Israel has yet to accept a Saudi-initiated peace offer to create a Palestinian state.
It was not a typical Washington think-tank event. No questions were taken from the audience. After an introduction, there was a speech in Arabic from Anwar Majed Eshki, a retired Saudi general and ex-adviser to Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the former Saudi ambassador to the U.S. Then Dore Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations who is slotted to be the next director general of Israel's foreign ministry, gave a speech in English.
While these men represent countries that have been historic enemies, their message was identical: Iran is trying to take over the Middle East and it must be stopped.
Eshki was particularly alarming. He laid out a brief history of Iran since the 1979 revolution, highlighting the regime's acts of terrorism, hostage-taking and aggression. He ended his remarks with a seven-point plan for the Middle East. Atop the list was achieving peace between Israel and the Arabs. Second came regime-change in Iran. Also on the list were greater Arab unity, the establishment of an Arab regional military force, and a call for an independent Kurdistan to be made up of territory now belonging to Iraq, Turkey and Iran.
Gold's speech was slightly less grandiose. He, too, warned of Iran's regional ambitions. But he didn't call for toppling the Tehran government. "Our standing today on this stage does not mean we have resolved all the differences that our countries have shared over the years," he said of his outreach to Saudi Arabia. "But our hope is we will be able to address them fully in the years ahead."
It's no coincidence that the meetings between Gold, Eshki and a few other former officials from both sides took place in the shadow of the nuclear talks among Iran, the U.S. and other major powers. Saudi Arabia and Israel are arguably the two countries most threatened by Iran's nuclear program, but neither has a seat at the negotiations scheduled to wrap up at the end of the month.
The five bilateral meetings over the last 17 months occurred in India, Italy and the Czech Republic. One participant, Shimon Shapira, a retired Israeli general and an expert on the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, told me: "We discovered we have the same problems and same challenges and some of the same answers." Shapira described the problem as Iran's activities in the region, and said both sides had discussed political and economic ways to blunt them, but wouldn't get into any further specifics.
Eshki told me that no real cooperation would be possible until Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, accepted what's known as the Arab Peace Initiative to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The plan was first shared with New York Times columnist Tom Friedman in 2002 by Saudi Arabia's late King Abdullah, then the kingdom's crown prince.
Israel's quiet relationships with Gulf Arab states goes back to the 1990s and the Oslo Peace Process. Back then, some Arab countries such as Qatar allowed Israel to open trade missions. Others allowed an Israeli intelligence presence, including Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates.
These ties became more focused on Iran over the last decade, as shown by documents released by WikiLeaks in 2010. A March 19, 2009, cable quoted Israel's then-deputy director general of the foreign minister, Yacov Hadas, saying one reason for the warming of relations was that the Arabs felt Israel could advance their interests vis-a-vis Iran in Washington. "Gulf Arabs believe in Israel's role because of their perception of Israel's close relationship with the U.S. but also due to their sense that they can count on Israel against Iran," the cable said.
But only now has open cooperation between Saudi Arabia and Israel become a possibility. For Gold, it represents something of a sea change. In 2003, he published a book, "Hatred's Kingdom," about Saudi Arabia's role in financing terrorism and Islamic extremism. He explained Thursday that he wrote that book "at the height of the second intifada when Saudi Arabia was financing and fundraising for the murder of Israelis." Today, Gold said, it is Iran that is primarily working with those Palestinian groups that continue to embrace terrorism.
Gold went on to say that Iran is now outfitting groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon with precision-guided missiles, as opposed to the unguided rockets Iran has traditionally provided its allies in Lebanon. He also said Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps forces propping up the Bashar al-Assad regime are now close to the Israeli-Syrian border.
A few years ago, it was mainly Israel that rang the alarm about Iranian expansionism in the Middle East. It is significant that now Israel is joined in this campaign by Saudi Arabia, a country that has wished for its destruction since 1948.
The two nations worry today that President Barack Obama's efforts to make peace with Iran will embolden that regime's aggression against them. It's unclear whether Obama will get his nuclear deal. But either way, it may end up that his greatest diplomatic accomplishment will be that his outreach to Iran helped create the conditions for a Saudi-Israeli alliance against it.
Something Else Coming in September: A UN Resolution Establishing a Palestinian State - By Michael Snyder -
http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/something-else-coming-in-september-a-un-resolution-establishing-a-palestinian-state There has been a lot of talk about things that are going to happen in September, but something that has been almost totally overlooked is the fact that the UN Security Council is likely to be voting on a UN resolution which will establish a Palestinian state at that time. Right now, France is working on a proposed resolution which would give formal UN Security Council recognition to the Palestinians, would declare that a divided Jerusalem is the capital of both Israel and a Palestinian state, and would set the 1967 borders as the baseline for future negotiations which would establish the final borders between the two nations. It is being reported that France will submit this resolution for a vote after the 70th session of the UN General Assembly begins on the 15th of September. At this moment, 136 nations have already recognized a Palestinian state, but the United States has always blocked recognition by the UN Security Council. This time may be different though, because there are quite a few indications that Barack Obama actually plans to back the French resolution in September. If that happens, and the UN Security Council approves this resolution, it is going to have enormous implications for all of us.
Not a lot of people understand that this is happening, so let's take this step by step.
Back in March, the Wall Street Journal and other news sources reported that the French were working on a new Security Council resolution which will establish the parameters for a Palestinian state...
France will begin discussions in the coming weeks on a U.N. Security Council resolution that would set out the steps for a negotiated end of Israel's occupation of Palestinian land and a solution to the nearly 70-year-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict, France's Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said on Friday.
According to the Times of Israel, this resolution will use the 1967 borders as the baseline for future border negotiations, and it sets Jerusalem as the capital city for both states...
France sees a window of opportunity after Israel's elections to get the United States on board with a new push for Mideast peace, and is preparing a draft UN Security Council resolution in about 12 days, according to French diplomatic officials.
The draft would define the pre-1967 frontier as a reference point for border talks but allow room for exchanges of territory, designate Jerusalem as capital of both Israel and a Palestinian state and call for a fair solution for Palestinian refugees, one official told The Associated Press on Tuesday.
And according to WND, the proposed French resolution draws heavily from a UN resolution which established a partition plan for the land of Israel back in 1947...
The French draft is said to be based on U.N. Resolution 181, dating back to Nov. 29, 1947, which provided for the establishment of two separate states. Called the partition plan, Israel accepted the deal, but the Arab governments rejected it and went to war against Israel. It would have created an independent Palestinian state on 52 percent of historic Palestine.
The current proposal is said to call for an independent state in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, creating a Palestinian state on 22 percent of the area.
"We don't and we won't give up on this," said Francois Delattre, French ambassador to the U.N.
So when will this new resolution be brought to a vote at the UN?
According to Haaretz, the French hope to submit their plan for a vote when the new General Assembly session begins in September...
The proposed French resolution will only be tabled after the June 30 deadline set for the nuclear negotiations with Iran. The intention is to bring it to a vote in the Security Council during the General Assembly session in New York in September.
If you understand what I am saying and you are able to put all of the pieces together, you probably just had a "whoa moment". It would be hard to overstate just how important this is.
As I mentioned above, up until now the U.S. has always blocked any attempts to get the UN Security Council to recognize a Palestinian state.
But now that Barack Obama is completely and totally fed up with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that could be changing. The following is a pretty good summary of where things stand today...
White House spokesman Josh Earnest pledged on May 12 that following "the comments made by the prime minister in the closing days of his election," the United States would change its approach toward promoting a solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Earnest was referring, of course, to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's comment that a Palestinian state will not be established as long as he is prime minister. The most likely assumption, based on Earnest's words, was that the president will replace his indulgence of Netanyahu's procrastination on the process with support for proposals for resolving the conflict. Among other things, the new approach appears to include a freeze of the US veto at the UN and its institutions until such time as Israel deigns to extract the two-state negotiations from the freezer.
If the United States does not veto the French resolution later this year, it will almost certainly pass. So right now, the only thing standing in the way of a Palestinian state is Barack Obama. And considering the fact that he is probably the most anti-Israel president in our history that is a very sobering thought.
Publicly, Obama is being very coy about what he plans to do. But privately, it appears that he has already made up his mind. In fact, Debka is reporting that Obama has given France a "green light" to move forward with this resolution...
US President Barack Obama did not wait for Binyamin Netanyahu to finish building his new government coalition by its deadline at midnight Wednesday, May 6, before going into action to pay him back for forming a right-wing cabinet minus any moderate figure for resuming negotiations with the Palestinians.
Banking on Netanyahu's assertion while campaigning for re-election that there would be no Palestinian state during his term in office, Obama is reported exclusively by our sources to have given the hitherto withheld green light to European governments to file a UN Security Council motion proclaiming an independent Palestinian state.
In addition, Debka is also reporting that officials from the Obama administration have actually traveled to France to help draft this new UN resolution...
To show the administration was in earnest, senior US officials sat down with their French counterparts in Paris last week to sketch out the general outline of this motion. According to our sources, they began addressing such questions as the area of the Palestinian state, its borders, security arrangements between Israel and the Palestinians and whether or not to set a hard-and-fast timeline for implementation, or phrase the resolution as a general declaration of intent.
Incorporating a target date in the language would expose Israel to Security Council sanctions for non-compliance.
And like I discussed earlier, we are not likely to see any action taken on this resolution until the new session of the UN General Assembly begins on September 15th.
Global leaders probably hope that this plan will bring peace.
But it won't. In fact, it will just greatly inflame tensions in the region.
In the end, I believe that this "peace plan" will only lead to more war.
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