Peace doesn't exist; neither do the Palestinians - Daniel Greenfield - http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/24206
Three assumptions are at the root of the senselessly Sisyphean peace process.
Salah Abu Miala, a Hevron businessman, traveled to Bahrain to attend the Bahrain peace conference. When he returned home, he was arrested by the Palestinian Authority.
A security official for the Islamic terror group admitted that there was no actual charge.
"It was a warning," he said. "He must understand the implications of this sort of collaboration."
Collaboration with the United States. The country that set up the PA and lavished billions in aid on it.
Another businessman managed to evade the crackdown on peace conference attendees.
The Palestinian Authority had not only boycotted the peace conference, but it arrested participants in the peace conference, and warned that participating in the peace conference was collaboration.
Collaboration, under Palestinian Authority law, can be punishable by death.
The message is that the Palestinian Authority really doesn't want peace. It has sabotaged peace conferences under Clinton, Bush, Obama, and now Trump. Every approach running the same narrow gamut from pressuring Israel to bribing the Palestinian Authority has been tried. They all end the same.
Just ask Salah who was locked up for attending a peace conference.
The pattern here is so obvious that it would take a diplomat or a politician to miss it. That's why we've been mired in it for so long. And the billions of dollars wasted and thousands of lives lost could have been saved if only our leaders had questioned their premises by asking three simple questions.
1. What if the Palestinians don't want peace?
2. What if there are no Palestinians?
3. What if there's no such thing as peace?
The three assumptions, that the Palestinians exist, that they want peace, and that enduring peace is an attainable condition in the region, are at the root of the senselessly Sisyphean peace process.
The peace process was launched under the assumption that the PLO really wanted peace. Or at least a deal. Surely, our best and brightest agreed, they couldn't possibly want an endless war.
And so, the truth was dismissed out of hand. It was too horrible to believe.
Decades of failed negotiations, rafts of Israel concessions, personal involvement by five presidential administrations, billions of dollars, with nothing to show for it, and the truth is still dismissed.
Instead, the official story is that Israel doesn't want peace. The media echo chamber resounds with a narrative in which Israel has moved sharply to the right and is run by ultra-orthodox religious fanatics.
And Netanyahu, who is hardly anyone's idea of an ultra-religious fanatic.
Also, the most right-wing party in the last Israeli election ran on a platform of marijuana legalization.
But it's easier to claim that Israel doesn't want peace than that the Palestinian Authority doesn't. If Israel doesn't want peace, that just goes to show that it's a bad actor and must forced for its own good. If the Palestinian Authority doesn't want peace, then the whole political premise of the process dies.
Israeli misbehavior can always be met with economic and political pressure. If the PA doesn't want peace on any terms, that means it was never really a government, just a front for a terror group.
And that terror group became vastly more powerful and dangerous because of the peace process.
Before the peace process, the idea that the PLO might not want peace seemed implausible. In the post-peace process, the idea is an explosive scandal whose culpability extends through the political establishments of dozens of countries, including America and Israel. And so, it can't be talked about.
Why did so many experts come to believe, against all evidence, that the PLO wanted peace? The error came about because the establishment had accepted the PLO's propaganda that it was leading a national struggle to set up a state on behalf of a population of displaced and oppressed people.
The truth was that Palestine, as an Arab cultural minority as opposed to a defunct Roman colony, was as much of a mythical invention as the Islamic State with its Caliph. Like ISIS, Hezbollah and countless Islamic terror groups around the region, the terror group tapped into grievances among a local minority, invented an identity for them, and, backed by foreign donors, launched a campaign to "liberate" them.
There are dozens of similar enterprises going on in the region at any given time. They don't enjoy the same level of support and recognition as the PLO does. None of them can actually run a state. Or want to. But neither does anyone else in the region. That's why it's always on the verge of exploding.
That brings us to the third assumption.
Peace as the natural state of the world is an exciting European delusion from just after one war and then another war that devastated the continent. There is as little evidence for this idea in human history as there is for the existence of a Palestinian kingdom, empire or anthill. And even less evidence for either the existence of peace or the Palestinians in its own region which has never experienced either one.
Even in Europe, the inevitability of peace keeps being interrupted by wars every generation. There are soldiers in the streets of Paris, where the first League of Nations meeting was held, fighting the war that France failed to fight in Algeria. After reviling the Pied-Noirs, the French are two generations away from becoming a nation of Pied-Noirs themselves, fleeing to Montreal to escape the Battle of Paris.
Peace is not the natural condition of mankind. It is a lovely thing that sometimes happens.
Generations of western diplomats keep stumbling into disasters because they believe that peace is inevitable. Therefore, the other side is bound to want it, because it wants the same things they do.
They never ask the terrible question, what if the other side wants something else?
Our foreign policy keeps falling apart because we never ask that question. We take the other side's claims at face value and view them through the flawed lens of our own wants and needs. We want peace; therefore, they must want it too. We want the killing to stop, how could they not?
No matter how many times peace fails, the fundamental assumptions are never questioned.
What if instead of negotiating with a national minority that wants land for its own state, we've been funding an Islamic terror group that was set up by the USSR to destabilize the region?
Which of these two possibilities better explains the history of failures in the peace process?
If the Palestinian Authority were a terror group set up by the USSR to destabilize the region, undermine Israel's existence, and drag America into a messy conflict, what would it be doing differently?
Nothing.
There's no solution here. There never was. The region is never at peace for longer than a week. When peace can't even hold between Sunnis and Shiites, how was it supposed to hold between either Muslim group and the Jews? The Arab Spring reminded us that every state in the region is just one crackup away from splitting apart into a civil war. What made anyone think that a terror group could create a state?
Or that it even wanted to.
We can solve the problem that five administrations have struggled with if we reevaluate our flawed assumptions about the world, the Palestinian Authority and the fictional people it represents.
All we have to do is ask the right three questions.
Friedman says U.S. peace plan will support 'Palestinian autonomy' - https://www.jns.org/friedman-says-u-s-peace-plan-will-support-palestinian-autonomy/
U.S. ambassador to Israel says the Trump administration does not use the term "two-state solution" in crafting its Mideast peace plan, but is not promoting a one-state solution, either.
U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman said on Tuesday that the Trump administration supports "Palestinian autonomy," but does not use the phrase "two-state solution" as it works to develop a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
"We believe in Palestinian autonomy," Friedman told CNN's Christiane Amanpour. "We believe in Palestinian self-governance. We believe that the autonomy should be extended up until the point where it interferes with Israeli security."
Asked if the as-yet-unveiled American peace plan is based on the two-state concept, Friedman responded "We haven't used that phrase, but it's not because we are trying to drive toward a one-state solution ... The issue we have is agreeing in advance to a state because the word 'state' conjures up with it so many potential issues that we think it does a disservice to us to use that phrase until we can have a complete exposition of all the rights and limitations that would go into Palestinian autonomy."
According to Friedman, the Bahrain "Peace to Prosperity" conference in June was intended to "help the Palestinians create some of the institutions necessary for statehood," but warned: "Let's be clear, the last thing the world needs is a failed Palestinian state in between Jordan and Israel."
He noted that even former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, who gained notoriety as a strong proponent of making concessions for peace, was unwilling to use the term "Palestinian state," preferring to use words "like autonomy and self-governance."
Friedman emphasized that the administration is not pushing for a one-state solution.
"I don't think anyone responsible in Israel is pushing for a one-state solution," he said. "I don't think there is a serious political movement in Israel for a one-state solution, and I don't think any of the acts Israel has taken or we've taken over the past two years is driving us to that point."
In the interview, Friedman also minimized comments he made in The New York Times in June about the legitimacy of Israeli annexation in parts of Judea and Samaria, saying the Israeli government has not raised the issue with the administration, which renders the matter "hypothetical."
Friedman told CNN that "it's good for Israel and good for the Palestinians" that the Israeli Security Cabinet approved construction of 700 Palestinian housing units in Israeli-controlled Area C, saying the U.S. administration has been encouraging Israel to improve conditions for Palestinians in the area.
There might be something to 'deal of the century' after all - Ben-Dror Yemini - https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-5561854,00.html
Opinion: The long-awaited Trump peace plan is not expected to include an offer of statehood for the Palestinians, unlike offers made by previous administrations and it would be wise for Ramallah to understand there will be no better offer on the table
You would be hard pressed to find a single political commentator who takes Donald Trump's "deal of the century" seriously.
Politicians also say there is nothing to the plan, while the Palestinian response to it will as always be negative - not because of Trump or Benjamin Netanyahu, since they would respond negatively to a Meretz proposal as well.
The only politician who still goes around claiming that the Palestinians never rejected his proposal is former prime minister Ehud Olmert. But he cannot be taken seriously because he was the one who at the time wrote that his proposal was indeed rejected, a version of events confirmed by the Palestinians.
But as time goes by, it seems there might be something to the Trump plan after all.
Circumstances in the region have changed and are continuing to change.
Iran has assumed the role of enemy for most of the Arab world.
Israel has become a strategic alley thanks to Iran, a situation for which it should be grateful.
The Palestinian position is being criticized more and more in the Arab world, both on social media and by journalists and bloggers. Even some politicians are expressing such views - which would have been unthinkable just a decade ago.
The outline of the deal is being revealed bit by bit. It is not just the economic plan whose gist was presented at the Bahrain summit in June.
There is no Palestinian statehood in the "deal of the century," only autonomy, as U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, a silent member of the administration's Mideast peace team, has revealed.
Friedman warned the Palestinians that the Clinton, Olmert, Kerry and Obama proposals are no longer on the table.
This is a blow to Saeb Erakat's vision of Israeli-Palestinian peace as told to the Jordanian Ad-Dustour daily newspaper in 2009: "At Camp David (in 2000) we were offered 90% (of the West Bank) and Olmert offered 100% (in 2008)."
Now the architects of the peace plan are making clear that all those proposals are a thing of the past and there is no better deal on its way.
When Arab countries are disintegrating because of jihad on one hand and Iran on the other, no stable Arab government would see the formation of a new Arab state as a dream come true. A bold new peace plan should propose taking a completely different direction.
Given all of the above, there may be some logic to holding a summit at Camp David as a continuation of the Bahrain conference. And maybe, just maybe, some Arab states would be supportive of that.
Jordan will continue to release statements in support of a Palestinian state, but it is actually the last thing Abdullah's kingdom needs. Such an entity would be prone to expansion to its east as well as its west and could threaten Jordan.
Additionally, Hamas would try and most likely succeed in seizing control of such a state.
Netanyahu's plan to build 700 housing units for Palestinians in Area C can be seen as a gesture of good will, if a proposal of autonomy is considered.
Regardless of whatever left-wing or right-wing political views its population may hold, a proposed peace settlement that would ensure Israel's continued existence as a Jewish and democratic state - and prevent a bi-national state down the road - is the best option.
Two attacks on two borders in one day: Is the IDF ready for war on 3 fronts? - by Anna Ahronheim -
What's the connection? Iran, Iran, Iran.
Two attacks on two borders in less than 24 hours. One targeted IDF troops stationed along Gaza, while another targeted Hezbollah positions in Syria's Golan Heights. Two incidents, miles apart. Just a small indication of the major challenge Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Aviv Kochavi faces in the next war.
Before dawn on Thursday, hours after the army completed the largest drill since Operation Protective Edge five years ago, a Hamas terrorist armed with grenades and a Kalashnikov infiltrated into southern Israel near the community of Kissufim and injured an officer and two soldiers before being killed by IDF reinforcements.
Several hours later, Israel was accused of striking a Syrian Arab Army position in al-Bariqa west of Queintra on the Golan Heights.
What's the connection?
Iran, Iran, Iran.
With fronts ripe for conflict to break out at any moment, the IDF's ability to operate effectively on multiple fronts simultaneously is crucial for Israel to deal with the region's unpredictable and explosive nature.
According to a report in Haaretz, Iran and Hamas have agreed to open a southern front should a war break out in the North. Israeli officials have warned that any northern war will not be confined to one border, but rather both the Lebanese and Syrian border.
That means war on three fronts.
The IDF, which has put Gaza as a top priority, is concerned that should a war break out in both the North and South, the military's air defense might not be as available, leaving whole communities and cities vulnerable to rocket fire.
Israel has accused Iran of growing involvement in Gaza, both financially and militarily.
Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar has boasted about his close ties to Hezbollah and Iran, including with Maj.-Gen. Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Revolutionary Guards' Quds Force. Hamas delegations have visited Tehran and met with Solemani and other senior Iranian officials following his appointment.
Despite facing its own economic crises, the Islamic Republic has increased its funding to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) to the tune of $100 million, to have more influence in Gaza. And in the West Bank, Israeli officials foiled around 130 Hamas terror cells in 2018 alone, up from the 40 foiled the previous year.
While the past few months have been "relatively" quiet in southern Israel, tensions with Gaza have significantly risen over the past year of weekly riots and occasional rounds of conflict, with thousands of rockets and mortars being fired at Israeli communities.
The IDF, in return, has struck hundreds of targets belonging to Hamas and PIJ (a group fully subservient to Iran) throughout the Strip.
Hamas, which itself is under intense public pressure due to the humanitarian situation in its territory, knows it cannot militarily survive another conflict with the IDF. But the army knows that another confrontation in Gaza, despite it being more prepared than before, will not end with it being a clear victor.
On top of that, the army is not too keen on another military operation in Gaza until the upgraded barrier to remove the threat of terror tunnels is completed, which is expected to be done by next summer.
And as Israel keeps its eyes warily on Hezbollah and Iran's entrenchment in the Syrian Golan Heights, it is also looking toward Iraq. Iran is believed to have transferred ballistic missiles capable of reaching Israel to terrorist groups there.
Despite Israel's missile defense capabilities being at an all-time high after successful trials of the Arrow 3 over Alaska this week, defense officials believe the advanced technological capabilities coupled with intensive firepower by the country's enemies - be it from the South or North - will lead to unprecedented damage and fatalities.
Israel fought simultaneously in Lebanon and Gaza in 2006. But 12 years later Israel's enemies have changed, and their military capabilities have increased tremendously.
"I get the impression that there is very high readiness for a possible campaign in Gaza," Kochavi said during the four-day exercise this past week. "We will continue preparing, on the assumption that a conflict could erupt any day."
The army under Kochavi needs to be ready: while the most imminent threat for war is on the southern front, the risk of a military confrontation in the northern arena, from three different countries at the same time, is not farfetched.
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