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TechnoratiIsraeli Leader Reveals Why Israeli Shuns Negotiation
Israeli government officials are experts at finding excuses to avoid negotiating with Palestinians. Israel’s Minister of Strategic Affairs, Moshe Ya'alon, pulled out an old one the other day: "There is no partner on the Palestinian side, we just give, and we get nothing."
Others have now come up with a new one: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in his recent speech, “Let us begin peace negotiations immediately without prior conditions”; but the Palestinians, backed by the Obama administration, are demanding a halt to settlement expansion as a precondition to talks.
Either way, it seems, the Palestinians (as usual) must take all the blame.
But now, in a rare moment of unguarded honesty, Israel’s second ranking leader, Ehud Barak -- Defense Minister, former Prime Minister, former head of the military -- has let the truth slip out. According to Israel’s premier newspaper, Ha’aretz, Barak told reporters: “In negotiations with the Palestinians, Israel is the ‘only one that can give, the Palestinians are the underdog and the talks are asymmetrical.’ But in regional talks, Barak said, it becomes clear that Israel is the isolated party.”
Israel has to look like the isolated underdog to keep up the myth that it is the innocent, virtuous, aggrieved party. That has always been a fundamental principle of Israeli strategy: Someone else must take all the blame for the conflict that keeps Israelis as well as their neighbors insecure. The only difference now is that a top Israeli leader has admitted it in public.
Barak knows perfectly well that the other excuses for avoiding direct negotiations with the Palestinians are bogus.
Take the “no partner” ploy. For many years the Israelis had a universally-accepted Palestinian partner, Yasser Arafat. Arafat could not embrace Barak’s so-called “generous offer” at Camp David in 2000 because it was actually an offer to create a state of Palestine that was bound to fail. The New York Times recently called it, quite rightly, an “archipelago” of small clumps of land separated by Israeli settlements, security roads, and check points. The Israelis continue to offer only variants on the same impossible plan.
When Arafat turned down the offer, knowing that his people would never tolerate it, the Israelis launched a calculated plan to make him “irrelevant” and then proclaim that they had “no partner for peace.” Unfortunately, the plan worked all too well.
After Arafat’s death and the electoral victory of Hamas, the Israelis’ great fear was that the two major Palestinian parties, Hamas and Fatah, would create a unified government, whose head would obviously be a partner for peace. So they torpedoed every effort in that direction, exacerbating (with U.S. help) the conflict between the two parties that continues to the present day.
Palestinian unity efforts continue, too. Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas has just ordered the release of all Hamas prisoners held by his security forces, in a goodwill gesture aimed at speeding the formation of a single Palestinian government. We can expect some kind of high-profile Israeli violence to break up that effort any day now, to make sure there is “no partner for peace.”
The other Israeli argument against negotiations -- the claim of Palestinian preconditions -- is equally bogus. It was Netanyahu who recited, in his major address, a litany of conditions the Palestinians would have to accept in any settlement, many of them so painful that he can be quite sure they’re impossible for his foe to swallow: no capital in Jerusalem, no right of return (not even a symbolic one), no withdrawal from or even freeze on settlements, and a state at some vague future date with no army, no control of their air space, no right to sign treaties unless Israel approves them.
As Barak rightly pointed out, Israel is in a position to demand such preconditions because it has all the power. It is “the only one that can give,” and that leaves it in a position to dictate the outcome of negotiations from the beginning. Against all that, the Palestinian negotiators have to come up with some way to shift the power balance a tiny bit in their direction. Otherwise, they will sit down at the negotiating table powerless. And then, why should they bother to talk at all?
So against all of Israel’s preconditions they’ve come up with this one, relatively minor precondition of their own: freezing expansion of the settlements immediately, which means only that Israel should begin complying with international law. Full compliance with Article 47 of the Fourth Geneva Convention would mean removing all the quarter-million or so Jewish settlers from the occupied territories, as Tony Judt recently pointed out. However, as Judt noted, Netanyahu has made it painfully clear that the settlements will stay: “His government has no intention of recognizing international law or opinion with respect to Israel’s land-grab in “Judea and Samaria.”
That makes it all the more important for the Israelis to find some way to avoid direct talks with the Palestinians while keeping up their image as the innocent underdogs. Hence, as Barak said quite plainly, they will resist two-way talks with the Palestinians and demand a regional peace conference -- which can be dragged on for years, with the settlement issue lost amid the vast complexities of regional matters, while the settlements themselves continue to grow quite unnaturally. Thank you, Mr. Defense Minister, for that rare moment of honesty.
54 Comments so far
Show All"Wanderer June 24th, 2009 6:59 am
I am not mistaken, and you are splitting hairs to justify Chernus, a Zionist trying to co-opt the left in support of a genocidal invasion called Israel.
So use your search engine on "generous offer" and see what comes up.
What comes up is that Zionists push the line that Arafat turned down the offer. The reason they claimed Arafat did that is to imply he wasn't interested in negotiating and he was being unreasonable. That's the Zionist line.
Arafat didn't turn down the offer. He continued negotiations, meaning the Zionist line that he wasn't interested in negotiations was a lie. ..."
---------
YOU ARE again distorting things.
1) You did not say "generous offer" in what I quoted from your post!
The following is from my post, the one you replied to with the above.
QUOTE:
MikeCorbeil June 24th, 2009 2:40 am
"Wanderer June 23rd, 2009 8:57 pm
How about, "When Arafat turned down the offer..."? He's lying - Arafat never turned down the offer but continued negotiating. But the Zionist line is that he turned it down. CHERNUS IS LYING.
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1113
Chernus is trying to co-opt us to protect Zionism."
END QUOTE
Note that I quoted your entire post and NO WHERE in it do you refer to "generous offer".
Hence, POINT PROVEN! That's the point that you're again distorting things.
And, again, you said to refer to the article at fair.org to prove your point, only it does not. It does as I already explained!
So you have in NO WAY proven that Ira Chernus is a Zionist or at all siding with them without him saying this explicitly. If you have proof, then it is NOT from this article of his; it would have to be from others he's written.
Furthermore, wherein Ira Chernus puts "generous offer" in quotes, this is either to quote the words from a tierce source, or to mock, and given he doesn't say he's quoting those words from another source, he is therefore mocking the "offer"; because, as he additionally says, Israel's leader achieved the plan he had, which was nothing good for the Palestinians.
It's all very clear for anyone who knows how to correctly read!
"Zionism" is the code word for "Jew"
Zionism = Jewish White Supremacy
Which is why they are so comfortable with the religious right
Actually, most of the time it is the other way around.
Absolutely - the only ones wanting to conflate Zionism and Jews are the Zionists themselves
in order to wield the anti-Semitism club whenever they want.
The club is reserved for bigots. You should know that by now habib. Nobody takes the rants of islamofascists seriously.
"Wanderer June 23rd, 2009 8:57 pm
How about, "When Arafat turned down the offer..."? He's lying - Arafat never turned down the offer but continued negotiating. But the Zionist line is that he turned it down. CHERNUS IS LYING.
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1113
Chernus is trying to co-opt us to protect Zionism."
I DO NOT SEE that in what Ira Chernus says about the Camp David story in this article of his. Maybe he was mistaken about Arafat having "turned down the offer", but it's quite clear that he's not trying to make Israel out to have been the "good guy". Basically, he says Arafat turned down the "offer" Israel presented because this "offer" was rotten.
QUOTE:
... Arafat could not embrace Barak’s so-called “generous offer” at Camp David in 2000 because it was actually an offer to create a state of Palestine that was bound to fail. ...
When Arafat turned down the offer, knowing that his people would never tolerate it, the Israelis launched a calculated plan to make him “irrelevant” and then proclaim that they had “no partner for peace.” Unfortunately, the plan worked all too well.
END QUOTE
That rather specifically says that the so-called "generous offer" would fail if Arafat accepted it, so it's credible that he did reject it.
And Ira Chernus adds that what Israel really planned for was non-agreement; very deliberately, too, evidently. So Ira Chernus is right when saying that Israel's plan worked, because the Israeli leader didn't plan for the talks to culminate with any agreement; none that would be fair anyway.
This is what Ira Chernus says!
And it's all the more obvious that Wanderer is wandering alright, but in some fanatical world of fictional stories. The fair.org article Wanderer provided a link for provides this additional element of proof.
QUOTE:
...
Locking in occupation
To understand what actually happened at Camp David, it's necessary to know .... ...
...
Had Arafat agreed to these arrangements, the Palestinians would have permanently locked in place many of the worst aspects of the very occupation they were trying to bring to an end. For at Camp David, Israel also demanded that Arafat sign an "end-of-conflict" agreement stating that the decades-old war between Israel and the Palestinians was over and waiving all further claims against Israel.
Violence or negotiation?
The Camp David meeting ended without agreement on July 25, 2000. At this point, according to conventional wisdom, .... ...
But the Intifada actually did not start for another two months. In the meantime, there was relative calm in the occupied territories. During this period of quiet, the two sides continued negotiating behind closed doors. Meanwhile, life for the Palestinian population under Israeli occupation went on as usual. ...
The Intifada began on September 29, 2000, when Israeli troops opened fire on unarmed Palestinian rock-throwers .... Demonstrations spread throughout the territories. Barak and Arafat, having both staked their domestic reputations on their ability to win a negotiated peace from the other side, now felt politically threatened by the violence. In January 2001, they resumed formal negotiations at Taba, Egypt.
The Taba talks are one of the most significant and least remembered events of the "peace process." ...
END QUOTE
The last paragraph of section or subsection entitled "Locking in occupation", in the fair.org article, and which is about what really happened at Camp David, the text reads:
"Had Arafat agreed ..."
That clearly and literally means that he did not agree, which is the same thing as saying he turned down the "offer". And what I left out of this one section of the article describes the conditions that israel presented and they are clearly hellish; but as the same fair.org article relates, many "news" media reported the failure of these talks by faulting Arafat, when it was clearly, obviously the fault of the Israeli leader.
The Taba Talks! This is the first time that I've heard or read of these talks and the rest of what the fair.org article says on this is indeed important. I recommend that anyone not familiar with this topic read this fair.org article.
It's Wanderer who's mistaken; not Ira Chernus!
I am not mistaken, and you are splitting hairs to justify Chernus, a Zionist trying to co-opt the left in support of a genocidal invasion called Israel.
So use your search engine on "generous offer" and see what comes up.
What comes up is that Zionists push the line that Arafat turned down the offer. The reason they claimed Arafat did that is to imply he wasn't interested in negotiating and he was being unreasonable. That's the Zionist line.
Arafat didn't turn down the offer. He continued negotiations, meaning the Zionist line that he wasn't interested in negotiations was a lie. When Chernus writes, "When Arafat turned down the offer...", HE LIED along the lines of the Zionist talking points. Granted, Chernus gives it nuance because of the audience here, but Chernus remains a Zionist and is willing to push their talking points.
Zionists like Chernus are moral monsters, the worst of the banality of evil types, as they appropriate the language of morality to push agendas like Zionism. By appropriating the language of morality, and the resulting evil, it makes it all the more difficult to discuss morality itself. They not only break the moral sphere, they intentionally hamper the ability to rebuild it.
Israel drew first blood. We are tired of paying for it.
Explain how most of the dead in the recent Gaza campaign were found to have ak-47 bullets in them. Israel doesn't use ak-47s, hamas does. Seems like hamas used the chaos to settle some old political scores and try to blame it on Israel.
-- Basically, the Galil assault rifle can be described as a modified Kalashnikov AK-47 design. --
Gee, that took 15 seconds to find out.
The IDF was using the AR15 along with the 223 round.
And, I'll add that this is a very good article by Ira Chernus. If there are any flaws about or in the piece, in any way, then I didn't notice them.
How about, "When Arafat turned down the offer..."? He's lying - Arafat never turned down the offer but continued negotiating. But the Zionist line is that he turned it down. CHERNUS IS LYING.
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1113
Chernus is trying to co-opt us to protect Zionism.
Palestine, an "archipelago", the NYT wrote?
Ira Chernus wrote:
"Take the “no partner” ploy. For many years the Israelis had a universally-accepted Palestinian partner, Yasser Arafat. Arafat could not embrace Barak’s so-called “generous offer” at Camp David in 2000 because it was actually an offer to create a state of Palestine that was bound to fail. The New York Times recently called it, quite rightly, an “archipelago” of small clumps of land separated by Israeli settlements, security roads, and check points. The Israelis continue to offer only variants on the same impossible plan."
A reader, seasalt, claims to disagree.
"seasalt June 23rd, 2009 3:00 pm
re the bit about nyt calling the barak/ clintom proposal an offer of an "archipelago of small clumps of land" - the nyt did not call it so at that time."
FIRSTLY, at what time was "that time"; recently, or in 2000, during or sometime soon following the Camp David meeting? If the latter, then it's not what Ira Chernus wrote, for he clearly and specifically says that the NYT "recently" said this of Palestine, that it's an "archipelago".
Wake up and take note that we're presently June 23, 2009, and year 2000 is not particularly "recent"; really.
Also NOTE that Ira Chernus did not write that the NYT called Palestine an "archipelago of small clumps of land", but an "archipelago", which Ira Chernus then further explained by adding the words of, "of small clumps of land". A recent NYT piece does use basically all of these terms, but not in one single, consecutive set of words.
Take this following recent NYT blog article f.e.
"The West Bank Archipelago",
by Robert Mackey, May 7, 2009
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/07/the-west-bank-archipelago
EXCERPT:
To get a better idea of where the mapmakers are starting from, take a look at a fanciful map of the West Bank called “L’archipel de Palestine orientale” (”The Archipelago of Eastern Palestine”), drawn by Julien Bousac for the French publication Le Monde Diplomatique, and republished recently on the blog Strange Maps. Mr. Bousac’s imaginary map illustrates how fragmented the areas of the West Bank currently under the control of the Palestinian Authority are by portraying them as islands, divided by areas under Israeli control, which are represented by the sea.
(map)
In a post on this imaginary map, the French blogger Gilles Paris shows an excerpt from the real map of the various zones of control in the West Bank produced by the United Nations that Mr. Bousac used as the basis for his drawing. On Thursday, the same U.N. body that produced that map, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, released a report on the “fragmentation” of Bethlehem caused by Israel’s security barrier and settlements. As The Guardian’s Rory McCarthy reports, Israel’s new foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, “lives in Nokdim, one of the Jewish settlements in the Bethlehem area.”
In an interview, Mr. Bousac told the blog Strange Maps that his map “is not about ‘drowning’ or ‘flooding’ the Israeli population, nor dividing territories along ethnic lines,” but is simply “an illustration of the West Bank’s ongoing fragmentation based on the (originally temporary) A/B/C zoning which came out of the Oslo process.”
...
What Mr. Bousac’s imaginary map does quite neatly is illustrate that while there are countries in the world made up of pieces of land as divided as those parts of the West Bank currently under Palestinian control, there are none that are not real archipelagos, surrounded by water, rather than by parts of another state.
Since some degree of fragmentation is a feature of many of the maps proposed by Israeli governments in recent years for the shape of a Palestinian state, it seems important to ask what chance a country with this landlocked archipelago shape really has of becoming a viable nation-state. ...
This leaves aside the more obvious problem that the biggest island in a Palestinian archipelago is the Gaza Strip, which is completely cut off from the West Bank. ...
END OF EXCERPT(S)
There are perhaps other articles using this terminology in referring to Palestine, but I just did the Web search to find this above NYT blog piece and won't bother to try to find more. One suffices to prove that Ira Chernus was right and seasalt ... mistaken. Actually, based on the results in the first Google page, there seems to be at least one more NYT piece using this terminology; that one piece evidently having a title referring to "Eastern Palestine", as opposed to "West Bank".
"howdypez June 23rd, 2009 4:28 pm
I've just returned from my first trip to Israel. Being there and seeing things first-hand changes everything. I didn't visit the Gaza strip or the West Bank, yet the treatment of the native people there is horrendous even in the 'regular' parts of Israel."
YES, the treatment of non-Jews, especially Palestinians or else all Arabs in Israel, is very bad, at least in some parts of Israel anyway. There have been a number of articles posted at www.uruknet.info on this very topic over the past couple of months or so.
howdyprez:
"Keep in mind that not all Palestinians are extremist Muslims. Many are Christians and non-practicing Muslims. And yes, there are Zionist extremists as well."
THAT is a partially ignorant statement, because it leaves inferred that all Palestinians who are Muslim, practicing Muslims, are extremists and they are certainly not all this way; surely most of them are [not]. Many, the majority of Palestinians supported electing Hamas, [democratically], and this was [not] done because these voters are extremists or that even Hamas is extremist. Hamas commits what are reported to be extreme acts, but it's not really an extremist group. To fire rockets, and rather minor they are, as evidenced by the little damage and few Israelis killed by these things, many of the Israelis are only injured by these minor rockets, and that's only for the relatively very few Israelis who are ever personally touched, physically, by the firing of these rockets. Well, to fire these rockets is certainly not an extremist action when we carefully keep in mind the necessary comparitive analysis. When considering what Israel has been doing since 1947 or 1948, these rockets fired by a relatively few Palestinian militants or resistance fighters are [nothing], just firecrackers.
Overall, evidently very few extremists exist among the Palestinians. Otoh, many extremists exist in Israel; many, given the total population of that so-called state, which was illegally established with the rather wholly illegal approval of the UNSC.
The islamofascists and neo nazis crawl out of their caves to cover the internet with hate filled lies. You would think the world has learned it's lesson from WW2 but apparently not. At least with this go-around it won't be a pretty ending for the bigots.
islamofascists? Dude stop quoting your hero George Wanker Bush II
You only make yourself look hella ignunt and a laughingstock. You are quite entertaining, I must say
Pfpfpfpf!!! he ain't that entertaining - just a white supremacist neonazi quote machine.
I was being sarcastic, see the rest of my comments. Sorry if you don't like irony and sarcasm
Hey if the shoe fits. How else would you describe these people who are pretending to be part of the left? The people who support suicide bombings, beheadings, amputations, stonings, kidnappings, jihad, honor killings, child brides, female genital mutilation, Holocaust denying....to name a few.
And they're out there waiting for you Charlie. With their turbans and beards and vests made of explosives. They're hiding in your closet and under your bed and you probably work with one. Everyday they wake up and plot and scheme to destroy your SUV and teevee shows with naked women. They hate your singing and dancing and want you to wear a robe too.
go clean your gun
with your mouth
I've just returned from my first trip to Israel. Being there and seeing things first-hand changes everything. I didn't visit the Gaza strip or the West Bank, yet the treatment of the native people there is horrendous even in the 'regular' parts of Israel.
Keep in mind that not all Palestinians are extremist Muslims. Many are Christians and non-practicing Muslims. And yes, there are Zionist extremists as well.
Settlements are only part of the problem. The Israeli's are walling in various towns, creating ghetto's the the people are unable to leave, while the next town over is not. They will build a road through the middle of another area, putting walls up on either side and restrict the access, splitting a community in half with no access to the other.
As an outsider I noticed that the Palestinians were very kind or ignored us, where the Jews were rude, even pushing one of our older group members out of the way so they could get on an elevator before her. Whether this was intentional or not to gain sympathy, I do not know, but the Jewish people did not help their cause with me.
My advice is to not judge too harshly what you have not seen with your own eyes.
"And yes, there are Zionist extremists as well."
How can that be? After all, Israel is an immoral and illegal invasion, based on bigotry, and pursuing an aggressive genocidal occupation.
Zionism is a moral monstrosity. As for what I've seen with my own eyes, you Zionists continually demand people believe your lies over what is plain in front of our eyes. So no thanks for the false advice.
I do appreciate your personal observations and anecdotes. However making a judgement based solely on anecdotal information is also inadequate. Your suggestion sounds very top-down and elitist. I must disagree strongly
That is why we have civil society, education and research systems, international law and people like Dr. Richard Falk who are impartial experts. Dr. Ilan Pappe, Norm Finkelstein, Jimmy Carter, Neve Gordon, Desmond Tutu.
I was not present in the Soviet Union during the Purges, but I have a judgement about it, I was not present at the summary slaughter of Native Americans by white imperialists, yet I do indeed have a judgement. I was not present at the slaughter of Gaza, but I do indeed have a judgement.
re the bit about nyt calling the barak/ clintom proposal an offer of an "archipelago of small clumps of land" - the nyt did not call it so at that time. 90% of editorials and commentaries suggested that the offer was fair. Neither were any maps of the proposed offer published to enable the public to judge.
The only solution to bring down the Apartheid Israeli state:
Boycott Divest and Sanctions. It worked before and it will eventually work again.
Keep in mind that Ira Chernus himself is a Zionist that's trying to co-opt us.
When Boulder wanted to do a largely symbolic divestment of Israeli-intensive stock, who lead the charge to defeat this? Ira Chernus.
Take his good points, but keep in mind his ultimate goal is the protection of preservation of Israel.
Chernus is also the target of a great deal of Zionist hatemongering because he tells the truth. Have a bit of sympathy for the guy.
Really? He tells the truth? Like telling Boulder that it was a mistake divesting because it would make peace less possible.
Give it a break. Just because he can read the writing on the wall doesn't mean he's a moral person - he's just realistic in his goal of propping up an immoral and illegal genocide.
"Enlightened Self-Interest" is not a moral position - it's an attempt to use the language of morality to further your goals, and the goal of Chernus to protect Zionism.
But by adopting the language of morality, he is trying to co-opt those who want to use it for legitimate moral goals.
Lots of islamofascist trolls on this board.
When are you people going to learn that the Middle East is not owned exclusively by arabs or islam? I guess you will have to continue being taught that lesson by the IDF.
Wow the racist hatmongers come out da woodwork again, what a coincidence eh?
talk a about neo-Fascism, lets see:
Israel perpetuates:
ethnic cleansing
war crimes
racist hatred
Jewish White Supremacy
imperialism
puts Palestinians in the world's largest concentration camps
views palestinians as animal, sub-humans with no Human Rights
Sound Familiar?
The Zionist hatemongers come out of the woodwork whenever an article to do with Israel, Muslims, or both, comes up on CD. Note how they're often the first to post on such articles, as was "Charles Martel" in this case. They must data-mine for these and similar subjects across the web, so they can quickly get down to work spreading their lies.
ahhh...Yishai....is that you, you self professed illegal settler and murderer...?
Just like the Iranian revolutionaries who are chanting "Death to islamofascism" and "Islam is a lie", when are the palestinians going to throw off the shackles of this primitive and violent ideology which has been directly responsible for so much blood and tears?
You could say the same for the jews and the christians.
Just like the T-shirts the Israeli Far Right Fascists wear depicting a pregnant Palestinian woman "one shot, two kills" What does that remind you of? Talk about beyond Chutzpah.
That has already been proven to be palestinians dressed up as Israelis.
Wow! Do you really believe that, King Charles?
yeah right, whatever you want to tell yourself there tough guy.
when you show me the deed to your land...You are a fucking buffoon aren't you?
This genocidal monstrocity never had any intention of peace or following international law. It's all cruelty and averice, as it always has been ever since this tribe wandered out of the Arabian desert.
How long before the Israeli people punch through the Likudnik propaganda wall and dump the bas+ards? How bad does it have to get?
The Israeli people. along with the vast majority of Jews, seem OK with the "bas+ards".
After all, Israel is an immoral and illegal invasion, and I applaud those resisting the genocidal occupation.
Zionism is a moral monstrosity - so why would they change now?
It's hard to negotiate with someone who believes they will receive 72 virgins by blowing themselves up on a crowded bus.
The resident racist zionist troll is back....
apparently with a different handle. Charles Martel was a Frankish King, the Franks were a Germanic tribe that settled in what is now France. Curious that a right-wing hatemonger would choose such a name.
Exactly what I was thinking. I believe his father was Charles the Fat.
It is not necessary to negotiate when you have such superior military strength and are than more willing to be the most evil nation in the world. If you think Muslims are wildly superstitious then you have never met a pious ultra-conservative Jew.
The use of bombing as a tactic actually began with the zionists themselves.
q
Mmm the car bomb comes to mind. Wasn't here a hotel, too? A ship, Liberty? Disregard for the sovereign airspace of a dozen countries?
Poor eternal victims!