Why the Israel Palestinian Peace Talks Fail

This is not an article on why the current peace negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinian Authority will most likely fail but about why all of these negotiations have and will forever fail. The common perception is that all that is necessary for there to be peace is for the Israelis to make sufficient sacrifices and surrender sufficient land for there to be peace. The mantra we hear over and over to the point it has become almost a chant that the world leaders recite whenever the Israelis and Palestinian Authority leaders meet is “Land for Peace.” There is actually no amount of land that Israel can surrender which will result in peace or even an agreement with the Palestinians. The simple truth is that there is only one result which the Palestinians are willing to accept, the complete annihilation of the Jewish State to be replaced by an Islamic Sharia State completely free of any Jewish, Christian or any non-Muslim religious group allowed to reside within. There will be protests with this claim which are fully expected.

 

I can hear the protestations already that the Palestinian Authority has been accepting and good to the Christians in their midst as claimed by those very same Christians who place the blame for their troubles with the Israelis where it belongs. The reason that the Christians leaders from within the Palestinian areas in Judea, Samaria and Benyamin have little choice in expressing their preferences; as if they do not blame Israel for their every woe, then the Muslims will lose vindictive destructions upon Christian businesses, churches, homes and people even higher degree than they currently inflict. Explain why in all of North Africa and the Middle East, an area almost exclusively under Islamic rule, everywhere in every location with but one exception the numbers of Christians have been decreasing for decades upon decades. The sole exception where the numbers of Christians has been steadily on the increase is Israel where freedom of religion is a treasured value which is held in high esteem. The Muslim lands are not so generous with their acceptance of those who even follow a branch of Islam which is different from that of the governing preference, let alone any religion other than Islam. If you wish to see what the treatment the Christians would receive under Palestinian rule if they spoke the truth all one need do is look to Egypt at the treatment of the Christians by the Muslim Brotherhood since they were removed from power. There have been days where as many as fifty churches have been completely looted of anything worth taking before being burned to the ground. Also, Christian owned businesses which have also been torched along with Christian homes, all of which have burned solely as the result of Muslim anger and perceived insult resultant to President Morsi being removed. The Christians were victimized and blamed for his removal despite the protests of literally tens of millions of Egyptians against his actions which excluded all except his cohorts within the Muslim Brotherhood. The Christians who used to make up approximately three quarters of the population in Bethlehem before the Palestinian Authority was gifted security and political control over the birth place of Jesus but now only a remnant making up less than ten percent still reside in this holies of holy cities in Christendom. The only part which Israel played in this entire procession of events was to gift control to the Palestinian as a result of the tragic Oslo Accords.

 

There are a number of horrific results from the continuing tragedy called the Oslo Accords. Perhaps the greatest of these has been the requirement on the Israelis to placate those who cannot be placated. We can boil down the Israeli needs to a single item which would be sufficient to destroy any possibility for peace. This one item is probably not one the majority of people would even be able to name, let alone be high on their list as Israel is often chastised for making too many demands and not showing a willingness to do what is necessary to reach a peace agreement. This one item has absolutely nothing to do with the settlements or Israeli towns and businesses that are in areas liberated from Jordanian illegal occupation as a result of the June 1967 War. It does not have anything to do with whether or not Israel will be allowed to retain the eastern half of Jerusalem which they have already made an integral part of Israel placing all of Jerusalem under Israeli political and security rule. This one item is not in reference to Israel being permitted to keep some defensive positions and monitoring stations in the Jordan Valley just west of the Jordan River as an early warning system to detect any attack approaching from over Jordanian space. The one item Israel insists the Palestinians meet is to recognize that Israel exists as the state for the Jewish People. The recognition that Israel is the reestablishment of the ancient Jewish homeland is about as basic an understanding of the real reason the world agreed upon when they setup the British Mandate with the stated intent to establish a homeland for the Jewish people. This was voted upon and established international intent for the creation of a state for the Jews before 1920 which is decades ahead of the horrors of the Holocaust. The claim often made that Israel was established as a guilt offering by a world shocked by the horrors of the Holocaust is so easily proved false it is remarkable that it has survived. The Balfour declaration came in 1917 and by 1920 the entire League of Nations had made the Balfour Declaration an international treaty recognized by the world. There have been numerous conferences and accords made all before World War II and the Nazi horrors which echoed and restated support for the establishment of a Jewish State in the Jewish ancient homelands. So, requiring the Palestinians to simply recognize that Israel is and was established as a state for the Jewish People is far from asking the impossible, yet this is the one point above all others which the Palestinians and rest of the Muslim World refuse to grant. Until the Muslim World can recognize that Israel is the state for the Jews, which is even mentioned in the Quran, there can be no peace and that is as simple as it gets. If the world really wishes to find a path to peace between the Jews and the Muslim World they need to require the Muslim World recognize that the Jews have rights to a homeland and that homeland is located as stated in the Old Testament, the Christian Bible and the Islamic Quran on the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea and includes all of Jerusalem, and only after this has been established should they demand that Israel give even more lands to the Palestinian authority.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

Bibi, Poor Election Results, and Making a Coalition

Back when Benyamin Netanyahu called for new elections he was confident and thought he had made a tactical decision which would not only provide him with a strong coalition, but a comfortable coalition where any of the lesser parties which chose to join being unable to threaten the coalition with a vote of no confidence. He made a couple of serious miscalculations along the way, one before finally calling for new elections and the other subsequent to dissolving his relatively strong coalition confident of a better tomorrow. Netanyahu’s first mistake occurred when he first decided to call for new elections rather than face the difficulties of making a new budget and facing Iran and other threats without a stronger and more stable coalition. He then reversed himself when Kadima, facing possible oblivion if new elections were called, offered to join Netanyahu’s Likud led coalition adding an impressive twenty-eight to the coalition which promised to give it the stability Netanyahu desired. Unfortunately, Shaul Mofaz, the recently elected leader of Kadima, replacing Tzipi Livni, and Netanyahu had a falling out within a couple of months and Kadima pulled out of the coalition which drove Bibi to again call for new elections. There was a short period of indecision and within a week Likud executed a vote of no confidence with coalition partner Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beyteinu. This excess drama and indecision likely was just the initial sign of weakness and began his problems. Soon after dissolving the coalition, Netanyahu and Lieberman merged their two parties in the hopes of forging an unopposable center-right consensus party. This was the next step in the undoing of Netanyahu’s plan as the religious parties resented Lieberman and Yisrael Beyteinu. Then came the months of waiting for elections which soon became a long march towards mediocrity for the Likud- Beyteinu super party.

Then came the coup de grace during the campaign. For reasons which will be the raw meat for dissecting what not to do in a campaign, the senseless and viscous attacks by numerous members of Likud aimed at the Jewish Home Party, the one party that most observers would have thought would be a natural fit with Likud, inflicted harm on both parties though it appears that Likud was the greater harmed. There were the claims that the lead of Jewish Home, Naftali Bennett, was the difficulty as he had once been the Chief of Staff for Bibi which led to a messy split between the two. Some placed the problem with Bibi’s wife, Sara Netanyahu, as the one who had some difficulties with Bennett which drove the spite campaign. Whatever the source, the viciousness and pure undiluted bile heaped on Naftali Bennett and the Jewish Home Party drove many away from the Likud-Beyteinu Party as many nationalists were put off and dismayed by the attacks on another nationalist party. The attacks also did result in lower support for the Jewish Home Party as they had been designed to be. The result in the end was a falling off from a combined total of forty-two seats for Likud and Beyteinu in the previous Knesset to thirty-one seats in the new Knesset. This loss of eleven seats not only damaged the power for the new combined party but also will force the Likud-Beyteinu Party to rely on and be susceptible to the whims of even the smallest parties who they will end up depending on to form their coalition. The damage was so complete as to have been just short of the cusp of allowing for a left-leaning coalition being formed blocking Netanyahu from making a coalition and allowing for a social issues coalition instead of what Netanyahu hopes to build, a nationalist and capitalist bent coalition. There are so many good old sayings that could be utilized to cap off this article, but in the spirit of allowing everyone their own freedoms, unlike the mistakes made by Likud-Beyteinu with their limiting attacks, we will allow you to choose your own to finish with your favorite.

Beyond the Cusp

The Israeli Zionist Election Question

The Israeli election is fast approaching and the Israeli nationalists, often referred to as the Zionists, come in two types, religious and secularist. Usually these two groups tend to vote for political parties which are tailored and tooled to fit their exacting preferences. This election is apparently going to be somewhat different and, if the polls are accurate, there may be a fairly significant number of crossover votes and these two groups are ending up vying for many of the same voters. Part of this phenomenon is due to the persona of the new head of the Jewish Home (Bayit Yehudi) Naftali Bennett on one side and some dissatisfaction and mistrust of Likud leader, the current Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu. Then there are the usual new parties which are usually driven by one of two items, personality or hot button issue. There are three such new parties with two driven by their founders’ belief that they are the answer for all of Israel’s problems. One was started by former leader of Kadima, Tzipi Livni, who left Kadima after she lost the election to Saul Mofaz in the party’s primary. Another was started by ex-newscaster Yair Lapid who appears to be following in the same tracks that his father traveled from journalist become politician whose party achieved initial success making it into the Knesset for one election and failed thereafter. Time will tell if the younger Lapid will exactly mirror his father’s feats. The final one is Otzma Leyisrael which is headed by current MKs Michael Ben-Ari and Aryeh Eldad who split from their party after their faction lost the leadership positions.

There will be the usual contest between the two main sides as in every previous election pitting the liberal left socialists against those who have been attempting to remove the government from its heavy investment in the economy. The main subject that is separating these groups in this election is not actually economics but nationalism and those purporting the end of the Oslo Accords versus those who still hold out that peace is just the right offer away and that Mahmoud Abbas is an honest broker and the Oslo Accords are still relevant. It is this debate that has driven much of the election campaigning with secondary subjects being the place of women in the religious sector of society, whether to replace the deferment for religious males who are devoting their lives to the study of Torah and related writings, choosing a Prime Minister who would be capable of developing a more friendly and agreeable relations with United States President Obama avoiding the antagonism apparent between Netanyahu and Obama, and all the rest of the subjects that have been the center of recent Israeli elections. But my real curiosity tends towards the interesting and sometimes troubling history of current Prime Minister Netanyahu and the surprise of the election, Naftali Bennett and the Jewish Home Party, who has watched over the rise of the party which seemingly simply grew stronger the more criticisms they received from the rest of the other parties in the election.

The question that will be on the mind of what appears to be a relatively significant sector of the Zionist nationalist will be choosing between the known package of Likud and the reelection of Prime Minister Netanyahu or taking a chance on an unknown with Jewish Home Party leader, Naftali Bennett. Other than the diehard, leftist, post-Zionist, mostly secular voters who could never vote for anyone other than the Labor Party, the Arabists and pro-Palestinians who will support the Arabist parties, the Haredi who are religiously locked to vote for Shas, and the really hardcore leftist who will support Meretz, the majority will be deciding the election between Netanyahu and Bennett. What makes this even more interesting is that Netanyahu could have easily avoided the entire drama by simply making an offer to Naftali Bennett to publically state that their respective parties would form the core of a coalition of pre-Zionist nationalist government. Instead, Likud, most likely under the directions of Netanyahu, attacked Bennett directly as well as the Jewish Home Party. This has likely been one of the main motivating factors in driving some voters from supporting Likud to support Jewish Home. But what has been even more interesting is that there also appears to have been voters leaving Tzipi Livni’s party and Yair Lapid’s party as well as the most surprising, defections from the Labor Party who have also gone over to Jewish Home. Another oddity which has sent some looking for an alternative to Likud and Netanyahu in Bennett has been announcements even by members of the Likud Party that Bibi Netanyahu will seek to form a coalition, any coalition, as long as it does not include Naftali Bennett and the Jewish Home Party. Along with these statements have been others, some even by Netanyahu, which have declared that he is seeking to form a balanced coalition, or even a unity coalition, with as many parties from all views so he will have room to make decisions which would be seen as unfavorable to the nationalists in order to reach the goals he feels are achievable. This has made a number of nationalists nervous about whether or not Netanyahu can be trusted or are the suspicions that he might be ready to execute another disengagement similar to what happened when Prime Minister Sharon left Likud and formed Kadima in order to disengage from Gaza, this time in Judea and Samaria, possible valid. If this is what Prime Minister Netanyahu does after winning the election, it may be a very long time before anybody trusts Likud again and they will simply become another post-Zionist party. The fears that this is the Likud plan could push a change in votes that will be far more drastic than the polls have shown and could lead to Jewish Home and Bennett forming the next government. Such an eventuality is highly unlikely but still has a remote chance. Everything could turn simply by Prime Minister Netanyahu making one misstep and removing all doubt by stating he is ready to make painful sacrifices in order to reach a peace with Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinians. So, all we can do now is make our choices, vote on Tuesday, and wait to see the results.

Beyond the Cusp