Israel Matzav: Will that be all, Saeb?

Will that be all, Saeb?

Former 'Palestinian' chief negotiator bottle washer Saeb Erekat says that if only Israel would agree in advance to withdraw to the 1949 armistice lines, we could start negotiating again. Of course, he doesn't say just what it is we might negotiate.

What could go wrong?

Israel Matzav: Will that be all, Saeb?

Israel Matzav: No great surprise here: Canada says Nobama

No great surprise here: Canada says Nobama

Coming just a few weeks after the stunning (due to its margin) re-election of Conservative Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, it should come as no surprise to anyone that Canada is not going to back Barack Hussein Obama's pressure on Israel (Hat Tip: Memeorandum).

“What the government of Canada supports is basically a two-state solution that is negotiated,” a senior federal official said. “If it’s border, if it’s others issues, it has to be negotiated, it cannot be unilateral action.”

Pressed by reporters, federal officials said both the Israelis and the Palestinians have to decide on their bottom lines, which the Israelis have said will not include a return to the 1967 border.

“If the two parties are of the view that this is a starting point, that is fine for them,” said the federal official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The Prime Minister’s director of communications, Dimitri Soudas, added that Canada’s position continues to be the search for a two-state solution.

“No solution, ultimately, is possible without both parties sitting down, negotiating and agreeing on what that final outcome will look like,” he said.

Canada under Stephen Harper is a true friend of Israel.


Israel Matzav: No great surprise here: Canada says Nobama

Israel Matzav: The indefensible 'borders'

The indefensible 'borders'

The map above should show you why Prime Minister Netanyahu said that Israel cannot go back to the 1949 armistice lines. And if you don't get it from there, here's Dore Gold.

The cornerstone of all postwar diplomacy was U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, passed in November 1967. It did not demand that Israel pull back completely to the pre-1967 lines. Its withdrawal clause only called on Israel to withdraw "from territories," not from all territories. Britain's foreign secretary at the time, George Brown, later underlined the distinction: "The proposal said 'Israel will withdraw from territories that were occupied,' and not from 'the' territories, which means that Israel will not withdraw from all the territories."

Prior to the Six Day War, Jerusalem had been sliced in two, and the Jewish people were denied access to the Old City and its holy sites. Jerusalem's Christian population also faced limitations. As America's ambassador to the U.N., Arthur Goldberg, would explain, Resolution 242 did not preclude Israel's reunification of Jerusalem. In fact, Resolution 242 became the only agreed basis of all Arab-Israeli peace agreements, from the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli Treaty of Peace to the 1993 Oslo Agreements between Israel and the Palestinians.

How were Israel's legal rights to new boundaries justified? A good explanation came from Judge Stephen Schwebel, who would later be an adviser to the State Department and then president of the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Writing in the American Journal of International Law in 1970, he noted that Israel's title to West Bank territory—in the event that it sought alterations in the pre-Six Day War lines—emanated from the fact that it had acted in lawful exercise of its right to self-defense. It was not the aggressor.

The flexibility for creating new borders was preserved for decades. Indeed, the 1993 Oslo Agreements, signed by Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn, did not stipulate that the final borders between Israel and the Palestinians would be the 1967 lines. Borders were to be a subject for future negotiations. An April 2004 U.S. letter to Israel, backed by a bipartisan consensus in both houses of Congress, stipulated that Israel was not expected to fully withdraw, but rather was entitled to "defensible borders." U.S. secretaries of state from Henry Kissinger to Warren Christopher reiterated the same point in past letters of assurance.

If the borders between Israel and the Palestinians need to be negotiated, then what are the implications of a U.N. General Assembly resolution that states up front that those borders must be the 1967 lines? Some commentators assert that all Mr. Abbas wants to do is strengthen his hand in future negotiations with Israel, and that this does not contradict a negotiated peace. But is that really true? Why should Mr. Abbas ever negotiate with Israel if he can rely on the automatic majority of Third World countries at the U.N. General Assembly to back his positions on other points that are in dispute, like the future of Jerusalem, the refugee question, and security?

Mr. Abbas's unilateral move at the U.N. represents a massive violation of a core commitment in the Oslo Agreements in which both Israelis and Palestinians undertook that "neither side shall initiate or take any step that will change the status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip pending the outcome of Permanent Status negotiations." Palestinian spokesmen counter that Israeli settlements violated this clause. Yet former Prime Minister Rabin was very specific while negotiating Oslo in preserving the rights of Israeli citizens to build their homes in these disputed areas, by insisting that the settlements would be one of the subjects of final status negotiations between the parties.

Read the whole thing.

The Wall Street Journal agrees.

But all attention is now focused on the coda he offered about the Arab-Israeli conflict, in which he said that "the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines." Though he immediately added that those lines should be adjusted "with mutually agreed swaps" of territory "so that secure and recognized borders are established for both parties," it's the 1967 line that is sticking.

And with good reason. At its neck, the distance from the Mediterranean coast to the West Bank is nine miles. Foreign analysts may imagine that strategic depth no longer matters, but Israelis know better thanks to the thousands of short-range rockets fired at their towns from Hamas-controlled Gaza. As candidate Obama said when he toured one such Israeli town in 2008, "If someone was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that, and I would expect Israelis to do the same thing."

Well, exactly. Which is why it was strange to hear Mr. Obama, in a speech otherwise devoted to urging change in the nature of Arab societies, suddenly revert to the tired land-for-peace formula that has so often failed. Since the rest of Mr. Obama's speech borrowed heavily from President Bush's Freedom Agenda, he might also have taken a cue from his predecessor's June 2002 speech, which conditioned Palestinian statehood on renouncing terrorism and liberalizing politics.

That concept is all the more appropriate now that Hamas has joined the Palestinian government, a point Mr. Obama acknowledged in his speech. Most Israelis would not object to a Palestinian state, even on the 1967 lines, if its politics resembled those of, say, Canada. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's problem is that political trends among the Palestinians lean more in the direction of Iran, despite some recent promising economic trends.

Nor does it help that Mr. Obama wants Israel to withdraw from Palestinian territory even before the two sides resolve the issues of the status of Jerusalem and of the 1948 Palestinian refugees, recently in the news with their attempt to force their way through Israel's borders. No Israeli leader is going to give up the West Bank without resolving those existential issues, since it would merely allow the Palestinians to pocket the territorial gains while perpetuating the conflict.

The President's team is explaining the speech as an attempt to restart the moribund Israeli-Palestinian talks, but it will accomplish no such thing.

Indeed.

Although right now, I doubt most Israelis would agree to any 'Palestinian state.' Most of us have had enough.

Israel Matzav: The indefensible 'borders'

Israel Matzav: Beck: Who needs Yasser Arafat when you have the President of the United States?

Beck: Who needs Yasser Arafat when you have the President of the United States?

I was getting emails about this while it was on television.

Glenn Beck rips Obama's sellout of Israel.

Let's go to the videotape (Hat Tip: Cheryl H).



Make sure especially to watch the interview around the 14:00 mark.

Israel Matzav: Beck: Who needs Yasser Arafat when you have the President of the United States?

Israel Matzav: What's the change?

What's the change?

I've seen a lot of comments out there on the net claiming that it's not such a big deal that Obama wants the 'Palestinian state' to be based on the '1967 borders' (really the 1949 armistice lines), because Olmert and Barak both offered that in the past.

Well, it is a big deal. Here's why.

There is certainly something very new in the US endorsement of the 'Palestinian' position that the 'Palestinians' are presumptively entitled to sovereignty over all Mandatory areas captured by the Arab League in its invasion of Israel in 1948 and held by the Arab states until 1967, and therefore Israel has to compensate them one for one for anything it keepsu agreement reached between Israel and the PLO that endorses that position, and there is no previous US endorsement of that position. The Israeli position, which is quite reasonable under the agreed-upon negotiating framework of Resolution 242, is that borders should be “secure and recognized” rather than based upon where the Arabs reached in 1949. The US position used to be that borders had to be agreed upon. No more.

There is a major difference between Israel offering to establish a border on the basis of the 1949 armistice lines and the US claiming that negotiations must be based on that Israeli concession. In fact, one of the major requirements for both Barak and Olmert was that nothing was agreed upon until everything was agreed, i.e., that Israeli concessions regarding the borders could not be pocketed but would only be valid when coupled with various 'Palestinian' concessions that Barak and Olmert (foolishly) expected to receive. If Obama is now endorsing the 1949 armistice lines, he is essentially giving the Palestinians the offered Israeli concessions in exchange for nothing.

But the point for the general audience isn't what Obama endorsed, it's the language he used. No president has ever said the words "antagonism toward Israel" in a policy speech, nor have US presidents spoken of the "'Palestinians' suffering under occupation" by Israel.

What this will sound like to most people is that Obama took a position on one of the key points to be negotiated, meaning that the US has taken a giant step away from acting as a comparatively neutral mediator. There is a big difference between accepting an Israeli negotiating position, and announcing that the US will tolerate only that specific negotiating position.

Bush referred to 'Palestinian suffering' and so did Clinton. But neither of them spoke of the Palestinians suffering "the humiliation of occupation by Israel." Neither Bush nor Clinton targeted Israel as the source of 'Palestinian' suffering or humiliation. Obama explicitly did.

Israel Matzav: What's the change?

Israel Matzav: The Long Overdue Palestinian State

The Long Overdue Palestinian State

Sixty three years ago, a 13-year-old Palestinian boy left his home in the Galilean city of Safed. His was a family of means. He studied in elementary school, and then came the naqba [calamity, namely, the founding of the State of Israel - ed.]. At night, his family left by foot from Tzfat, to the Jordan River, where they remained for a month. Then they went to Damascus, and then to their relatives in Jordan, and then they settled in Damascus. That child's story, like that of so many other Palestinians, is mine.

Continue reading here.

Note: This post is a rewrite of Abu Mazen's article in the New York Times (Hat Tip: Memeorandum).

Israel Matzav: The Long Overdue Palestinian State