The power of peaceful negotiations

News item:

An Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement could be reached “within the year,” but only if all sides agree to peaceful negotiations, Quartet Middle East envoy Tony Blair said in an interview to be broadcast Friday.

Nothing to it, Tony. Just a few minor technical issues to clear up:

  • The Palestinians will not agree unless Israel allows enough hostile Arab ‘refugees’ to settle within its borders to outnumber Jews. Would you accept this if you were an Israeli Jew?
  • The Palestinians will not agree unless Israel removes every last one of the approximately 270,000 Jews from the area that was occupied by Jordan from 1948-1967. But the removal of about 8,000 Jews from Gaza almost caused a civil war.
  • ‘Palestine’ will be the state of the Palestinian Arab people, and Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu insists that they, similarly, accept Israel as the state of the Jewish people. But they won’t, and they call Netanyahu a “liar and swindler” for suggesting this.
  • Israel is prepared to compromise on Jerusalem so that both nations can have their capitals there. But the Palestinians demand every inch of East Jerusalem, where Judaism’s holy sites are located.
  • No Palestinian government can be representative of Palestinians unless Hamas is included in it. But Hamas’ reason for being is to bring about the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews.
  • Israel will not agree unless ‘Palestine’ is demilitarized. But militarization is the whole point for the Palestinians.

All of the above issues have been talked about without real progress since Oslo. Israel offered shockingly sacrificial compromises in 2000 and 2008, which the Palestinians rejected.

No problem is too great, though, for people who want to sit down and “peacefully negotiate”, right?

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One Response to “The power of peaceful negotiations”

  1. Shalom Freedman says:

    When President Obama suggests that there will be a Palestinian state in two years one wonders where he is living. The ‘nos’ of the Palestinians are so negative and so all- encompassing that there is not at this moment even a sliver of hope of agreement between the sides. The Palestinians understand a Palestinian state to have one meaning only- the suicide of Israel.
    How any person of any reasonable intelligence cannot understand this is beyond me. Wake up , Obama Administration, Wake up.