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The negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) are supposed to result in “two states for two peoples”. Even US negotiator George Mitchell thinks so.  Here is what he said last week at Sharm el-Sheikh, where Israeli and PA negotiators began a second round of talks:

Our common goal remains two states for two peoples. And we are committed to a solution to the conflict that resolves all issues for the state of Israel and a sovereign, independent, and viable state of Palestine living side by side in peace and security. [my emphasis]

The ‘two peoples’, for Mitchell, are the Jewish and Palestinian peoples. And finding a solution means, in particular, that the PA will drop its claims against Israel.

I’ve argued that the PLO/Fatah which presently dominates the PA does not accept either of these principles. They do not believe that there is a Jewish people — they insist that there is only a Jewish religion — and they do not accept the rights of the Jews to any of the land, which in their view is ‘owned’ by the Palestinian Arabs. This has been a consistent theme, which the US and the ‘peace processors’ have just as consistently ignored.

Yesterday Salam Fayyad, the most ‘moderate’ representative of the PA — he is not even a member of Fatah — expressed it in a way which cannot be ignored any longer:

NEW YORK — Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad angrily left a UN Ad-Hoc Liaison Committee meeting and canceled a scheduled subsequent press conference with Deputy Foreign Minister Daniel Ayalon in New York on Tuesday, after Ayalon refused to approve a summary of the meeting which said “two states” but did not include the words “two states for two peoples.”

“What I say is that if the Palestinians are not willing to talk about two states for two peoples, let alone a Jewish state for Israel, then there’s nothing to talk about,” Ayalon told the Post in a telephone interview. “And also, I said if the Palestinians mean, at the end of the process, to have one Palestinian state and one bi-national state, this will not happen.” … “I also said that I don’t need the Palestinians to say Israel is a Jewish state in Hebrew. I need them to say it in Arabic to their own people.” — Jerusalem Post

Recently the PA has been threatening that if the ‘freeze’ on construction east of the 1949 lines is not extended, they will leave the talks. Naturally, this would be spun as Israel’s fault — or at best the fault of ‘right-wing’ elements in Netanyahu’s government — and Israel would be subjected to pressure to submit. This is the normal process, apparently, in which Israel is forced to make concessions for nothing.

But now Fayyad has shown the world that the PA simply cannot live next door to a Jewish state. How will it be possible to spin this as Israel’s fault?

Nevertheless, at a different meeting, he was in more comfortable territory:

NEW YORK, Sept 21, 2010 (AFP) – The western-backed Palestinian Authority requires an additional 500 million dollars in aid this year, prime minister Salam Fayyad said on Monday ahead of a key donor meeting.

“What we are looking for now in the course of what remains of this year is to find about half a billion dollars that we will need to balance the books,” Fayyad told reporters.

He was speaking following a meeting hosted by Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Store with foreign ministers of Arab states who were pressed to meet up their pledges for aid…

The Norwegian foreign minister said that Israeli road blocks and administrative impediments in the occupied West Bank were the biggest challenge impeding Palestinian development.

Wrong. The biggest challenge is this: it is far more important to them for there to not be a Jewish state than for there to be a Palestinian one. They proved this in 1937, 1947, 2000 and 2008. And now they are proving it again.

Update [23 Sept 1034 PDT]: Now the Palestinians claim that it was Ayalon who walked out of the meeting, contradicting  YNet and JPost (the YNet article was tweeted by Ayalon). The Norwegian FM said that “the meeting completed normally.”

But whoever lost his cool is irrelevant. There was no final statement or press conference because Fayyad would not accept “two states for two peoples.”

Technorati Tags: Israel, Palestinian Arabs, Salam Fayyad, Danny Ayalon

How to talk tough to Ahmadinejad

News item:

WASHINGTON, Sept 20 (Reuters) – U.S. President Barack Obama will use his visit to the United Nations General Assembly later this week to emphasize to Iran that the “door is open” to them for international engagement, the White House said on Monday.

White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes told reporters during a telephone briefing that in order for Iran to walk through that door, it would have to demonstrate the peaceful intent of its nuclear program.

Translation: we’re too weak to stop you from getting nuclear weapons, but we’re prepared to let you humiliate us if that will make you be nicer. Maybe we’ll offer you a prize of some kind — then you can pocket it and go on with your program. Because why shouldn’t you?

Sometimes we do things that are so stupid! See Harold Rhode on the sources of Iranian negotiating behavior.

What might work is this: “If you don’t stop your nuclear program, we’ll do x.” Of course x has to be very bad for them, and we have to be ready to really do it if they don’t stop. But if we’re not prepared to do this, then we are better off saying nothing at all.

The future

Somebody recently asked me if I thought the present negotiations would bring peace between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs. No, I didn’t think so. “Then what will happen?” I was asked.

What will most likely happen will be the second round of the war with Hizballah. Most analysts expect that this will be a major war, with major consequences. Jeffrey White of the Washington Institute writes,

If war does in fact come to Israel’s northern border, it would bear little resemblance to the 2006 conflict in Lebanon. Instead, it would in all likelihood be a transformational, even fateful, event for the region—certainly for Hizballah and Lebanon, probably for Syria, and perhaps even for Iran. Israel and its regional standing would likely undergo substantial alterations as well.

Today neither side wants war: Israel because it knows well that both military and civilian casualties would be significantly greater than in recent ‘little’ wars; and Iran, because the regime would like to be left alone to develop its nuclear weapons. A war between Israel and Hizballah would open up all kinds of possibilities — Iran could fire missiles at Israel and provoke retaliation, Iran could take action against oil supplies and precipitate a strike by the US, etc.

But it seems to me that the stated goals of the Iran-Syria-Hizballah axis, made concrete by the huge array of short- and long-range rockets arrayed against Israel in Lebanon and Syria, make this war inevitable. Either they will attack Israel, or Israel will preempt an attack. The rockets will not be left to rust away.

I think that most of the instability in the Mideast today comes from Iran. If Iran and her proxies are defeated, it can only be an improvement. Of course, the other epicenter of anti-Zionism and antisemitism in the Mideast is Saudi Arabia, which will be strengthened in this case.

With the Palestinian Arabs, it will mean a whole new ball game. Nobody’s crystal ball sees that far.

Twitter

What everyone’s been waiting for (right): Now you can follow FresnoZionism on Twitter! Presently I am only tweeting links to new posts, but I’m still looking into possibilities for more functionality. Maybe a hat like Roland Hedley’s would help.

Twittermeister Roland Hedley.

You can find some of Hedley’s tweets here.

Update [1419 PDT]: I just saw this:

UNITED NATIONS, Sept 21 (AFP) Sep 21, 2010
Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Tuesday in New York that if the United States started a conflict with Iran it would be a war with “no limits,” US media reported.

“The United States has never entered a serious war, and has never been victorious,” Ahmadinejad told a meeting with US media owners and editors. “The United States doesn’t understand what war looks like. When a war starts, it knows no limits,” reports of the event quoted him as saying.

The limits on American exercise of power are political. The power is there. Ahmadinejad is confusing the disinclination to use power with the lack of power. He is the one who is threatening to remove the limits. It’s hard to express how irresponsible it would be for him to try to carry out his threat — unlimited war against the US would mean tens of millions of dead Iranians.

It’s time to remove this madman from power and preferably from this earth.

Technorati Tags: Ahmadinejad, Israel, Hizballah, Twitter

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is in New York, where he will shortly speak to the UN General Assembly.

This man is a throwback to the barbarism of Hitler or Stalin. He is undoubtedly the greatest danger to peace and stability in the world today. But for Jews, it’s worse. It’s personal. Since Hitler, there has not been a constellation of forces arrayed against the Jewish people that is as powerful and single-minded as the one that is led by Ahmadinejad (of course, today, thanks to the success of Zionism, we have the means to fight back).

An organization called Genocide Prevention Now (GPN) has created a timeline of anti-Zionist and antisemitic statements coming from Iran. Dr. Elihu Richter of GPN describes its purpose [forthcoming on the GPN website] and what it tells us:

Genocide Prevention Now (GPN) uses timelines to track the early warning signs of genocidal threats. These timelines enable us to spot trends in hindsight that are often missed in real time, and to suggest forecasts based on past trends. GPN’s chronologic timeline of Iranian incitement — the first of its kind — shows that since 2000, the statements of Iran’s leaders –- political and religious — have become ever more frequent, and the viciousness of these statements, has increased. Terms such as “cancer”, “filthy corpse”, and “microbes” abound. There are ever more calls for jihadi action and shahidi martyrdom to destroy Israel. Alternatively, these calls are cast in the form of predictions, and are accompanied by statements delegitimizing Israel and Zionism, disinformation, defamation and double standards. Ahmadinejad and his Iranian colleagues are explicit about their goal—the destruction of Israel…

Yet there are ups and downs in the intensity and frequency of statements in the timeline. We cannot rule out the possibility that the Iranian leadership made additional other statements which websites or media did not pick up. Of the statements we found and listed, between 2000 and 2006, websites and journalistic media had reported less than 10 such statements of incitement or hate language per year by the Iranian leadership. In the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq, there were hardly any such statements.

After Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to power in the fall of 2005, the situation suddenly changed. In 2006, there were 7 inflammatory statements. In 2007, they increased to 19, and then in 2008, in the aftermath of the grotesquely flawed US New Intelligence Estimate in November 2007, which stated that Iran had stopped working towards making a nuclear bomb, there were 46. In 2009, there were 28 such statements. In 2010 (through August), there already have been 26. In these years, Iran has moved ever closer to nuclearization, its military power has increased, and its support for terror in Iraq and Afghanistan, Lebanon and Gaza has increased.

GPN’s timeline will soon be available on its website, but in honor of Ahmadinejad’s visit to the UN, you can download it here by right-clicking the following link and selecting ‘save link as’: Iranian incitement to genocide

There is simply no excuse for treating this creature — who already has the blood of many of his own young people on his hands, not to mention that of the Israelis whose deaths at the hands of Hamas and Hizballah he facilitated — as an honored guest in the United States.

There are plenty of  New Yorkers, Jewish and otherwise, who understand what  Ahmadinejad is. If a tenth of them were to picket his hotel (like this), refuse any form of service to his delegation — or indeed the UN — block his motorcade, turn off his electricity, etc., it would be a practical demonstration that we don’t have to pretend that would-be Hitlers are human beings.

Here’s the appropriate spirit:

New York reaction when Ahmadinejad wanted to visit Ground Zero in 2007

Technorati Tags: Ahmadinejad, genocide

News item:

NEW YORK — A proposed Islamic center near ground zero is slowly being embraced by some Muslims who initially were indifferent about the plan, partly in response to a sense that their faith is under attack.

A summit of U.S. Muslim organizations is scheduled to begin Sunday in New York City to address both the project and a rise in anti-Muslim sentiments and rhetoric that has accompanied the nationwide debate over the project.

It has yet to be seen whether the groups will emerge with a firm stand on the proposed community center, dubbed Park51. The primary purpose of the meeting is to talk about ways to combat religious bigotry.

But Shaik Ubaid of the Islamic Leadership Council of Metropolitan New York, one of the groups organizing the gathering, said he has a growing sense that some American Muslims who initially had trepidation are now throwing their support behind the plan.

“Once it became a rallying cry for extremists, we had no choice but to stand with Feisal (Abdul) Rauf,” he said, referring to the New York City imam who has been leading the drive for the center.

Shaik Ubaid, you have earned one of my coveted FresnoZionism F’s in logic.

If Stalin opposes Hitler, should I be pro-Nazi? Speaking of Hitler, if he had been a vegetarian (actually he wasn’t), should I therefore become a meat-eater? If Terry Jones burns Qurans in Florida, do we need to have a mosque near Ground Zero?

It’s telling that Muslims say that “their faith is under attack.” Especially since the large immigration of Eastern European Jews in the beginning of the 20th Century, US Jews have dealt with antisemitic bias and sometimes violence — to a far greater extent than Muslims — but I can’t think of a case in which they have expressed themselves by saying ‘Judaism is under attack’.

Keep in mind also that there are 1.4 billion Muslims in the world (22% of the population), and the number is rapidly growing. Islam is projected to overtake Christianity as the majority religion on earth later in this century.  One would think that Jews (0.2%)  would be more likely to feel that their faith was besieged, especially in light of the massive campaign of defamation being waged against the world’s only Jewish state.

I think the reason they don’t is because the Jews have acclimated to being a minority everywhere in the Diaspora. They find this an acceptable condition, insofar as they are not persecuted. Post-Biblical Jewish writings, starting with the Talmud, are all about living as a minority in foreign lands. They see Judaism as part of Jews, something that can’t be taken away from them (as the kol nidre prayer on the eve of Yom Kippur makes clear) even under duress.

Islam, on the other hand, is a religion which seeks political power and is unsatisfied unless lands where Muslims live are ruled by a Muslim ruler (and for Islamists, a regime compliant with sharia). This explains the worldwide Muslim obsession with removing the ‘Jewish cancer’ from the heart of dar al Islam, which (as I mentioned yesterday) is quite irrational from a Western point of view.

Islam is a religious faith, but it is also in essence a political ideology — something entirely foreign to Diaspora Jewry, which finds safety in accepting the prevailing regimes and ideologies.

So anything which works against Muslim political power or the symbols thereof — such as a mosque built in the heart of America’s power, America’s Jerusalem, New York City — is viewed as an attack on Islam itself.

This also makes clear why any criticism of Islam or Muslim behavior engenders such a hostile response: Muslims expect that Muslims should rule, not be ruled, and criticism represents chutzpah — how dare those whose place it is to be subjects speak thus to those who should be rulers?

Another corollary is that Muslims must never compromise. Who ever heard of a ruler giving in to the ruled? And whoever heard of democracy, especially when some citizens can be infidels!

I said that this is essential to Islam, and it is certainly inherent in Islam today, as it developed in the autocratic cultures of the Middle East. Could there be an Islam without it?

I don’t know, but today’s Islamic politics are directly opposed to the ideals of the American democratic republic as constituted by the Founding Fathers and accepted by almost all Americans today — and if American Muslims don’t get this, the relationship is going to get worse, not better.

Technorati Tags: Islam, America