http://www.juancole.com/2013/07/auschwitz-negotiations-palestinian.html
Israeli settlements in the Palestinian West Bank
“Whoever Speaks of 1967 borders speaks of Auschwitz”: Israel’s Cabinet not Serious about Negotiations for a Palestinian State
Posted on 07/21/2013 by Juan Cole
US Secretary of State John Kerry very tentatively announced Friday that he has hopes that Israeli and Palestinian negotiations will start back up with a visit of both sides to Washington in the coming week. Oddly, he made the announcement alone, not flanked by either Palestinians or Israelis, prompting questions of whether he really had a breakthrough or firm commitments.
Palestinians had been reluctant to give predatory Israeli policy toward them any legitimacy by negotiating at a time when Israelis were actively pouring more Israeli settlers into the Palestinian West Bank. It is like negotiating with someone about how to share a piece of pie while that person is sneaking a fork into the pie and eating it up. For their part, the Israelis have refused to stop stealing Palestinian land and water as a prerequisite for talks.
For Palestinians, the point of negotiating with the Israelis is to achieve a Palestinian state on the territory of the West Bank and Gaza as they existed in 1967. That is also the point of any serious Western negotiator attempting to achieve peace.
However, from the point of view of the ruling far-right Likud Party of Israel, the point of negotiations is to create a fig leaf of a “peace process” while continuing to appropriate as much Palestinian land as possible, putting more hundreds of thousands of squatters into the West Bank, while decisively and forever preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state. In short, for the Likud Party, the “peace process” with the US and the Palestinians is like the ski mask worn by a bank robber. It allows you to get away with it.
For this reason, US Secretary of State John Kerry’s quixotic quest to restart talks is both a welcome distraction and an unwelcome threat for the Likud. It is welcome, because without a fictional “peace process,” the massive Israeli theft of Palestinian land and resources is nakedly exposed to the world. It is a threat, because there is always a danger that the negotiations may have some successes, requiring actual Israeli concessions of practical import, which is definitely not what the Likud wants.
The right wing Israeli project of slowly annexing the West Bank and starving out the Palestinians in Gaza involves a great deal of future-blindness and magical thinking. They seem to imagine that the Palestinians at some point will abruptly vanish into thin air, like an illusionist’s rabbit. After decades of carefully hiding from themselves their acts of butchery and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians in 1948, and then more decades of denying that there are any such things as Palestinians, the Israeli Right appears to have half-convinced itself that there isn’t really a problem with their Drang nach Osten.
These attitudes are clear in the Likud responses to the news that Secretary Kerry has succeeded in reconvening the Israeli and Palestinian sides for talks, as translated by the USG Open Source Center:
‘Minister Landau: Israel’s Consent To Release Prisoners — Mistake: Attila Somfalvi reports at 1647 GMT in Ynetnews : “Tourism Minister Uzi Landau said to Ynet that ‘there is an Israeli interest to enter negotiations; however, the Israeli consent to release prisoners is a mistake. Whoever speaks of the 1967 borders speaks of Auschwitz. Whoever pushes for negotiations based on the 1967 boundaries, even with border adjustments, actually speaks of the 1967 borders. We must negotiate with no preconditions and without prisoner release,’ Landau emphasized.” ‘
Apparently far right wing Israelis live in such a cocoon that they can’t understand how extreme a statement such as ’1967 borders are Auschwitz’ sounds to normal people. Really? Letting the Palestinians have a decent life is comparable to gassing innocent Jews? Trivializing Auschwitz like this is the real crime, and ratcheting up the rhetoric so that any concession to political reality is equated to genocide, is an offense against common sense. And, you will never ever hear mainstream American news programs report or quote Landau’s absurd and deeply offensive pronouncement.
Israeli settlements in the Palestinian West Bank
Then there’s this:
‘Likud’s MK Regev: PM Should Clarify Truth on Renewed Talks: Moran Azulay reports at 1504 GMT in Ynetnews : “Knesset Member Miri Regev addressed the issue of renewed talks with the Palestinians, and said: ‘In light of the various statements regarding an agreement about the 1967 borders, as well as agreements on releasing Palestinian prisoners, the prime minister should clarify the truth,’ Regev said, adding: ‘I expect to hear what the Palestinian leadership is doing for a peace agreement, because in my opinion they have no real intention of reaching one.’ According to her, US Secretary of State John Kerry’s ‘cleverness’ will increase the dangers to Israel’s security.” ‘
In other words, Regev doesn’t want the negotiations. She wants the West Bank. She sees giving up the West Bank and the establishment of a Palestinian state as unacceptable “dangers” to Israel. She implicitly believes that only by strangling the Palestinians can Israelis breathe free. Thus, she dismisses Kerry’s skillful diplomacy as mere ‘cleverness’ and condemns it as unsafe at any speed.
Deputy Defense Minister Danny Danon blasted his boss, Netanyahu, for the concession of freeing Palestinian prisoners, telling the Jerusalem Post ‘We must learn from our past mistakes and not free terrorists with blood on their hands, neither as a gesture nor as a reward.” He insisted that Israelis must not again commit the ‘injustice of the disengagement (in Gaza) by returning to the 1967 borders.’ Danon, the Likud Convention chair, said that the Netanyahu government
‘must not uproot thousands of Jews from their homes.’
‘must not uproot thousands of Jews from their homes.’
Danon, in other words, rejects any concessions to the Palestinians. He wishes Israeli troops and squatters were back inside Gaza, instead of the Israeli military only surrounding it and preventing its Palestinians from exporting most of what they make. He rejects the establishment of a Palestinian state or a return to 1967 borders, which would require that Israeli squatters on Palestinian land (which they stole outright) return to Tel Aviv and Haifa. He sees all Palestinians that dared resist Occupation and Apartheid as mere ‘terrorists’ and thinks they all, even the children among them, should stay in Israeli prisons forever. It should be remembered that many Palestinians in Israeli prisons are guilty of much less than Nelson Mandela was when he was in South African prisons.
In his response, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who has openly boasted of derailing the 1993 Oslo Peace Process, said:
“With the resumption of the diplomatic process, we are faced with two main goals: Preventing the creation of a bi-national state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River that would endanger the future of the Jewish state, and preventing the establishment of an additional Iranian-sponsored terrorist state on Israel’s borders, which would endanger us no less.”
In other words, Netanyahu believes that no Palestinian state can be allowed to come into existence, because it would inevitably be an Iranian-sponsored satellite and would conduct violence against Israel.
Netanyahu, on the other hand, understands that with no negotiations and no political settlement of any sort, Israel will likely become responsible in the eyes of the world for the stateless Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza, and will be forced to give them Israeli citizenship. People in the 21st century can’t be allowed to be without citizenship in a state, since that is what gives people the right to have rights. If Israel won’t allow the Palestinians to have a state (and it won’t), then it will be pressured to make them citizens of Israel.
So if Netanyahu absolutely rejects allowing a Palestinian state to be erected, and absolutely rejects giving the Palestinians citizenship in Israel, what is left? Apartheid is what is left, which is what Netanyahu wants. He wants Israeli control over the West Bank’s land, water and air, but wants to keep the Palestinian population there stateless. He hopes that Palestinians can be persuaded to accept Apartheid if only they are given a better standard of living, that, in essence, they can be bribed to accept their status as stateless inmates of an Israeli police state on the West Bank.
So for Netanyahu, the negotiations are not in good faith. They are window dressing. They give him a reply to the European Union, which accuses him of crimes against international law in the West Bank. Just wait, he can say, there may be irregularities now, but who knows what things will look like at the end of the peace negotiations, which we are actively pursuing. It is the old dodge of the Israeli right wing. Those negotiations are aimed at browbeating the Palestinians into accepting their statelessness forever, in return for empty Israeli pledges not to completely expropriate them and further pledges to allow them a standard of living similar to that of Jordanians.
http://rt.com/news/netanyahu-peace-talks-palestinians-380/
Netanyahu: Palestinians must make concessions at ‘tough talks’
Published time: July 21, 2013 11:47
Palestinians must make concessions to Israel’s national interests for the future Middle East peace talks to bring fruit, says the Israeli prime minister. The negotiations promise to be hard, with a wave of criticism already coming from both sides.
Benjamin Netanyahu said his two principal goals in the negotiations would be maintaining a Jewish majority in Israel and avoiding creation of an Iran-backed “terrorist state” on its borders.
"Our negotiating partners will have to make concessions that enable us to preserve out security and crucial national interests," he explained to his cabinet at a Sunday morning meeting.
Netanyahu added that if any agreement is reached with the Palestinians, it will have to be ratified by Israel in a national referendum.
"I don't think that decisions like these are possible to make with one coalition or another, but have to be brought to the nation for its decision," he explained in an apparent effort to neutralize opposition.
Some partners of Netanyahu’s Likud party in the ruling coalition voiced their skepticism over the practical results of the negotiations.
“It's important to negotiate, and even more important for negotiations to be predicated on realism and not illusions,” Avigdor Lieberman, head of Yisrael Beiteinu party wrote on Facebook. “There is no solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, at least not in the coming years, and what's possible and important to do is conflict-management.”
Earlier Israel said it plans to release some Palestinian prisoners ahead of the negotiations, which are expected to commence in the United States next week. The resumption of direct Israeli-Palestinian peace talks was announced by US Secretary of State John Kerry on Friday.
Kerry’s statement was brief and didn’t mention important details of the basis of the upcoming talks. Israel and Palestinian Authority have plenty of conflict issues between them, including the return to the 1967 borders, recognition of Israel as a state by Palestinians, construction of settlements in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories and others. Officials from both sides have clashed verbally over which of those issues are negotiable.
According to the British newspaper The Sunday Times, a compromise Israel and the Palestinian Authority may seek would include allowing Israelis settlers to stay in the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem while making them subject to a new Palestinian state. Israeli President Shimon Peres agreed this condition with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas as the minimum needed for PM Netanyahu to agree to the peace talks, the report claims.
Such a compromise, if reached, is certain to spark anger from some Palestinians and Israelis, increasing the number critical of the renewed negotiations on both sides. The talks were already rejected by Palestinian militant movement Hamas which controls the Gaza strip, making it uncertain how any agreement brokered in Washington would be implemented there. Hamas said the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas “succumbed to American extortion” by agreeing to talks and has committed political suicide by doing so.
The consideration was not missed by critics of the talks in Israel.
“Abu Mazen (Abbas) rules over Palestinians less than (President Bashar) Assad rules in Syria,”Transport Minister Yisrael Katz of Likud party told reporters, referring to the ongoing military insurgency in Syria.
Abbas’ move also sparked criticism from some factions of his own Fatah movement, which are frustrated he didn’t secure concessions from Israel as a precondition. Opposition was voiced by smaller independent political parties in Palestine as well.
Direct peace talks on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were last held in 2010, but they broke down after Israel failed to renew a moratorium on the construction of settlements in the West Bank. At the time Israel demanded formal recognition of the Jewish State from the Palestinian Authority before the moratorium would be extended, but the Palestinians rejected it.
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