On Palestinians, Israel's Leadership Is Two-Faced

[Purveyor]

In late February 2002, shortly after Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah presented columnist Thomas Friedman with his famous Saudi peace plan, the director of Israel’s vaunted Mossad went to his boss, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. His advice: Welcome the initiative as a bold step toward peace.

The plan offered Israel full recognition and normalized relations with all 22 Arab states, plus a declared end to the Israeli-Arab conflict, in exchange for Palestinian statehood along the pre-1967 lines. The Arab League was due to discuss the plan at a summit in Beirut at the end of March. An Israeli green light would help it along.

Sharon responded warily, then-Mossad chief Efraim Halevy told me some years later. He wanted clarifications. They agreed to ask that Sharon be invited to Beirut to get answers first-hand. Halevy approached an Arab League contact, who returned with a question: What would Sharon say in Beirut? Sharon replied that he would decide once he got there. And that ended that.

In Beirut, emboldened by Israel’s silence, the Syrians demanded a poison-pill clause calling for a “just solution” to the Palestinian refugee problem with an implied right of return. The drafters softened it with words requiring Israeli consent. Israelis hardly noticed; for them the plan had died a day before, on March 27, when Hamas bombed a community Seder in Netanya, killing 30 Israelis, in a declared attempt to derail the pact. In fact, it had been buried weeks earlier in the prime minister’s office.

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Read more: http://forward.com/articles/178206/on-palestinians-israels-leadership-is-two-faced/?p=all#ixzz2Vk5lXnmk

[shaayecanaan]

1. Amazing, really...

Neither side is unanimous, though the defense community is nearly so. Of the 18 living ex-heads of the IDF, Mossad and Shin Bet, all but one — former IDF chief (and current defense minister) Moshe Yaalon — believe the Palestinian leadership is willing to make a deal for a separate state and that Israel would be safer with it, even based on the 1967 lines, than with the status quo. Most have spoken out in favor of welcoming the Arab Peace Initiative as a basis for talks. No Israeli government has done so.

You now have a situation where both the Israeli government and the mainstream diaspora Jewish organisations are to the right of the Israeli defence establishment on the issue of the Palestinians. And not just by a margin, but by a whole lot.

You can see why Jewish organisations responded to the film "The Gatekeepers" with such squirming discomfort. It must have reminded them just how far right they have become.