Palestinians not interested in Israeli peace deal

Jerusalem Post:

Palestinian Authority officials in Ramallah expressed outrage and shock on Sunday over Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's call for the establishment of a demilitarized Palestinian state and his demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

The officials said that the speech that Netanyahu delivered at Bar-Ilan University was much worse than they had expected.

They also warned that Netanyahu's policies would trigger a new intifada.

Some of PA President Mahmoud Abbas's top advisers accused Netanyahu of "burying the peace process" and said the ball was now in the court of US President Barack Obama.

"Netanyahu's speech is a blow to Obama before it's a blow to the Palestinians and Arabs," an Abbas aide said. "It's obvious, in the aftermath of this speech, that we are headed toward another round of violence and bloodshed."

Abbas's office issued a terse statement in which it accused Netanyahu of destroying efforts to achieve peace in the region.

"The speech has destroyed all initiatives and expectations," the statement said. "It has also placed restrictions on all efforts to achieve peace and constitutes a clear challenge to the Palestinian, Arab and American positions."

Nabil Abu Rudaineh, a spokesman for Abbas, also lambasted Netanyahu for refusing to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of the future Palestinian state and his call for solving the issue of Palestinian refugees outside Israel.

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This is just more evidence that the Palestinians are not seriously interested in a peace deal with Israel. What they are interested in is going though the motions in order to keep the money flowing that keeps the Palestinians dependent on the charity of others rather than developing a self sustaining culture that could live in peace with Israel.

The threat of another intifada may be sincere, but it has already been a loser of a strategy every time it has been tried. It is just more evidence that the Palestinians do not want peace. The absurd call for making Jerusalem the capitol of a Palestinian state is more evidence of the lack of seriousness on the part of the PA. There has never been a Palestinian state and the pretensions that they have some historic ties to Jerusalem is another bad faith claim.

Israel has put forward a rational basis for an agreement that will give the Palestinians self rule. They are not likely to get a better deal and they are apparently relying on a vain hope that Obama will force the Israelis to accept something else. If the Palestinians were really serious about an agreement they would go back to the Clinton deal that Arafat rejected. It was far more generous than they deserve.

Melanie Phillips has a good analysis of the Palestinians rejection of peace with Israel. "... The cause of the conflict remains, as it ever was, the Arabs’ refusal to recognize the right of the Jewish people to a state of their own in their historic homeland of Israel, which (contrary to Obama’s claim) predated the Nazi Holocaust by several thousand years. Those (like Obama) who think the cause is the Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) and Gaza are confusing cause and effect. The fundamental prerequisite for ending the conflict is therefore a public, binding and unequivocal Palestinian recognition of Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people. Far from Israel occupying Palestinian land in Judea and Samaria, it is the Palestinians who are living within the ancient Jewish homeland. Israel does not wish to rule them and they can have a state of their own, provided they accept Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, and provided a Palestinian state is demilitarised so that it does not possess the means to destroy Israel."