RUTHFULLY YOURS

The New York Post editorial board offers this refreshing bit of candor:

Cutting a peace deal with the Palestinians is “impossible” right now, Israel’s Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman told Israeli diplomats on Sunday.

No kidding.

Anyone startled by such a statement obviously has been living in a cave since DiMaggio was still wearing pinstripes.

“Even if we offered the Palestinians Tel Aviv” and shrank Israel into the sliver of a sliver it constituted in 1947, “we wouldn’t have a deal,” Lieberman said. And, of course, he’s correct.

Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu finger-wagged at Lieberman and denied this was official policy. Well, that is accurate. Netanyahu, far from being the hardliner whom the American left and the “international community” vilify for supposed indifference to the peace deal, has more than played along with the canard that the Palestinian Authority is devoted to negotiating a two-state solution. But we know that’s ludicrous:

Chances for Mideast peace are now, just as they were at Israel’s founding, sabotaged by Arab intransigence.

Indeed, the Palestinians are now skirting direct talks and trying what Lieberman calls diplomatic war — pushing the United Nations to acclaim an independent Palestine, talks be damned.

The only thing more futile that George Mitchell and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shuttling back and forth trying to restart the “peace process,” which never really got under way, is having the two of them do so while the PA runs to international bodies and a hodgepodge of status-seeking minor international players to gain what the Palestinians refuse to bargain for. At some point, isn’t it time to stop pretending that Israel has a viable “peace partner”?