RUTHFULLY YOURS

The first reason that so many deal-makers have failed is that peace is never negotiated and is always imposed by the side that wins a war. There is not any instance in history, which is primarily a narrative of countless wars, in which an outsider has imposed peace on unwilling belligerents.

The second reason is that outside deal-makers have their interests and agendas which make an already tangled web even more complicated. For example, in the case of American deal-makers, how to win Jewish votes in the US without antagonizing the Arabs who sell us oil and buy our arms?

The third reason is that whenever a status quo is at least tolerable for both belligerents, the desire for risking it in the hope of an ill-defined peace is diminished. Many people in the world live with a status quo they don’t regard as ideal.

There is one thing that Trump the deal-maker could do. He could ask the Israelis and the Palestinians to work on an agreement, each in their own camp, on what they exactly want, and report to him.

Casting himself as the best friend Israel could hope for, President Donald Trump is promising, some may say threatening, to unveil his grand plan for a peace “deal” to end the so-called “Middle East problem”.

Trump has always fancied himself as a deal-maker; he has even written a book on the subject. It is, therefore, no surprise that he might want to put his skill to use on an issue which has defied numerous deal-makers for six decades.

What are the chances of him succeeding? The short answer is: nil!

Last month during a conference at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, the State Department’s David Satterfield said the administration would keep “bolster[ing] the elements of state security in Lebanon, with an emphasis on the Lebanese army.”

So reports Eldad Shavit, a researcher at the institute. Yet at the same conference another State Department official, Nathan Sales, argued “that the Lebanese army is currently a tool of Hezbollah and … it is therefore pointless to strengthen it.”

Which of those two diametrically opposed views, coming from the same State Department, is accurate?

If Sales is right, it is troubling that since 2006, as Shavit notes, the U.S. has given the Lebanese army “more than $1.6 billion in military aid,” and that “recent months have witnessed an expansion in U.S. aid, some of which has already reached Lebanon.” This aid included attack planes and helicopters as well as drones.

The official Israeli view is that it’s all a big mistake. Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman says:

[T]he Lebanese army has lost its independence and is another unit in Hezbollah’s apparatus, and therefore, as far as we are concerned, the infrastructure of the Lebanese army and the Lebanese state is one with the infrastructure of Hezbollah.

Shavit, a former high-ranking intelligence official, spells it out in more detail:

Close cooperation continues between the Lebanese army and Hezbollah. Therefore, the working assumption must be that weapons and knowledge that reach the Lebanese army will find their way into the hands of Hezbollah. This means that all aid to the Lebanese army is liable to strengthen the military capabilities of Hezbollah.

Hezbollah, officially listed as a terror organization by the State Department, is an enemy of the West that is sworn to Israel’s destruction.

And yet:

Lebanese authorities are taking no action to prevent Hezbollah from increasing its military capabilities, and no efforts were made to prevent the group from deploying surface-to-surface missiles and rockets intended for striking at Israel and taking measures to improve the systems’ accuracy.

A recent study of Palestinian textbooks found that Palestinian children are being taught to glorify and value terrorism and violence. The Palestinian Authority and its Minister of Education, Sabri Saidam, want Arab schools in Jerusalem to teach the students why Muslims should be killing Jews.

“Within the pages of the textbooks, children are being taught to be expendable. Messages such as: ‘The Volcano of My Revenge’; ‘The Longing of my Blood for my Land’; and ‘I Shall Sacrifice My Blood to Saturate the Land’ suffuse the [Palestinian] curriculum. Math books use numbers of dead martyrs to teach arithmetic. The vision of an Arab Palestine includes the entirety of what is now Israel, defined as the ‘1948 Occupied Territories.'” — IMPACT-se.

How come the Arab citizens of Israel have never complained about the Israeli educational system? The answer is because they evidently like the education that Israel has been offering them. It teaches them to value life, freedom of speech and democracy, and Arab Israelis admire it. They love the education Israel offers them because it does not demonize any race or group of people. They love it because it does not teach them to kill Jews, but to live with them in peace and security. This is the truth that the Palestinian Authority does not want to hear. This is the truth that it does not want the rest of the world to hear.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) Minister of Education, Sabri Saidam, is worried these days. He is not worried, he says, because Palestinian schoolchildren are being taught to hate Israel. He is not worried because Palestinian schoolchildren are being goaded by their leaders to carry out terror attacks against Jews, from stone-throwing to stabbings to ramming cars.

The PA minister of Education is worried, he says, about a “crime” that is about to be committed against Arab children in Jerusalem schools. The “crime,” in his view, is that the children will be taught according to an Israeli, and not a Palestinian, curriculum.

Saidam sees the decision to apply the Israeli curriculum to Arab schools in Jerusalem as an “ugly crime of counterfeit.” These are the exact words he used to denounce the decision to introduce the Israeli curriculum into Arab schools.

Why are the minister and the Palestinian Authority so truculently opposed to Arab schoolchildren studying according to the Israeli curriculum? Is this curriculum really an “ugly crime of counterfeit,” as the minister says?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kpn1qx9S218

After damning the United States for recognizing reality by stating that since Jerusalem is the capital of Israel the US will move its Embassy there in May to celebrate Israel’s 70th anniversary, the PLO president-for-life, Mahmoud (a variation of the name Mohammed) Abbas took his traveling hate show to a receptive audience, the UN, where he repeated the message but in more moderate — relatively — terms.

And then? Well, since he condemns the US and all that it symbolizes whenever the opportunity arises — and even when it doesn’t…

“Damn your money!” to the United States following President Trump’s decision on Jerusalem. “We will not accept for the U.S. to be a mediator, because after what they have done to us — a believer shall not be stung twice in the same place.”

…he quickly returned to the well…”s&#*hole” territory he presides over. where US aid money, which he still eagerly accepts, European aid money, oil aid money from Muslim countries, and UNRWA aid money is used for weapons and destruction, not schools and hospitals. Except that he didn’t return there, according to the Jewish Insider, almost the only outlet on the story:

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was sighted on Wednesday in Baltimore, Maryland. According to a source, Abbas is receiving medical treatment at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

An impressive motorcade of Secret Service vehicles were seen parked outside the Four Seasons Hotel in the Harbor East neighborhood of Baltimore.

Abbas’ Boeing 737 [A Boeing Business Jet, the most expensive private jet in the world, far better than aircraft used by most heads of legitimate states — such as The Netherlands, Chile, or Norway – ed.] landed at Baltimore–Washington International Airport at 3:00 PM EST after a short flight from White Plains, New York, according to the Flight Radar24 site. (snip)

Abbas’ medical treatment in Baltimore may explain the timing of his speech this week at the UN.

This past December, Haaretz reported that Abbas received an invitation to visit the White House for the second time in a year after the Trump administration was made aware that the Palestinian president was slated to be in the city for a medical procedure.

Let us be clear about this: When Palestinians — and some of their supporters in the international community, including Europe — say that they want an end to the “occupation,” they mean they want to see an end to Israel’s existence, full stop. They do not want to throw the Jews out of their homes in the settlements; rather, they want Jews to be expelled from the whole country.

The conflict, as far as the Palestinians are concerned, did not begin in 1967, when east Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza Strip came under Israeli control. In the eyes of the Palestinians, all Jews are “settlers” and “colonialists.” All the land, they argue, stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, is Muslim-owned land, and no Muslim is entitled to give up any part of it to a non-Muslim. For the Palestinians, accepting Israel’s “right to exist” with Jews is seen as an act of treason.

What is really bothering the Palestinians is that Israel, with Jews, exists, period. The Palestinians want all of Jerusalem. They want all of “Palestine.” They want Israel removed from the planet. It is time to listen carefully to what the Palestinians are saying — in Arabic — to understand that the conflict is not about Jerusalem and not about settlements.

No doubt Ismail Radwan is a terrorist, but, unlike other Palestinian leaders and spokesmen, he is at least an honest one.

At a time when most Palestinian leaders are telling the world that settlements are the real “obstacle” to peace, Radwan, a senior Hamas official, last week made it clear that the conflict with Israel is not about Jews living in a settlement in the West Bank. The truth is that the Palestinians see Israel as one big settlement that needs to be uprooted from the Middle East.

The Palestinians do not differentiate between a Jew living in a settlement on the outskirts of Bethlehem, in the West Bank, and a Jew living in the cities of Haifa, and Tel Aviv and Eilat. All the Jews, they say, are “occupiers” and “settlers” who need to “go back to where they came from.”

For the Palestinians, the real “occupation” began with the establishment of Israel in 1948.

The US decision to comply with the law of the land – the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Act – recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and relocating the US Embassy there, enhances the US posture of deterrence, in defiance of threats and pressure, while walking against the grain.

This reasserts the independence of US unilateral diplomatic action, rather than subordinate US interests to multilateral diplomacy, which tends to undermine US interests. Moreover, it challenges the political correctness of the UN, the Department of State and the “elite” media, which have been serial blunderers on Middle East issues.

While President Trump recognizes Israel as a unique ally, strategically and morally – in an explosive region and during an unpredictably violent era – his determination to remedy this 70-year-old faulty policy aims at advancing US interests, rather than demonstrate pro-Israel sentiments.

The relocation of the US Embassy to Jerusalem reflects the realization that retreat in the face of threats and pressure intensifies anti-US policies, aggression and terrorism, while defiance of pressure is a prerequisite for the rehabilitation of deterrence, a precondition to peace and security.

US procrastination on the implementation of the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Act did not advance the cause of peace. Rather, intensified Palestinian expectations forced them to outflank the US from the radical side and therefore, added another obstacle on the road to peace.