Ethan Bronner writes about Israeli PM Netanyahu:
After a long career supporting Israeli settlements in occupied land and rejecting Palestinian statehood, Mr. Netanyahu said last June that he accepted the two-state idea. Three weeks ago, he imposed a 10-month freeze on building Jewish housing in the West Bank, something no Israeli leader had done before. Settlers are outraged, and Mr. Netanyahu is facing a rebellion in his party. Together with his removal of many West Bank checkpoints and barriers to Palestinian movement and economic growth, these steps went well beyond what many ever expected of him.
Yet skepticism would be a polite way of describing the reaction of the Palestinians and much of the world, who view his steps as either too little too late or a ruse aimed at buying time to pursue his real agenda.
Interestingly, the article never mentions that the first time Netanyahu was Prime Minister he withdrew Israeli forces from most of Hebron. (By the way, the world acquiesced to the Arab conquest of Hebron by force largely as a consequence of the pogrom in 1929.)
Still Bronner gets to the heart of the problem:
But the Palestinians have concluded that they can get further by appealing to international bodies than by returning to talks with this Israeli government. Mr. Abbas repeated his rejection of talks without a full settlement freeze at a meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Council on Tuesday. Palestinian politics are also deeply divided not only between Hamas in Gaza and Fatah in the West Bank but also within each group.
This, of course, leads to a question, why is there a need for such an article?
Israel hasn’t made peace with the Palestinians regardless of who the Israeli Prime Minister had been.
Consider that the Clinton administration was constantly at odds with Netanyahu during his first stint as Prime Minister. The administration must have been thrilled when Ehud Barak was elected. But the Camp David summit didn’t work out the way they’d planned and two months later Arafat lauched the “Al Aqsa Intifada.” And then:
On December 23, 2000, the United States proposed the creation of a “non-militarized†Palestinian state on 95 percent of the West Bank, plus three percent more traded to it by Israel, plus all of the Gaza Strip, with its capital in east Jerusalem. In other words, this would have been equivalent to about 99 percent of the pre-1967 territory then ruled by Egypt and Jordan.
Israel would have annexed small areas including three areas with large populations of Jewish settlers: Gush Etzion, Ma’aleh Adumim, and Ariel. All of east Jerusalem would have become Palestinian–including the al-Aqsa Mosque–except for post-1967 Jewish neighborhoods, the Western Wall, and the Jewish Quarter. Israel would have gotten an existing access road—which is about ten feet wide—to the quarter. There would be an international observer force in the Jordan Valley, along the Palestinian-Jordan border, to see that heavy arms or foreign soldiers were not being smuggled into Palestine.
In addition, though this was not spelled out in the specific proposal, the level of aid and compensation to the Palestinians then being talked about by the United States was at around $21 billion.
On December 28, 2000, the Israeli government approved of the offer with only one condition: that the Palestinians accept it, too. For the record, I supported that plan, too.
Yasir Arafat turned it down.
More recently, in the waning days of his tenure as Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert made an offer to Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas too turned it down. For all the talk we hear of the urgency of a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Palestinians seem not to feel much urgency.
So then the question isn’t really whether or not, or how much Netanyahu has changed, it doesn’t make a difference. The question is when will the Palestinians change.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
