THE PEACE PROCESSORS ARE BACK RICHARD BAEHR
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=16227
There are certain things those who “know and understand the world” purport to know and understand. These things are the seeds for most opinion journalism and “news” reporting in the current era.
The perils of climate change are certainly near the top for the informed commentariat, despite the fact that most people, certainly most Americans, rate this a virtual nonissue, not even among their top 10 issues of concern. The planet may have experienced an average temperature increase of one degree centigrade or less over the last 165 years since the start of the industrial revolution. But supposedly, according to the media, catastrophe is at hand.
The need for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is another one of those “big” stories that are never far from the news lead, on which the groupthink consensus is never challenged. This week, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman managed in one column to repeat pretty much every accepted wisdom about Israel today that counts as opinion journalism among the “well informed.” This is no particular achievement for Friedman, who has been recycling his columns on Israel for decades, always with the same sage advice for Israel, a country he is trying to save from itself.
According to Friedman, the government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is destroying Israel by building settlements in the West Bank and by including ministers who happen to represent segments of the population that agree with Netanyahu on security issues. Netanyahu has shifted Israel hard to the right and is thereby closing off chances for peace with the Palestinians, Friedman claims. In time, he adds, the window to achieve a two-state solution will close (as it has presumably closed after every prior unsuccessful peace processing period, until it reopened with the next one).
Then, Friedman issues the only news in his column: a “threat” that The New York Times may soon begin calling Israel the state of “Israel-Palestine.” Horror of horrors, this would be as brave and earth shattering for the paper of record as refusing to call the Washington football team (the Redskins) by its name, as many “brave ” journalists posing as social justice warriors have chosen to do or not do, despite a recent survey suggesting that 90% of native Americans surveyed on the matter could not care less about the name of the team, and were not “insulted” by it in any case.
The timing of Friedman’s column is not accidental. These days, the periodic push to secure a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians is back on the agenda for those with nothing better to do and those too lazy to think of something new to write about. We are in the midst of rerun season and the end result of the latest peace process will be no different than all the prior failed efforts. That should come as no surprise considering that this effort involves all the same players raising all the same solutions.
In the United States, the election this year will yield a new president. Those in the know want to “help” the new president with a plan for achieving a two-state solution. So a new document is in the works from leaders of the Jewish establishment. The new working group will produce a plan that will presumably tell the new president what he or she does not already know, or in any case lay out steps to be taken that will finally achieve what all other processors have failed to accomplish before them. Obviously, the authors of the plan have Hillary Clinton in mind and not Donald Trump, since none of the members of the new group have any interest in talking to Trump, but many want to influence or secure a job with a restored Clinton administration. There is enormous narcissism involved in such an effort, which pretends to have come up with something new while doing nothing more than rehashing the old bromides from the Saudi peace plan or the Geneva conference document from 2003.
The problem with the new approach, described as a “rare show of independence,” is that for over two decades, the parameters of the two-state solution have never been a mystery for these informed Jewish community leaders or their media sidekicks. They were known to left-of-center Israeli prime ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert, and to American presidents including Bill Clinton and the two Bushes, and all others who profess to care deeply about protecting Israel’s security while securing Palestinian rights and sovereignty. Israel needs to pull all its settlers out from beyond the separation fence, and offer land to the Palestinians of equal quality to what Israel would retain beyond the Green Line. Jerusalem should be an open, shared city and become a capital of two nations.
It is easy enough to write, but it may be a bit more complicated to work out the details. How will the two sides address the problem of knife-wielding terrorists trying to kill Jews in the holy city? So-called refugees would return to a Palestinian state, with a very limited right to return to Israel. Compensation would be paid for their losses, presumably by the flush Western Europeans and the Americans. The new Palestinian state would not be armed. The deal that achieves a two-state solution would call for an end to all future claims by either party. The chances of Palestinians ever agreeing to these points regarding refugees, weapons, and ending the conflict, is of course zero. The history of peacemaking between the two parties is that the Palestinians have never gotten to a yes that requires them to forgo future demands or accept that there is no right of return, or that Israel is a Jewish state. Bill Clinton could advise his wife about this.
What is really going on, I think, is that these Jewish leaders, all members of the liberal establishment, are terrified that the pressure from Democratic presidential contender Bernie Sanders will result in a forceful campaign for Palestinian rights that will win support among Democrats at their convention, due to Hillary Clinton’s desperate desire to defeat Sanders and move on to her battle against Trump. So the Jewish leaders are trying to set the stage and lobby for promised Israeli concessions that will show Sanders supporters that progress can be achieved even among mainstream Democrats, and thereby prevent Israel haters from sealing the direction of the Democratic Party as hostile to Israel for generations to come.
On the international stage, the French appear to have gotten over their own domestic terrorism woes, immigrant absorption, and stagnant economic growth, and have now taken the lead on organizing a multinational conference aimed at resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Once great diplomats like U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry complete their “preparatory” work, they will let the Israelis and Palestinian in on the details. Netanyahu has come out against the idea of a Paris conference that does not include the two parties to the conflict, and made clear that he is prepared to meet with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, now in the 12th year of his four-year term as president of the “State of Palestine” and the Palestinian Authority. But Abbas has no interest in meeting with Netanyahu. He expects the French and Kerry to deliver Israel to him.
The French gambit is linked to a future U.N. Security Council vote — a vote that U.S. President Barack Obama will likely abstain on (one final chance to stick the knife into U.S.-Israel relations before his term is over). It is an opportunity for the French to insert themselves and achieve the great power role they believe they deserve on a major international conflict. This is easier to achieve while the American president is preoccupied with transgender bathroom rules and relocating killers from Guantanamo prison.
The problem with both of the latest peace processing efforts is that they are reruns. There is nothing new to see here. Reruns draw smaller audiences on TV and cheap sequels do poorly at the box office. But if we look at this as nothing more than an attempt to draw attention then the Jewish American power players and their French cousins are merely doing what is expected of them.
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