Palestinians Again Refuse Negotiations

Mike L.

The Palestinians have spurned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s latest invitation to resume peace talks, insisting Israel freeze settlement construction first.

Netanyahu on Wednesday proposed to start direct talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, without any preconditions. The call followed an appeal from international mediators for constructive efforts. Negotiations broke down in late 2010.

We have got to put away this never-ending nonsense and accept the obvious.

It is obvious that the Palestinians do not want a negotiated end of the conflict, because they have somehow convinced themselves that they will eventually defeat Israel. Part of the reason that they maintain this delusion is because western progressives continue to encourage "resistance" against the Jews of the Middle East.

Enough is enough.

Netanyahu needs to unilaterally declare Israel's final borders and inform the world that an undivided Jerusalem is, indeed, the Israeli capital. He should declare that the "Palestinians" have lost their opportunity for a portion of Jerusalem as a capital for whatever criminal-terrorist entity that they create for themselves.

He should also make it absolutely clear that any further rocket fire or violence coming from local Arab regions beyond Israel's borders will be met with an exceedingly strong response in order to discourage Arab genocidal actions towards Jews.

In any case, the peace process is dead, dead, dead.

It's been dead for quite some time and now its corpse is just lying there in the corner, stinking up the joint, and it does no one any good to pretend otherwise.

Writing in Commentary, Jonathan Tobin claims the following:

The Palestinians claim their refusal of negotiations is based on the idea that it is pointless to talk if Israel isn’t going to concede every point of contention such as borders and settlements in advance. Part of this is, however, Obama’s fault. Since he demanded three years ago that Israel freeze settlement building as a precondition to negotiations — something that not even the Palestinians had thought of prior to 2009 — it is difficult for PA leader Mahmoud Abbas to insist on anything less. But since Israel already froze building in the West Bank in 2010 and Abbas still wouldn’t talk, the point is moot...

Palestinian nationalism flowered in the last century not as an attempt to recreate an ancient ethnic or national identity or to recover a dying language or culture, as was the case with nationalist revivals in places like Ireland, the Czech Republic or even the Jewish movement of Zionism. Rather, it was a reaction to the Jewish return to the land. Though apologists for the Palestinians contend that it was not a purely negative movement, it is impossible to understand Palestinian nationalism as anything but an effort to prevent Zionism from succeeding. Its essence is the illegitimacy of the Jewish state, and any effort to wean it from that belief constitutes a contradiction that the Palestinian grass roots and its vast refugee diaspora simply cannot accept.

Barack Obama, particularly given his arrogant belief that he has the right to tell Jews where we may, or may not, be allowed to live in Jerusalem, needs to be made to eat this failure.

Jews who care about the Jewish people, and thus care about the Jewish state, should not vote for Obama in November, nor for any Democrat this cycle.

I would vote for a hot pastrami sandwich on rye (with onions, mustard, and melted swiss) before I would vote for Barack Obama again.

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Oh, and by the way, if any of you guys find yourself in San Francisco and would like to actually have a hot pastrami sandwich on rye (with onions, mustard, and melted swiss), I recommend Moishe's Pippic on Hayes Street not far from Civic Center.

Good stuff.