-9 Days Since Friday – No More Concessions!

By Sherwin Pomerantz

With three days this past weekend to think about the coming year I’ve had a significant amount of time to mull over the past months during the countdown to the UN, the speech that Mahmoud Abbas gave at the UN, the world’s reactions, Netanyahu’s speech and the aftermath of that strange week. My conclusion after all of this cogitating is that the watchword of Israel from this point forward should be “No More Concessions” when it comes to getting the Palestinian Arab leadership to the peace talks. There is simply no logical reason at all why we here in Israel should have to do anything more than we have already done to encourage the other side to sit down and talk peace.

Why do I say this? Well, to me the answers are obvious.

First of all, we have made all kinds of concessions already and it has gotten us nowhere. As Michael Oren, Israel’s Ambassador to the UN wrote in the Washington Post last week, “Two Israeli peace proposals, in 2000 and 2008 met virtually all of the Palestinian’s’ demands for a sovereign state in the areas won by Israel in the 1967 war – in the West bank, Gaza and even East Jerusalem. But Palestinian President Yasser Arafat rejected the first offer and Abbas ignored the second, for the very same reason their predecessors spurned the 1947 Partition Plan.” Each time, accepting a Palestinian State meant accepting the Jewish State, a concession that they were unwilling to make, so why should we make any more concessions?

Charles Krauthammer in a September 29th op-ed in the New York Times wrote “Israel gave up land without peace in south Lebanon in 2000, and in return, received war (the Lebanon war of 2006) and 50,000 Hezbollah missiles now targeted on the Israeli homeland. In 2005, Israel gave up land without peace in Gaza, and again was rewarded with war – and constant rocket attack from an openly genocidal Palestinian mini-state.” So, why should we make any more concessions?

In 2010 Israel agreed to a settlement freeze for 10 months, to which the Palestinian Arab leadership responded by boycotting the talks for 9 months, showing up during the last days of the freeze and then walking out again when Israel would not guarantee, in advance, the claim to any territory beyond the 1967 lines. This, in violation of every prior agreement which stipulated that such demands are to be the subject of negotiations, not their precondition. So why make any more concessions?

Add to all of this the consistent mantra of the Palestinian Arab leadership questioning our historic claim to the land. Dennis Prager relates an interview he conducted earlier last month with Ghassan Khatib, Director of Government Media for the Palestinian Authority and the spokesman for Abbas. Prager asked him “Do the Palestinians recognize Israel as the Jewish state?” His answer was “no!” He went on to say that there is no Jewish people, so how can there be a Jewish country? The Palestinian position seems to be that there is a religion called Judaism, but no such thing as a Jewish people. This concept was further supported by Abbas’ UN speech where he said “I come before you today from the Holy Land, the land of Palestine, the land of divine messages, ascension of the Prophet Muhammad and the birthplace of Jesus Christ.” No intelligent being can think that this formulation which omitted any reference to the Jewish claim to the Land of Israel was accidental.

Personally, I still believe that for the long term success of the enterprise called Israel, we need to find a way to make permanent peace with our neighbors. But no one in their right mind enters a negotiation having shown all their cards up front, or having made compromises before the negotiations begin. Prime Minister Netanyahu has offered to go to Ramallah to meet with Abbas, has invited Abbas to come to Jerusalem and has even agreed to meet in a neutral location like Brussels. But the other side continues to set preconditions to any meeting and, every few months, seems to add yet another precondition. Given those circumstances we may as well stand our ground and say enough! The world will not like us any better if we make more concessions and it certainly seems as if the world cannot like us any less.

So, at this point, the best strategy would seem to be the one that our government is following, in effect saying, as former US Secretary of State James Baker said to then Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, “Call us when you are serious about peace. Here is our number.” Netanyahu should send the same message to Abbas and then wait for the call. My guess is that he will have a long wait.