The Jihadists

“Know your enemy,” said the ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu, “and know yourself – that is the recipe for victory a hundred times over.”

Do we in the civilized world know ourselves?

There is no consensus on most of the big issues that confront us. For example, what is more important to us, individual rights or the protection of society? Or consider Syria today. Should defenceless civilians be sacrificed to the political self-interest of powerful nations? The UN Security Council requires unanimity before it sanctions action against a rogue state − which is a safeguard against arbitrary activity by a clique of nations, but a severe curtailment on effective action. Are we content with that balance?

As for knowing our enemy, we are even more deficient. That the civilised world in general, and Israel in particular, is confronted by loosely-knit world-wide Islamist terrorist groupings − jihadists − intent on disrupting and eventually destroying our way of life, to be replaced by an Islamic Caliphate, that much is widely recognised. What is less well known, perhaps, is that their origins and philosophy are intimately associated with Nazism in its most malignant anti-semitic manifestation.

In a recent article Professor David Patterson traces the modern jihadists’ virulent hatred of Jews, a prime element in their declared philosophy, to three founding fathers: Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, jihadist ideologue Sayyd Quth, and the leader of the Palestinian Arabs from 1920s to the 1940s, the Jerusalem mufti Hajj Amin Husseini.

Al-Banna was an open admirer of Hitler and Nazi methods of anti-semitic propaganda; modern jihadists take their lead from him and repeatedly quote the long-discredited forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as proof of a world-wide Jewish conspiracy, deny the Holocaust and blame the Jews for starting the Second World War.

As Patterson points out, the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg argued that Jews must be annihilated because all Jews were evil and were poisoning the Aryan race; Sayyd Quth followed the same line, giving it an Islamist twist. Jews, he held, were “by nature determined to fight God’s truth and sow corruption and confusion.” Just like the Nazis, the jihadists must eliminate this source of evil that threatens all humanity.

Patterson quotes a televised address, delivered in January 2009, by the Egyptian cleric, Muhammad Hussein Yacoub.

“If the Jews left Palestine to us,” he said, “would we start loving them? Of course not… They are enemies not because they occupied Palestine… Our fighting with the Jews is eternal, and it will not end until the final battle…until not a single Jew remains on the face of the earth.”

Thus the Islamist message is that hatred of Jews and their extermination is obligatory for Muslims, as it was for Nazis.

Patterson says, and provides chapter and verse for doing so, that the jihadist who more than any other espoused the Nazis’ loathing of Jews, and their aim of exterminating them, was Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the one-time mufti of Jerusalem. “He who kills a Jew is assured of a place in the next world” was his rallying cry to the Arabs of Palestine in 1929, when they rose against the British mandate government and went on a frenzy of killing that left 133 Jews dead and many more wounded.

Just two months after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, Husseini − having established links with the Muslim Brotherhood − met the Nazi general consul in Jerusalem, Heinrich Wolff, and arranged for the Nazis to provide support for the Brotherhood. He later indicated that the Arab revolt that he instigated in 1936, starting with rioting against the Jews of Jaffa, was engineered with the help of the Nazis.

In October 1937, shortly after the Peel Commission had recommended partition as the best way to resolve the Arab-Jewish conflict, Husseini had his first meeting with Adolf Eichmann and one of his colleagues in the Gestapo’s Department of Jewish Affairs.

He spent the next few years fomenting trouble, an effort that climaxed in May 1941 with his issuing a fatwa announcing a jihad against Britain and the Jews. By November that year he was in Germany, conferring with Hitler. Before the end of the year, Husseini again met Eichmann, now responsible for carrying out the “Final Solution”. Eichmann’s deputy later stated that the mufti was directly involved in its initiation and execution, and in advising Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and its architect.

On 2 November 1943, Husseini declared at a rally in the Luftwaffe Hall in Berlin, “The Germans know how to get rid of the Jews … They have definitely solved the Jewish problem. [This makes] our friendship with Germany… permanent and lasting…” In a series of broadcasts, he proclaimed that there are “considerable similarities between Islamic principles and those of National Socialism.” He enjoined Muslims to “kill the Jews wherever you find them.” As the war turned against Germany, Husseini began to fear that it might end before the extermination of the Jews could be accomplished. He wrote to Himmler twice, urging greater speed in completing the enterprise.

The modern jihadist movement has remained faithful to its origins. The 1968 final version of the Palestinian National Charter envisages no peaceful outcome to the struggle, but − turning facts on their heads − asserts that “claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history”. Jews not only have no place in Israel, but no place anywhere: “Israel is … the geographical base for world imperialism... Israel is a constant source of threat vis-à-vis peace in the Middle East and the whole world.”

Arafat declared that “the end of Israel is the goal of our struggle…Peace for us means the destruction of Israel and nothing else.” Following the murder of the Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, the United Nations recognised the PLO as the representatives of the Palestinians and granted it observer status. Subsequently PLO chief, Salah Khalaf, asserted: “an independent state on the West Bank and Gaza is the beginning of the final solution” – using the chilling Nazi code for the extermination of European Jewry. The phrase was echoed by Fatah leader Sakhr Habash, shortly after Israel left the Gaza Strip.

Hamas, which seized power in Gaza, is entirely rejectionist as far as any accommodation with Israel is concerned, and is involved in a power struggle with Fatah for the hearts and minds of Palestinians. Both need to assert and reassert their commitment to their jihadist origins, so as recently as August 2009 Fatah’s Sixth General Assembly asserted that “the struggle will not stop until the Zionist entity is eliminated and Palestine is liberated.” The Hamas charter expands on the theme of the God-approved duty of every Muslim to kill Jews. A good Muslim mother must prepare her children for the fighting that awaits them, for, as article 28 asserts: “The Zionist invasion of the world…[aims] at undermining societies, destroying values, corrupting consciences, deteriorating character, and annihilating Islam…Israel, Judaism and Jews challenge Islam and the Muslim people.”

Thus, as Professor Patterson concludes, Hamas, true to its core Nazi beliefs, asserts that “evil is rooted not only in the Jews, but in Judaism itself. The only way to liberate humanity is to cast the satanic Jew into hell − and, as the embodiment of God on earth, Hamas takes the lead in that endeavour. Hamas is humanity’s saviour.”

Patterson declares, not without reason, that by refusing to name the evil they confront, world leaders remain wilfully blind to it. Maintaining that the media are complicit in this, he castigates world leaders for refusing to refer to Islamist fascists as either Islamists or as fascists.

What does his analysis mean for the so-called “peace process”, currently frozen solid and immovable?

It does not mean that the world has to throw its hands in the air and declare that the search for an accommodation between Israel and the Palestinians is a pointless exercise. “Know your enemy”, just as “know yourself” is simply an essential precursor to successful action.

Published in the online Jerusalem Post today, Thursday 26 July 2012:
http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Opinion/Article.aspx?id=278983&prmusr=vQcjqrtVILovboAiilX2NiD%2bjulgbQsZC51qGfAN9oiCZTHLISVHyY2r9tGo358l

No One-State Solution

Pursue a left-wing agenda around the political race track long enough and you'll meet a right-wing agenda sprinting at you from the other direction.

Nazism and Bolshevism stood at opposite extremes of the political spectrum and their philosophies were poles apart, yet their regimes bore remarkable similarities to each other: smothering of dissension, persecution of political opponents, insistence that the state was more important than the individual, total disregard for the rule of law, rejection of religion, and so on.

The latest example of this political anomaly are ever-stronger calls from the left and right alike to reject the two-state solution to the perennial Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

Partition of the Holy Land emerged formally in 1937 as the preferred way of healing the festering sore of the Arab-Jewish conflict. The British government had been mandated by the League of Nations to administer Palestine and implement its own objective as set out in the Balfour Declaration – namely to establish a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.

However, the mandate administration was finding it virtually impossible to keep the lid on the simmering pot of Arab resentment at the influx of Jews into Palestine. As a result, following the Arab revolt of 1936, the British government set up a commission under Lord Peel to examine the situation and come up with a solution. Partition was the central recommendation of the Peel Commission.

Ten years later, following World War II, the two-state concept was also the considered conclusion of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), which recommended as much to the UN General Assembly in 1947.

On November 29 1947 the General Assembly recommended the adoption and implementation of the partition plan. The Jewish Agency accepted the decision; the Arab states rejected it. It is on the record that, in October 2011, Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, said that the Arab world had been wrong to do so. “It was our mistake,” Abbas said, in an interview on Israeli television.

Abbas, together with the majority of the world, has proclaimed the two-state solution as the holy grail of the peace process. It is the desired objective according to the Quartet (the US, EU, UN and Russia), and it was agreed upon in principle by both the government of Israel and the PA at the November 2007 Annapolis Conference. The rest of the non-Arab world would most likely give it their seal of approval as well.

For some time, it was only the extreme rejectionist elements within the Arab world that repudiated the concept entirely. As we know, Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and related factions refuse to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist at all. They set as their target the elimination of Israel and its replacement by an Islamist Palestine, on the lines of the government established by Hamas after they seized power in Gaza.

More subtle forms of eliminating Israel as the sovereign state of the Jewish people have gradually emerged. Support among Palestinians for a one-state solution began to grow because it was claimed that their population growth rate would leave Palestinians as a majority in a single state. Then voices from the liberal left in the US, UK, and Israel itself began calling for a single state in Israel and the West Bank (possibly including Gaza), with citizenship and equal rights in the combined entity for all inhabitants of all three territories, without regard to ethnicity or religion.

These and related views formed the agenda of a much-discussed, and much-excoriated, One-State Conference held at the Harvard Kennedy School in May 2012. Panels examined the two-state approach, questioned how a one-state solution would work, and discussed obstacles to its realization.

What was certainly not considered, however, was the concept increasingly advocated by more extreme right-wing voices, both in the US and in Israel by newspaper columnists and bloggers: namely the annexation by Israel of the whole of the West Bank, and the establishment of one state – Israel – in the area.

In pouring scorn on the two-state solution, some columnists point to the declared desire of most Muslim and Palestinian leaders, including Abbas, to see Israel eliminated from the map of the Middle East − as if that in itself were sufficient to damn any such enterprise and to justify Israel defying the world. It is not. Both sides of the dispute may dream their dreams − the Israeli right, perhaps of acquiring sovereignty over the whole of biblical Greater Israel; the Palestinians of eventually gaining sovereignty “from the river to the sea."

The purpose of negotiation is to achieve a compromise that both sides can live with. Advocates of Israeli annexation of Judea and Samaria seem blind to the impracticality of what they advocate, to say nothing of the totally negative effect its application would have on Israel’s relations with the rest of the world. Uncommitted world opinion would never endorse a land-grab like this. If anything were to push Israel into the status so ardently desired by its worst enemies – a pariah state – this version of the one-state solution would achieve it.

Of course the other side − the so-called “liberal” one state − would eliminate Israel altogether as the nation state of the Jewish people.

Hobson’s choice. The answer? Neither the one nor the other, but the two-state solution, doggedly pursued and carefully negotiated, with adequate safeguards guaranteeing Israel’s security.

Published in the on-line Jerusalem Post today, Monday 23 July 2012:
http://www.jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.aspx?id=278575&prmusr=keQ9Rw%2fN%2fyJINYq06KmeCfWiWL%2fDUr2Kl1Fk%2bgsr4I%2fUKZTZW2DOPxEYIUVQNh5D

Hamas in Sinai

Since Operation Cast Lead − Israel’s military incursion into Hamas-occupied Gaza, which ended in January 2009 – Hamas has, in the words of the English poet Alexander Pope, been “willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike.” Or at least it has been prepared to embark on truces, formal or informal, aimed at restricting its own rocket attacks. Hamas has also attempted − unsuccessfully − to control fanatic Islamist elements within Gaza that have continued indiscriminately to launch rockets at Israeli civilians.

The Muslim Brotherhood's (MB) presidential victory in Egypt has altered the balance of self-interest – as perceived by Hamas and other jihadist elements. Regardless of the results of the re-run parliamentary elections in Egypt, or the eventual extent of the newly-elected president’s powers, the MB has clearly proved that it has a substantial popular mandate. Its success has, overall, emboldened Hamas not only within the Gaza Strip, but in Sinai as well.

The 1979 peace treaty between Israel and Egypt saw Israel vacate and demilitarize the Sinai – which IDF forces had over-run during the conflict. Since then, the Sinai, which shares a 165-mile border with Israel, has served as an important territorial buffer between the two countries.

On June 18, two gunmen infiltrated Israel from the Sinai and killed an Israeli civilian working on the construction of a border fence. The two gunmen were later killed in an exchange of fire with Israeli forces. Media reports indicated that the gunmen had received helped from within Gaza. Subsequently, four other militants were killed during two Israeli air strikes into Gaza. Hamas responded by launching rockets at southern Israel. From June 18 to 24 over 150 medium-range rockets, mortar shells and long-range Grad-model Katyushas rockets were fired at southern Israeli communities.

After three days of fighting, however, Hamas’s military wing – the Izz a-Din al-Qassam Brigades – announced that it was willing to accept an Egyptian-brokered truce. Hamas, for the time being, does not see a major escalation of conflict with Israel to be in its best interests.

From the time Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip in 2006, the Sinai became the main smuggling route for weapons, people, and goods into and out of Gaza.

The interregnum following Egypt’s Arab Spring revolution and the subsequent weakening of authority in Cairo opened the large, sparsely populated desert peninsula of Sinai for armed Palestinian groups and global jihadists to mix with Bedouins who were disgruntled with the central Egyptian regime. The fall of Egypt’s former president Hosni Mubarak, and the political upheavals that followed, have led to a dramatic decline in security in the Sinai. This security decline has led to attacks on the pipeline transporting natural gas from Egypt to Israel and Jordan, the kidnapping of foreign tourists, and assaults against police stations. The Multinational Force and Observers (MFO), tasked with monitoring the Israel-Egypt peace treaty, have also come under attack.

We can only speculate as to the extent of Hamas' involvement in these activities. However, Israel, as a matter of policy, holds Hamas responsible for any hostile activity emanating from within the Gaza Strip – where Hamas is the de facto ruling authority.

Consequently, Israel is investing in a sophisticated fence that will run the length of its border with Egypt to help prevent cross-border attacks and, incidentally, the infiltration of illegal African migrants. Israel is also deploying more Iron Dome missile defense batteries to intercept rockets fired from the Gaza Strip and the Sinai.

The latest round of fighting further illustrates the threat of global jihadi groups in the Sinai. These groups can be linked to like-minded groups in the Gaza Strip, which are nominally under the control of Hamas. These armed groups are exploiting both the weakness of the regime in Cairo and Israel’s reluctance to take military action against them in Egyptian territory – for fear of further eroding Egypt-Israel relations.

Increased lawlessness in the Sinai could trigger conflict between Israel and armed groups in the Gaza Strip – a conflict that will undoubtedly attract Hamas.

If fighting were to erupt in the Sinai, a new area of instability could develop in an already highly unstable region – a new area ripe for exploitation by groups who thrive on destabilization in pursuit of their own self-interests. Chief among these groups is Hamas.


Published in the online Jerusalem Post Magazine today, 17 July:
http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Opinion/Article.aspx?id=277772&prmusr=3Th%2fRwWDQEWKomByxHd8qv38UtMgPG4LvHoJqVxiMWRmdfre3XafGI2r9tGo358
l

A Sovereign Palestine …

…could be celebrating its 12th anniversary

Shakespeare, as ever, puts the thought most felicitously:
                       "There is a tide in the affairs of men,
                         Which, taken at the flood leads on to fortune:
                         Omitted, all the voyage of their life
                         Is bound in shallows and in miseries.”

On 11 July 2000 Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat met at Camp David under the chairmanship of the United States president, Bill Clinton. Their purpose: to reach an agreement on all outstanding issues between Israel and the Palestinians – a so-called final status settlement. The summit ended on 25 July. If the negotiations had proved successful, we might be marking 25 July 2012 as the twelfth anniversary of the founding of an independent, sovereign Palestine.

What sort of Palestine would it have been?

No official records exist of the final position of the two parties, and the unofficial accounts differ in important respects. So some guesswork and a little creative imagination is called for.

To start with, we must assume that an agreement would have been on the basis of the final set of recommendations that the Clinton team put together, following the formal conclusion of the Camp David meeting. The three leaders met again in the White House that December, and once more in Taba in January, and the plan (known as the “Clinton Parameters”) was formally put to them. Israel accepted it in principle, the Palestinians did not. Let us suppose that they had done so.

If they had, sovereign Palestine would now control 97 per cent of the West Bank plus a Gaza Strip larger by roughly a third, to compensate for the 3 per cent of the West Bank annexed by Israel. Israel would have withdrawn from 63 settlements on the West Bank, all of which would have passed into Palestinian hands, and Palestinian territory on the West Bank would be contiguous, with no cantons. The West Bank would be linked with Gaza by both an elevated highway and an elevated railroad running through the Negev.

Sovereign Palestine would have as its capital a new municipality – Al Quds. The boundaries of Jerusalem would have been re-drawn, and Al-Quds would incorporate the Arab neighbourhoods that had previously been inside Jerusalem's boundaries. It would also encompass adjacent regions such as Abu Dis, el-Azaria, Beit Jala, Anata and A-Ram. The Palestinian state would have religious autonomy over the Temple Mount. The Muslim and Christian quarters of the Old City would also be autonomous, though remaining under formal Israeli sovereignty,

The new Palestine would by now have become home to many hundreds of thousands of refugees, all of whom would have the right of return to the Palestinian state. Those returning would have received reparations from a $30 billion international fund set up specifically to compensate them.

How different might the events of the past twelve years have been? Let’s speculate.

There would, of course, have been no second intifada – which means there would have been no sudden increase in terrorist attacks inside Israel, and therefore no need for Israel’s security wall or fence.

Yasser Arafat maintained a firm grip on Palestinian politics. What he said for Arab consumption differed pretty radically from his public utterances in English or his stance on the world stage. Hamas would have had little incentive to set itself up against an Arafat-approved settlement, because the organisation would have been fully aware of his real agenda. For example, Arafat had told an Arab audience in Stockholm in 1996, ‘We plan to eliminate the State of Israel and establish a purely Palestinian state. We will make life unbearable for Jews by psychological warfare and population explosion… We Palestinians will take over everything, including all of Jerusalem.’

Arafat’s colleague Faisal al-Husseini was even more explicit. He described the Oslo process as a ‘Trojan Horse’ designed to promote the strategic goal of ‘Palestine from the river to the sea’, that is, from the Jordan to the Mediterranean − in short, replacing Israel with Palestine.

So there would have been no take-over of Gaza by Hamas, no indiscriminate firing of rockets on Israeli citizens, no Israeli response in the form of Operation Cast Lead, and no naval blockade of Gaza by Israel. Accordingly, there would have been no “freedom flotilla”, and no Mavi Marmara incident – no death of nine Turkish citizens, and perhaps no freezing of Turkish-Israeli relations in consequence.

There would, of course, have been no need for any ill-fated attempt to secure recognition by the United Nations for a sovereign Palestine, for by now Palestine would have long been a fully-fledged, and no doubt active, member of the United Nations. Palestine would have followed Serbia into membership (they joined in November 2000), and beaten East Timor (September 2002).

Would the new sovereign Palestine have become a base for terrorist attacks on Israel, in pursuit of Arafat’s stated long-term aim – or would shorter-term political and economic realities have exerted their logic? Would self-interest have dictated that the fledgling State co-operate industrially, commercially, economically, financially, militarily, even culturally, as closely as possible with its nearest, flourishing neighbour? By now, would Palestine be thriving under mutually advantageous treaties not only with Israel, but perhaps also with Jordan and Egypt? In fact, would a sovereign Palestine by now be cultivating a prospering economy and be well on the way to becoming part of the developed world? Who may say? But it is a scenario as likely as any other.

Thinking about it, one’s over-riding feeling must surely be a sense of the pity of it all. Consider all the avoidable death and destruction over the past twelve years, both Palestinian and Israeli. And what a wasted opportunity. So felicitous a concatenation of circumstances from the Palestinian point of view is unlikely to present itself again in the foreseeable future, The political wheel has turned. The second intifada, Hamas’s seizure of power in Gaza, internal Palestinian rivalries, even the popular triumphs of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt – all have resulted in a political atmosphere quite different from the heady days of 2000.

So we are unable to wish a sovereign Palestine “Happy 12th Anniversary”. Twelve years ago the Palestinian leadership, not for the first time, signally failed to recognize that “tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.” But the future need not be quite as bleak as Shakespeare predicts. Tides have a habit of turning. Let us hope that, next time, those in charge of Palestinian affairs have the courage to seize the opportunity before it is, yet again, too late.

Published in the online Jerusalem Post today, 12 July 2012:
http://www.jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.aspx?id=277102&prmusr=keQ9Rw%2fN%2fyJINYq06KmeCfWiWL%2fDUr2Kl1Fk%2bgsr4I%2fUKZTZW2DOPxEYIUVQNh5D

Should Israel Annex the West Bank?

In politics, the so-called unimaginable can always be imagined; the unthinkable can always be thought.

Next Thursday, 12 July, perhaps as a riposte to the One-State Conference held at the Harvard Kennedy School in May 2012, a conference concerned with applying Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria (aka the West Bank) is due to take place in Israel. An impressive list of right-wing Israeli speakers, including several Knesset members, has been lined up to discuss the issue from a wide range of angles. The location selected is, somewhat provocatively perhaps, the Machpela Visitors Centre in Hebron.

The Harvard event envisaged the State of Israel being submerged into a new sovereign entity including the West Bank and Gaza, with equal rights for all its citizens. Right-wing voices within Israel − and some elsewhere as well − are becoming increasingly bold in proposing a quite different one-state solution to the perennial Israel-Palestine dispute. They are, quite simply, advocating the annexation by Israel of the whole of the West Bank, ignoring or discounting or downgrading the likely effects of such action.

Speakers at next Thursday’s conference are due, among other matters, to advocate no further concessions by Israel in pursuit of Palestinian involvement in a renewed peace process, to assert Israel’s ancient and biblically-based claim on Judea and Samaria, to set out a programme for extending Israel’s sovereignty over those areas, to explain the legal aspects of such action, to assess the balance of profit and loss of doing so, and to propose ways of winning over public opinion to support such a policy.

Advocates of such political action have in common so blinkered a world view that they see before them only their desired objective, and cannot – or choose not to − appreciate the disastrous consequences of what they are proposing.

Not that their ultimate purpose is necessarily unworthy. Most advocates of this version of the one-state solution are concerned very largely with Israel’s security – indeed, in some respects, its very survival. They point to Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000, and Hezbollah’s subsequent launching of Katyusha rockets into northern Israeli towns, together with their continued attacks on Israeli troops positioned beyond the agreed boundary. They see that the result of Israel withdrawing totally from the Gaza Strip in 2005 − undertaken in the expectation of a democratic Palestinian government taking over − was almost immediately undermined by a bloody fratricidal coup organised by Hamas against the Fatah-led Palestinian administration. The result: a veritable torrent of rockets from Gaza rained down indiscriminately on Israeli citizens, until Israel undertook its military incursion into Gaza in 2009.

They see that the founding documents of virtually every Palestinian political organisation includes the aspiration of eliminating Israel altogether from the Middle East. And they fear that the establishment of a sovereign Palestine on the West Bank could result in a new Gaza – a terrorist take-over, and this time within easy striking distance of major Israeli towns and cities, including Tel Aviv.

All of which may partly explain what they propose and why they propose it, but certainly cannot condone the politically disastrous effects.

World opinion in general could surely never accede to, or endorse, a land-grab of this sort by Israel, nor the flagrant violation of the Oslo Accords − officially signed on behalf of Israel by Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres − that it would represent. Israel would have de-legitimised herself, would be roundly condemned by friend and foe alike, and would have laid herself open to punitive economic, commercial and financial sanctions, if nothing worse.

It is no secret that an ideal Middle East, from the Muslim point of view, would contain no Jewish state. Many Arab politicians cling to this aspiration to retain their appeal to the hotter-heads among their followers. Polls of Palestinian opinion, however, reveal a quite different picture. The majority of Palestinians now accept that Israel is here to stay, and yearn for a happy, peaceful, reasonably prosperous life for themselves and their families. In a recent poll conducted in the West Bank and Gaza, only 13.5 per cent of those questioned thought that “violent action” was the best way to end the occupation and establish a Palestinian State. No less than 84.4 per cent of those questioned thought that when their children were their own age there would “definitely”, “possibly” or “likely” be peace between the Israelis and Palestinians.

The effect on the Arab world in general, and Palestinian opinion in particular, of removing forever the hope of an eventual sovereign Palestine, would be a recipe for a “1984” scenario of constant, unending conflict in the region, with no hope of resolution. This is certainly not the future that most Israelis or Palestinians want.

The Two-State Conundrum

Letter in The Jerusalem Post, June 27, 2012

Sir
      In his latest piece (“Stupid, Seditious or Suicidal?” – Into the Fray, June 22), Martin Sherman hits out in all directions. He castigates the Israeli Left as imbecile or iniquitous, the Israeli Right as impotent or insincere, and the rest of those who disagree with him, including Dennis Ross and Peter Beinart, as Arab-appeasers and Muslim-mollifiers − to say nothing of his current favoured term of abuse: “two-staters”. Which doesn’t leave all that many to endorse his favoured recipe for the future.
      He does not expound on this recipe in his current piece, but those who follow his lucid, rational, sometimes brilliant, but essentially impractical and politically naïve, arguments week by week, will know that he is all for his version of the one-state solution. In short, he advocates an Israeli annexation of Judea and Samaria. The inevitable consequence of such a move on world opinion, not that any Israeli government in its right mind would contemplate it, would be to confirm Israel in the status so ardently desired by her worst enemies – a pariah state.
      It seems to me that Sherman, justifiably in many ways, sees a future Middle East through the prism of copper-bottomed, guaranteed security for Israel; but he discounts all other considerations. Most of the rest of the uncommitted world, while not dissenting from that objective, sees a future Middle East as containing a sovereign Palestinian state.
      How to achieve the one without forfeiting the other − that is the political conundrum that has to be cracked.
Yours
Neville Teller

Preconditions for Peace Talks

“Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the dance?
Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, won't you join the dance?”

So sings the Mock Turtle in Alice in Wonderland,­ and a pretty apt metaphor it is for the Palestinian Authority’s indecision over the past two years about joining (and subsequently re-joining) the peace talks.

Back in January 2010, at the behest of newly-elected President Obama, Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, imposed a 10-month freeze on construction in all West Bank settlements. The idea was to create a positive cooperative atmosphere in which peace negotiations might be fostered. For nine of those ten months PA President Mahmoud Abbas havered and wavered. From time to time he announced additional conditions as essential pre-requirements even for so-called “proximity” discussions (that is, negotiations using a third-party go-between). When the Arab League endorsed the proximity talks idea, however, these preconditions were unceremoniously dumped. So, with US special envoy George Mitchell as the convener, proximity talks indeed started in March 2010 as a precursor to full face-to-face discussions.

Following months of delicate negotiations, Abbas and Netanyahu sat down together in September 2010 for the first session of what was announced as discussions that would lead to a peace accord between the two parties within twelve months. Held in Washington under the auspices of the United States, the meeting was chaired by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. To provide cover for Mahmoud Abbas, who was exposing himself to the hostility of a considerable proportion of the Arab world, Egypt’s President Mubarak and King Abdullah of Jordan had been persuaded to attend. Abbas was thus not facing Israel alone. Two major Arab nations were at his side, endorsing his decision to talk peace.

But by the time the parties had agreed to meet in person, too much of the precious ten-month construction moratorium had been used up. Netanyahu, heading a fragile coalition, was dependent on right-wing elements within his cabinet that were utterly opposed to any renewal of the freeze. President Abbas, on the other hand, now insisted that any extension of the direct peace talks was dependent on construction remaining frozen in the West Bank. This Netanyahu was unable to deliver, and the moratorium duly came to an end on the appointed day. The peace initiative followed soon afterwards – and Abbas and Netanyahu have not met from that day to this.

But since then Mahmoud Abbas − despite his attempt to outflank negotiations altogether last autumn, by unsuccessfully seeking United Nations recognition of Palestine as a sovereign state − has on several occasions pronounced himself perfectly willing to reopen negotiations, provided Israel meets certain conditions. These have been widened now to include a complete freeze on all settlement building in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, and an acceptance by Israel of the pre-Six Day War boundaries as the basis for a new sovereign Palestinian state. Lurking in the background are also a demand for the “right of return” of some 4 million Palestinians, the establishment of East Jerusalem as the capital of a new state, and an outright refusal to acknowledge Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people.

In parallel, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has repeatedly offered to reopen negotiations without preconditions of any sort. His offer is to put everything − all the outstanding issues between the parties − on the table.

The latest set of PA delaying tactics emerged after President Abbas met France’s new President, François Hollande, last Friday (8 June). In addition to the settlement freeze, President Abbas now added two further demands as the price Israel must pay for the PA to enter, not formal negotiations be it understood, but informal talks.

“We recently told them that if Israel agreed to free prisoners and allow us to re-arm the police, then we would again sit at the same table as Netanyahu,” said Abbas at a press conference in France, adding as qualification: “if Mr Netanyahu agrees, then we will establish a dialogue, but that doesn’t mean a negotiation.”

At the same press conference a few minutes later, the preconditions changed again.

“The ball is now in Netanyahu’s court,” said Abbas. “The moment he agrees to stop settlement construction and accepts the borders of the two states, we will go directly to the negotiations to discuss the remaining final-status issues.”

So what is it that will bring Abbas to the negotiating table – freeing prisoners, arming the PA police, accepting the borders of the two states, stopping settlement building? All – or some? And if some, which ones?

Incidentally, in response Israeli spokesman Mark Regev said: “Israel remains ready for the immediate resumption of peace talks without any preconditions.”

As for Israel’s continued building within settlements on the West Bank, following a peace accord the larger neighbourhoods, such as Gush Etzion, Pisgat Ze'ev and Modi'in Ilit, will − even according to quoted PA positions − almost certainly remain in Israeli hands. So whether building recommences in those areas or not can be of little practical concern to the Palestinian cause.

Take this thought one stage further. It is generally accepted that in the event of a final agreement, a range of smaller Israeli settlements will have to be evacuated and handed over to the new sovereign Palestine, just as settlements were evacuated when Israel withdrew from Gaza. Yes, there is going to be an almighty row inside Israel when, or if, that day arrives. But if it does, it will only have arrived following a referendum of the entire Israeli population, which will have voted in favour of whatever agreement has emerged from the final negotiations.

Given the democratic nature of the Israeli state, it can be taken for granted that a fair number of settlements would indeed be evacuated and handed over to the Palestinian Authority to be incorporated into the new Palestine. If that is so, one might ask, why are the Palestinians objecting all that vigorously to new building in these smaller settlements? After all, they might argue, the more construction the settlers undertake, the more will eventually fall into Palestinian hands when the hand-over deal takes place.

Of course, all the preconditions that Abbas can devise mean little to the rival Palestinian government in Gaza controlled by Hamas, the Islamist and terrorist entity viscerally opposed to any recognition of, let alone negotiations with, Israel. Hamas opposes Abbas’s acceptance of the two-state solution (since one of the two states would be Israel), just as it opposed the PA approach to the United Nations last year seeking recognition for a sovereign Palestinian state within the old 1967 boundaries. The corollary of a Palestine within the pre-Six Day War boundaries is an Israel outside them, and this is anathema to Hamas and its supporters − Iran, Hezbollah and Assad’s Syria. All attempts to effect a rapprochement between Hamas and its bitter rival, Fatah, which runs the PA, have proved fruitless, so whenever Abbas speaks, and whatever he says, he is representing only part of the Palestinian body politic. In short, a significant element of any future Palestinian state is not involved in any of the moves towards peace talks.

One precondition, therefore, rarely mentioned as essential for effective peace negotiations, is for PA President Abbas to resume full political and administrative control of Gaza. Someone might slip that into the list, next time around.

The New Palestinian Government

The Palestinian Authority (the PA) is nominally the governing body of the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza. However the world knows that, following the elections of 2006, Hamas seized control of Gaza in a bloody fratricidal coup, and has been the de facto ruling authority ever since, remaining at daggers drawn with its political rival, Fatah, which controls the PA. The latest in a long line of attempts to foster a formal accord between the two took place on the 6th of February 2012 in Qatar’s capital city, Doha.

Efforts at reconciliation between the two power blocs within the Palestinian body politic began as early as 2008. Five rounds of talks held in Cairo failed to achieve agreement. A sixth meeting, held in June 2009, was intended to pave the way for final reconciliation on the 7th of July. It never happened. All the same, Egypt continued hosting intermittent joint discussions between the parties in the forlorn hope of achieving a breakthrough – forlorn, because all such efforts are attempts at reconciling the irreconcilable.

Insofar as Mahmoud Abbas has embraced the concept of the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, has consistently engaged with Israel – even if to no obvious effect, as yet – and went so far in September 2010 as to sit down at the same table with Israel’s prime minister and talk peace, in Hamas’s eyes the PA has placed itself beyond the pale. For Hamas remains what it has always been – an extreme Islamist and terrorist organization committed to the destruction of Israel.

Hamas, which includes in its official charter the notorious antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, has never endorsed the two-state solution, since to do so would be to recognise Israel. For the same reason Hamas opposed Abbas’s attempt, in September 2011, at gaining United Nations’ recognition of Palestine within the old 1967 borders. Recognising Palestine within the 1967 borders would, by extension, mean recognising Israel outside them. Nor has it accepted the three minimal requirements for official recognition demanded of it by the Middle East Quartet, representing the US, the UN, Russia and the EU. These are recognizing Israel’s right to exist, abandoning terrorism, and accepting previous Israeli-Palestinian agreements – all of which are accepted by the PA.

Nevertheless, in February 2012 these irreconcilable differences appeared to have been overcome. After several rounds of discussion, PA President Mahmoud Abbas, and the leader-in-exile of Hamas, Khaled Meshaal, formally signed the Doha Declaration. which called for the formation of a national consensus Palestinian government whose main mission would be to prepare for presidential and parliamentary elections and rebuild the Gaza Strip. Abbas was appointed interim prime minister of the new joint Hamas-Fatah unity government.

The reaction of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was instant. “You can’t have it both ways,” he said, addressing Mahmoud Abbas. “It’s either a pact with Hamas, or it’s peace with Israel.”

Of course he was quite correct, and in little more than three months the Doha declaration has been revealed as a slap-dash papering over of cracks, and incapable of providing a lasting accommodation.

Abbas and his spokesmen insist that at Doha Hamas agreed to honour all previous agreements signed between the Palestinians and Israel, and accept that being part of a united Palestinian government means recognising Israel. But Hamas officials themselves have repeatedly denied this, and their various leaders have failed to unite behind the Doha deal. Senior Hamas officials in the Gaza Strip, including Gazan Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, and Mahmoud al-Zahar, criticised the agreement from the start, and signs soon emerged of a growing split within the movement.

By swearing in a new Palestinian government in the West Bank on 16 May, Mahmoud Abbas and the PA have acknowledged the validity of Netanyahu’s options – engage with Hamas or engage with Israel – and openly declared their choice. It is to continue their struggle against Hamas, and perhaps to re-engage in negotiations with Israel that might lead to an accord. For following an exchange of letters between Israel’s prime minister and the Palestinian President, Abbas is travelling to Cairo today, Friday 18 May, where he is scheduled to hold talks with Mohamed Tantawi, the de facto ruler of Egypt.  He will also visit Amman for talks with King Abdullah, and the tour could also include Qatar and Saudi Arabia. PLO executive committee member Wasel Abu Yusef said that Abbas was planning on requesting a meeting of the Arab League to discuss the Israeli reply to his letter.

Meanwhile Salam Fayyad, the West Bank Palestinian leader widely credited with developing and boosting the Palestinian economy over the past few years, though anathema to the Hamas leadership, remains prime minister. His previous additional role as finance minister is now taken by Nabil Kassis, a former university president who will have to deal with the challenge of steady decline in donor funds. The PA is relying on foreign aid to cover a 2012 budget projected to reach nearly $1.7 billion. Most of the aid comes from the European Union, the United States and Arab countries.

The new cabinet consists of representatives of Fatah, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Palestinian Democratic Union, as well as independent figures. It includes six female ministers – the largest number of women to serve in a PA cabinet.

Prior to the swearing-in ceremony of the new government in Ramallah, Abbas told a news conference that the incoming government "will be dismissed immediately" if the political partnership with Hamas is consummated. It looks as though the new Palestinian government is safely installed for its full term.

Likud and Kadima - A Winning Team?

Israel's new Likud-Kadima unity government is a bold initiative that opens the way for interesting developments, both domestic and external.  There is logic in the coalition of the two parties.  Kadima is in a real sense the child of Likud - a hard-line party, which itself softened its ideas with time and experience.  Kadima embodied a hard-nosed look at demographics - the realisation that it was not in Israel's best interests to continue governing a huge Arab minority that could easily turn into a majority.  Thus was born major non-Labour support for the two-state solution.

Talk of a possible conjoining of Israel's Likud and Kadima parties was in the air as early as July 2010 (see my blog of 9 July 2010: 'A Peace Deal by 2011?' ).  But with Tzipi Livni leading Kadima the idea came to nothing.  She was intent on remaining the official opposition, hoping for a political opportunity - that frustratingly remained out of reach  - to oust Likud and take over the reins of power.  Her replacement as chairman of Kadima by Shaul Mofaz has opened the door to this new configuration of Israel's political kaleidoscope. 

A major effect must be to reduce considerably prime minister Netanyahu's dependence on the support of the religious right-wing parties.  They - in particular, but not exclusively, Yisrael Beitenu - not only consistently restricted his freedom of manoeuvre during the peace negotiations of 2010, but placed positive obstacles in his path.

The main reasons for forming this new alliance are internal and domestic - to do with devising new rules for ensuring that most young haredi men undertake some form of national service - but the new unity government will inevitably adopt a new approach to any peace initiatives that might arise between now and the autumn of 2013, when a general election becomes mandatory.  Neither Likud nor Kadima offer the same hard-line support for the settler movement as the more right-wing religious parties.  This in itself will open the way for greater flexibility, should any moves towards new peace negotations make an appearance. Let us hope they do.

Ha'aretz vs the Jews

In the Jerusalem Post of 4 May 2012 Martin Sherman, in a piece titled “Haaretz vs the Jews” castigates the Left for running an “unambiguous campaign for the conversion of Israel from the 'nation state of the Jews' to 'a state of all its citizens.'  But the one surely does not preclude the other. The choice is not between a Zionist Greater Israel and a post-Zionist state denuded of its Jewish identity.  I remind Martin Sherman of Israel’s Declaration of Independence which, while unequivocally endorsing “the right of the Jewish people to national rebirth in its own country”, states:
The State of Israel will … foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants… it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture.
Israel can and must retain its identity as the nation state of the Jewish people. But this is entirely compatible with the aspiration of the founding fathers to respect the rights of minorities and to strive for equality on every level for all the country's citizens.
A letter from me to this effect appears in the Jerusalem Post of 8 May 2012.

Gunter Grass

This Must Be Said

Allan Massie, writing in the London Daily Telegraph on 26 April, makes a valid point. To understand history, it is necessary to appreciate the context in which events occurred and the pressures influencing people’s behaviour. I am, therefore, content to suspend judgement on Gunter Grass’s teenage Nazi past. What I find unforgiveable are his current distorted and frankly antisemitic views, as expressed in his recent poem “What Must Be Said”. In it he declares that Israel is the major obstacle to world peace and is planning a first nuclear strike against Iran “to extinguish the Iranian people.” But this is surely viewing the world through a totally warped lens. Is it not Iran that is alarming the world by continuing to develop its nuclear capability? Was it Israel that threatened to wipe Iran off the map, or the other way around? Surely it is Iran that is providing military and financial support to Assad in Syria, Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Perhaps it is Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s continual denial of the Holocaust that pleases Gunter Grass. Whatever his reasoning, he proclaims the aggressor the victim, and castigates the victim of threats of annihilation as an aggressor.. No amount of empathy with Gunter Grass’s past can justify this biased view of today’s world.

Israeli Peace Initiative (IPI)

I thought I closed this blog officially on 31 December 2010. [The book based on it: "One Year in the History of Israel and Palestine" was published on 1 June 2011]. However, the announcement of Wednesday, 6 April 2011 of the Israeli Peace Initiative was too significant a development to allow to pass unremarked. Accordingly, I exceptionally posted this additional piece.  Since then I have been adding an occasional article as matters of particular interest have caught my attention.


What is the IPI?
• The Israeli Peace Initiative is a peace proposal launched by a group of public figures in Israel, including former generals and others.
• It presents itself as an Israeli response to the Arab Peace Initiative promoted by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and endorsed by the Arab League in 2002.
• It outlines the terms for final status agreements between Israel and the Palestinians, Syria, Lebanon, and the normalisation of relations between Israel and the rest of the Arab world.

The principles for peace in the document include:
> A Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank based on 1967 borders with 1:1 land swaps not exceeding 7% of the West Bank.

> Jerusalem shared as the capital of two states with special arrangements for shared sovereignty in the Old City.

> Refugees to receive financial compensation from the international community and Israel with the right of return only to a Palestinian state but with ‘with mutually agreed-upon symbolic exceptions.'

> Peace with Syria to be based on a staged Israeli withdrawal from the Golan and agreed security arrangements.

> Peace with Lebanon based on existing borders and Lebanon exercising ‘full sovereignty over its territory through the Lebanese army.'

> Regional security arrangements and economic cooperation based on the creation of a ‘Middle East Economic Development Bloc'.

> The gradual normalisation of relations between Israel and Arab and Islamic states that would commence at the start of negotiations.

Who is behind it?
The initiative was launched by a group of public figures in Israel, who perceive the current deadlock in the peace process to be damaging for Israel. They include:

* Yaakov Peri - Former Shin Bet (Israeli internal security) chief

* Amram Mitzna - Retired IDF general and former leader of Israeli Labour party

* Danny Yatom - Former head of Mossad, Israel's intelligence service

* Amnon Lipkin Shahak - Former IDF Chief of Staff and former Knesset member

* Yuval and Dalia Rabin - Children of assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin

* Adina Bar Shalom - Daughter of Shas Rabbi and spiritual leader Ovadia Yosef

* Professor Aliza Shenhar - President of Emek Yezreel College

* Idan Ofer - Israeli business mogul

Here is the Israeli Peace Initiative in full:

The Israeli Peace Initiative (IPI)
in response to the Arab Peace Initiative (API)

Proposal - April 6, 2011

The State of Israel,
*Reaffirming that Israel's strategic objective is to reach a historic compromise and permanent status agreements that shall determine the finality of all claims and the end of the Israeli Arab conflict, in order to achieve permanent and lasting peace, lasting and guaranteed security, regional economic prosperity and normal ties with all Arab and Islamic states,

*Recognizing the suffering of the Palestinian refugees since the 1948 war as well as of the Jewish refugees from the Arab countries, and realizing the need to resolve the Palestinian refugees problem through realistic and mutually agreed-upon solutions,

*Realizing that wide-scale multilateral economic cooperation is essential in order to ensure the prosperity of the Middle East, its environmental sustainability and the future of its peoples,

*Recognizing the Arab Peace Initiative of March 2002 (API) as a historic effort made by the Arab states to reach a breakthrough and achieve progress on a regional basis, and sharing the API statement that a military solution to the conflict will not achieve peace or provide security for the parties,

Therefore Israel accepts the API as a framework for regional peace negotiations and presents the IPI as an integrated response to the API, and as a vision of the regional final-status agreements to be negotiated and signed between the Arab states, the Palestinians and Israel, based on the following proposed principles:

1) CONFLICT RESOLUTION PRINCIPLES
The key principle of all regional peace agreements shall be Israeli withdrawals, guaranteed security, normal relations and end of all conflicts, while recognizing the security needs of all parties, the water resources challenges, the demographic realities on the ground, and the interests and needs of the followers of the three monotheistic faiths;

Furthermore, the Israeli Palestinian conflict shall be resolved on the principle of two states for two nations: Palestine as a nation state for the Palestinians and Israel as a nation state for the Jews (in which the Arab minority will have equal and full civil rights as articulated in Israel's Declaration of Independence). On this basis, the following parameters are proposed:

1a) Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Resolution Parameters
1. Statehood and Security
A sovereign independent Palestinian state shall be formed in the West Bank and Gaza Strip on territories from which Israel withdrew. The state shall be demilitarized, exercising full authority over its internal security forces. The International community shall play an active role in providing border security and curbing terrorist threats.

2. Borders
The borders shall be based on the June 4, 1967, lines, with agreed modifications subject to the following principles: the creation of territorial contiguity between the Palestinian territories; land swaps (not to exceed 7% of the West Bank) based on a 1:1 ratio, including the provision of a safe corridor between the West Bank and Gaza, under de facto Palestinian control.

3. Jerusalem
The greater Jerusalem area shall include the two capitals of the two states. The line shall be drawn so that: Jewish neighborhoods shall be under Israeli sovereignty; the Arab neighborhoods shall be under Palestinian sovereignty; special arrangements shall be implemented in the Old City, ensuring that the Jewish Quarter and the Western Wall shall be under Israeli sovereignty; the Temple Mount shall remain under a special no-sovereignty regime ("God Sovereignty"), with special agreed-upon arrangements, ensuring that Islamic holy places shall be administered by the Moslem Waqf, and Jewish holy sites and interests shall be administered by Israel. The implementation of these arrangements will be supervised by an Israeli-International committee.

4. Refugees
The solutions for the Palestinian refugees shall be agreed upon between Israel, the Palestinians and all regional parties in accordance with the following principles: Financial compensation shall be offered to the refugees and the host countries by the international community and Israel; the Palestinian refugees wishing to return (as mentioned in UNGAR 194*) may do so only to the Palestinian state, with mutually agreed-upon symbolic exceptions.

1b) Israeli-Syrian Conflict Resolution Parameters
1. Borders
Israel shall withdraw from the Golan to a border-line to be designed based on the June 4, 1967 status, with agreed minor modifications and land swaps based on a 1:1 ratio, reflecting the 1923 international border. The agreement shall be mutually implemented in stages, based on the Sinai model, over a period not to exceed 5 years.

2. Security Arrangements
A comprehensive security package shall be mutually agreed, defining, inter alia, the scope of demilitarized zones on both sides of the border and the deployment of peace keeping international forces.

1c) Israeli-Lebanese Conflict Resolution Parameters
1. Borders Israel and Lebanon shall establish permanent peace based on UNSCR 1701**, subject to which Israel concluded its withdrawal to the international border.

2. Lebanese Sovereignty
In addition to the full implementation of UNSCR 1701, Lebanon shall exercise full sovereignty over its territory through the Lebanese army.

1d) State of Peace
In each of the Israeli-Palestinian, Israeli-Syrian and the Israeli-Lebanese peace agreements the respective parties agree to apply between them the provisions of the Charter of the United Nations and the principles of international law governing relations among states in time of peace; to settle all disputes between them by peaceful means; to develop good neighborly relations of co-operation between them to ensure lasting security; to refrain from the threat or use of force against each other and from forming any coalition, organization or alliance with a third party, the objectives or activities of which include launching aggression or hostility against the other party.

2) REGIONAL SECURITY PRINCIPLES
1. The parties will create regional security mechanisms, addressing shared threats and risks arising from states, terrorist organizations, marine pirate groups, and guerrilla organizations. to ensure the safety and security of the peoples of the region.

2. The parties shall build regional frameworks to jointly fight against crime and environmental threats.

3) ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT PRINCIPLES
Based on significant economic support by the international community, the parties shall implement wide-scale regional cooperation projects in order to ensure the stabilization, viability and prosperity of the region, and to achieve optimal utilization of energy and water resources for the benefit of all parties. Such projects will improve transportation infrastructure, agriculture, industry and regional tourism, thus addressing the rising danger of unemployment in the region. In the future, the parties shall create the "Middle East Economic Development Bloc"(inviting all Middle Eastern countries to join), aiming at reaching a special status in the EU, the US and the International Community.

4) STEPS TOWARDS NORMAL RELATIONS PRINCIPLES
Israel, the Arab States and the Islamic States commit to implement gradual steps towards establishing normal relations between them, in the spirit of the Arab Peace Initiative, which shall commence upon the launching of peace negotiations and shall be gradually upgraded to full normal relations (including diplomatic relations, open borders and economic ties) upon the signing of the permanent status agreements and throughout their implementation.

* United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194
was passed on December 11, 1948. It consists of 15 articles, the most quoted of which are:
Article 7: protection and free access to the Holy Places
Article 8: demilitarization and UN control over Jerusalem
Article 9: free access to Jerusalem
Article 11: the return of refugees

**United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701
was a resolution intended to resolve the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict. Approved by both the Lebanese and the Israeli Cabinets, the ceasefire came into effect on Monday, 14 August 2006.

One Year in the History of Israel and Palestine

"A Mid-East Journal" closes

I began this blog early in January 2010, and I wrote the last piece on 30 December. My intention from the start was to follow the ins and outs, the ups and downs, of the peace process during a period that I thought might prove a turning point in the history of both Israel and Palestine – and then to produce a book about the events that I had lived through and described.

As 2010 dawned, it seemed to me possible that the year might prove seminal in the long-drawn-out process of finding an accommodation between Israel and the Palestinians. Although many of the negative factors that had frustrated past efforts were still present, the signs that meaningful negotiations might be resumed and brought, eventually, to some sort of favourable outcome seemed more hopeful than for many years.

Within its first days in office, the new US administration had clearly marked the Middle East as a priority for its attention. It was on 22 January 2009, in a special ceremony in the White House, that newly-elected President Barack Obama named George Mitchell his "special envoy to the Middle East". The event, attended also by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was widely interpreted as a determination on Obama's part to involve himself and his new administration in working for, and in finally achieving, a settlement to the long-running Arab-Israel dispute.

At the ceremony Mitchell said that, along with Obama and Clinton, he believed the objective of a Jewish state and a Palestinian state living side by side was possible, and that the conflict, old as it was, could be resolved

Obama charged his Middle East envoy to return to the Middle East, and to seek a "comprehensive peace". By that, Mitchell soon made clear, he meant not only a settlement of the Israel-Palestine impasse, but also peace between Israel and Syria, and between Israel and Lebanon, and a normalisation of relations between Israel and the Arab world as a whole – ambitious objectives indeed, and certainly not susceptible of achievement in the space of one short twelvemonth. Some sort of breakthrough in the long-lasting Israel-Palestine dispute did, however, seem a possibility.

It was in March 2009 that the Obama administration explicitly incorporated into US policy the 2002 Arab League peace plan, originally mooted by Saudi Arabia, under which the Arab world undertook formally to recognise Israel and enter into normal relations with her, in exchange for Israel's withdrawing from territories captured in the 1967 war. Three months later President Obama, in an unprecedented move, reached out to the Muslim world in a speech in Cairo.

In what must still be regarded as an historic address, Obama said the "cycle of suspicion and discord" between the United States and the Muslim world must end. He called for a "new beginning"; both sides needed to make a "sustained effort... to respect one another and seek common ground". The US bond with Israel was unbreakable, he said, but the Palestinians' plight was "intolerable".

Fortunately or unfortunately, whichever way one chooses to regard the matter, water continued to flow under the bridge. Events overtook aspirations. For example, it quickly became apparent that all the overtures in the world counted for nothing against the reality of Iran's nuclear ambitions.

As regards the position of the Palestinians, the West Bank, administered by the Palestinian Authority, had been enjoying unprecedented economic growth – something between 5% and 7% was the World Bank's estimate for 2009. Meanwhile the Islamist terrorist organisation Hamas, having seized control of the Gaza Strip in a bloody internecine coup d'état, remained virtually at war with Fatah, its rivals within the Palestinian Authority, and deeply opposed to any accommodation with, or even recognition of, Israel.

Considering itself at war with Israel, Hamas had pursued a consistent policy of firing rockets from Gaza, indiscriminately hitting anything within range. Supplied with ever more sophisticated weaponry from Iran and Syria, Hamas's attacks started reaching deeper and deeper into Israel. Finally, in December 2008 – after Barack Obama had won the Presidential election, but before his inauguration – Israel launched its short, sharp and devastating Operation Cast Lead against the Hamas regime.

The legacies of that conflict were a virtual cessation of the rocket incursions, accusations that Israel's attack had taken too little account of the impact on the civilian population, and a continuing blockade of the Gaza Strip by both Israel and Egypt – Egypt being as keen as Israel to prevent Hamas boosting its military capabilities. Israel's blockade, which allowed a regular though restricted flow of humanitarian aid through the main land crossings, extended also to a naval blockade aimed at preventing the import of weaponry and related materials by sea.

A possible additional legacy of the conflict – though this is difficult to assess – was that Hamas had agreed to Egypt acting as a mediator in talks aimed at the release of the Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, captured in June 2006 by Hamas in a cross-border raid and held prisoner in the Gaza Strip ever since.

In Israel the intensive peace talks with PA President Mahmoud Abbas, that had occupied the then prime minister, Ehud Olmert, during the final months of 2008, came to a sudden end with Israel's strike against Hamas in the December. In any case, Olmert was already acting in a caretaker capacity, following his resignation after charges of corruption, and Israel was awaiting new elections. These produced a change of government, and Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu finally headed his new – and rather fragile – coalition in March 2009.

The following months saw Israel's right-wing prime minister, and America's new Democrat president, attempting to bring apparently irreconcilable political perspectives on the Middle East into some sort of congruence. On the face of it they succeeded. Against the odds, before the end of 2009 Netanyahu had formally accepted the two-state solution as the desired outcome of any future peace deal, and had, moreover, instituted a ten-month moratorium on building in the settlements of the West Bank.

This was the overall position at the start of 2010 – sufficiently encouraging, it seemed to me, to give hope of some sort of breakthrough during the course of the year. And so I decided that for twelve months, starting on 1 January 2010, I would follow the ups and downs in what could scarcely at the time be called a "peace process". How much, if anything, would be achieved during the year? Would my initial feeling that we were on the brink of a breakthrough be realised? These were the questions that my articles would eventually reveal.

So I created the blog “A Mid-East Journal”, and posted the pieces as I wrote them. Taken together, they trace the tortuous progress of the early efforts to bring Israelis and Palestinians to the negotiating table, recording the occasional gleams of hope and the predictable setbacks, and then, when the principals were finally brought face-to-face, both the depressing cynicism of many about the prospects of success, and the uplifting determination of a few to maintain the process, whatever the setbacks – and there were many. The articles record also events in the region that impacted on the peace process – the Gaza flotilla episode, the “Mossad assassination” in Dubai, the Lebanon border incident, the rocket attacks on Israel.

Of course the breakthrough that seemed so enticing a possibility in January – and virtually within grasp in September, when Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu sat down at the same table with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas for their first direct face-to-face talks in nearly two years – had by December apparently turned to dust and ashes.

The peace process had certainly stalled. Yet it had not foundered. President Obama had invested so much in his Middle East policy that he could not – indeed he simply refused – to acknowledge defeat. As the year ended, behind-the-scenes diplomatic activity led by the US administration was fast and furious, while in front of the curtain US special Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, had virtually reopened the initial, pre-breakdown, "proximity talks" phase – a version of shuttle diplomacy aimed at keeping dialogue between the principal parties open.

At the same time a new factor in the complex equation had emerged – moves by the Palestinians towards a form of "unilateral declaration of statehood", initially by seeking recognition from international bodies and friendly states for a sovereign Palestine within the boundaries that existed just prior to the Six Day War in 1967. Practical considerations of many sorts probably militate against success in this enterprise on its own, but as a psychological means of exerting pressure on the right-wing within Israel's coalition government, it may prove effective.

Whatever the outcome of this, and of the many other initiatives afoot at the end of the year aimed at trying to break the Israeli-Palestinian log-jam, it is clear that when eventually the first history of the sovereign state of Palestine, and the next history of the sovereign state of Israel, come to be written, the events of 2010 will prove of major significance in both stories – and I hope my book, “One Year in the History of Israel and Palestine” will provide those future historians not only with the facts that underlay the events of 2010, but also background to and commentary on the facts.

Details of “One Year in the History of Israel and Palestine” can be found at:
http://www.troubador.co.uk/book_info.asp?bookid=1390

December Reviewed

Neither breakthrough nor breakdown

Early in December it became undeniable that the impetus towards achieving a settlement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority had slowed almost to a stop. Brokered painstakingly from the beginning of 2010 by the US Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, the process had moved slowly into an initial “proximity” talks phase which, against all the odds, managed to weather the storms of the Ramat Shlomo building project in East Jerusalem; the consequential spat between President Obama and the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu; recourse by PA President Mahmoud Abbas to the Arab League for political cover; and the tragic Mavi Marmara affair.

And then, against all the odds, but certainly as the result of the most intensive diplomatic and political activity on the part of Washington – and despite a succession of spoiling actions by various extremist groups, aimed at destabilising the situation – Arab League foreign ministers proceeded to give the OK to Mahmoud Abbas to enter direct peace talks with Israel if and when he wanted to.

As a result, perhaps the most surprising event of the year occurred on 20 August when, at a press conference, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, were to begin direct peace talks in Washington on 2 September. This meeting, said Clinton, was intended to "re-launch direct negotiations to resolve all final status issues, which," she said, "we believe we can complete in one year." Clinton said she herself would host the first direct Israel-Palestinian negotiating session on 2 September, and that President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and King Abdullah of Jordan had also been invited to join that first discussion.

As we now know, that first session indeed took place amid many honeyed words and assurances from both sides that the framework of a final settlement would be a possibility within 12 months. But the worm lurking at the heart of the situation was that Israel’s 10-month freeze on construction in the West Bank was scheduled to end on 26 September. Clearly Mahmoud Abbas cherished the hope that, in view of the opening of direct talks and the lightening of the political atmosphere, Israel’s building freeze would be renewed – and indeed extended to cover East Jerusalem. If that was indeed his hope it was a vain one, for he reckoned without the right-wing elements within Netanyahu’s fragile coalition – the coalition he relied on to remain in power. So Abbas’s position hardened, and he finally made the return of the Palestinians to the negotiating table entirely dependent on a renewed construction moratorium covering not only the West Bank but East Jerusalem as well.

Israel too adopted a harder line, and maintained that there would be no renewed building freeze without some compensation – such as recognition by the PA of Israel as a Jewish state. This proposition the Palestinians rejected out of hand. And so it was left to the US to attempt to patch together some sort of formula that would enable the peace process to continue.

That formula, which rumour has it is still a possibility, has so far failed to materialise, but US special envoy George Mitchell has meanwhile returned to the region, and has virtually reopened the earlier proximity talks method of keeping dialogue going between two sides who, for the moment, are not prepared to meet face to face.

A sad way to end a year that opened with such high hopes of a possible breakthrough in the apparently endless conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

Meanwhile the Palestinians have opened a new front in their search for a sovereign state – moves suggesting the possibility of a unilateral declaration of statehood. They have begun to woo such bodies as the United Nations General Assembly, the UN Security Council, the European Union and as many countries as possible to grant them recognition as a state within the borders of the West Bank and Gaza as they were on 4 June 1967 – the day before the Six Day War.

And indeed on Christmas Eve 2010 Ecuador became the fifth Latin American state formally to recognise Palestine on this basis. Following his neighbours Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, which took this step earlier in December, Ecuador's President Rafael Correa signed "the Ecuadoran government's official recognition of Palestine as a free and independent state with 1967 borders."

The term "the 1967 borders" has been part of the Arab-Israeli peace process lexicon for over five years, but the plain fact of the matter is that in 1967 there was no recognized international border between the West Bank and Israel. What existed was the 1949 Armistice Line – basically where Israeli and Arab forces found themselves at the formal end of Israel's first battle against the combined Arab armies that surrounded it. And all sides agree that a final agreement will have to incorporate land swaps aimed at ensuring secure borders for both Israel and the future Palestine.

In virtual acknowledgement that the"1967 borders" would be totally inadequate as a basis for establishing a sovereign Palestine, the EU, although recently reaffirming its readiness to recognise a Palestinian state at an "appropriate" time, stopped short of doing so and instead reaffirmed support for "a negotiated solution" between the two sides "within the 12 months set by the Quartet" of international mediators.
The fact that this approach is unlikely in itself to prove fruitful may not inhibit Abbas from pursuing it, on the grounds that to do so may exert such a degree of psychological pressure on Israel's hard-line rightists that – to quote the Johnny Mercer song – "something's gotta give."

Meanwhile PA prime minister Salam Fayyad has not abandoned his August 2011 deadline for preparing for Palestinian statehood (and by implication Israeli withdrawal) – a deadline which, by coincidence or not, exactly matches that endorsed by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and PA President Mahmoud Abbas at their first direct face-to-face discussion on 2 September for reaching agreement on a framework settlement.

And so December comes to an end. The year 2010, though it achieved a memorable climax in the opening of direct talks in September, certainly witnessed no breakthrough in the long voyage towards an accord between Israelis and Palestinians. But equally the peace process has not broken down; it has stalled, as any vessel may do in stormy weather, battered by wind and waves. The ship can, and surely will, be repaired, and the journey towards a just and durable peace between Israel and a sovereign state of Palestine finally brought to a successful conclusion.

Israel-Palestine – can Obama’s errors be rectified?

Bradley Burston, an American-born Israeli journalist, is a regular columnist for the influential daily, Ha’aretz. In today’s edition (21 December), he produces a brilliant analysis of the mistakes President Obama has perpetrated in his Middle East strategy. He weighs the effectiveness of Obama’s strategy against Sun Tzu's ancient The Art of War.

He starts by quoting two of Sun Tzu’s basic principles:
We cannot enter into alliances until we are acquainted with the designs of our neighbours.
He will win who, prepared himself, waits to take the enemy unprepared.

Burston points out how very effectively Obama followed these principles in much of his domestic policy, and how abysmally he failed to do so in respect of his approach to the Middle East. Burston reckons the President should have taken more fully into account the inherently hardline background and beliefs of Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu; the instability of Netanyahu’s coalition foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, the former nightclub bouncer determined to bar entry to any peace progress; and should have made a realistic assessment of the chance of a working rapprochement between Mahmoud Abbas's Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Ismail Haniyeh's Hamas in Gaza.

The last point is worth emphasising, for of what value would a peace accord be between Israel and a Palestinian Authority whose writ ran only in the West Bank? The past year has shown that every attempt to broker an understanding between Hamas and Fatah – the party of President Mahmoud Abbas – has failed. Hamas are irretrievably rejectionist – not only of any sort of peace accord with Israel, but of any rapprochement with the PA. They seized power in Gaza in a bloody coup d’état, and their aim clearly is to extend their power over the rest of the Palestinian body politic, converting it to their extreme Islamist ideology.

“A lack of movement in any one of these three elements alone,” writes Burston, “would have been sufficient to impede Washington's peace overtures. Together, they guaranteed defeat. But,” he adds, “that was just the beginning.”

To illustrate Obama’s failure in respect of his settlement policy, he quotes another of Sun Tzus’s principles: The clever combatant imposes his will on the enemy, but does not allow the enemy's will to be imposed on him. Burston asserts, not without reason, that Obama's demand for a freeze on building in the West Bank settlements including East Jerusalem played into the hands of the pro-settlement right (for to the fury of many in Israeli politics, and not only those on the right, Washington persisted in including East Jerusalem in the demand for a construction freeze).

“Had more groundwork been laid,” asserts Burston, “the administration might have concluded, correctly, that the demand for a settlement freeze would have done more harm than good. As it was, the freeze made Washington look bad for no gain and considerable pain.”

Burston asserts that if the administration had taken more time and care, it might have realized in advance that the original 10-month building freeze would not in itself be enough to bring the PA back to negotiations. In fact, once the freeze had run its course, the subsequent high-profile dispute over continued Israeli construction both in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem brought the first phase of the peace process to a juddering halt.

Even more to the point – something Burston does not touch on – the moment that Washington made public its view that all construction on the West Bank and East Jerusalem was unacceptable and should be halted (and this it did quite early on and reiterated more than once), the US administration had effectively backed Mahmoud Abbas into a corner from which there was no escape. Without so clear-cut an opinion from America, Abbas could have brokered a deal with Netanyhau, an understanding of the sort that has existed for many years. Construction in the West Bank has never inhibited previous attempts by Israel and the Palestinians to talk about the issues. It has proved an insurmountable stumbling block this time simply because the US has made it so – and in the process has strengthened the hands of Obama's pro-settlement, anti-peace process opponents in Israel and the United States.

Then there was the matter of Obama's Cairo address to the Muslim and Arab world in June 2009. "The intention was good," wrote commentator Nahum Barnea, visiting Chicago this month to interview Rahm Emanuel for Israel’s leading Hebrew language newspaper, Yediot Aharonot. “The result was destructive.” Obama sought to turn a new leaf with Arabs and Islamic peoples, wrote Barnea, but in the wake of the speech, "the Muslims he failed to gain, and the Israelis he lost."

According to Barnea, "Obama's path in the twists and turns of the Mideast has been paved with errors." Barnea's list:

Mistake A: Obama was convinced that the Palestinian issue was first on the order of priorities of pro-American Arab leaders, and that a working peace process would win their gratitude. But given Wikileaks, what the Arab leaders really wanted was for the U.S. "to annihilate Iran for them.”
Mistake B: Turning the peace process into "a hostage of the settlement freeze."
Mistake C: Thinking that the Israeli Labour leader, Ehud Barak, a conviction dove on the peace process, could effectively influence Netanyahu.
Mistake D: Making the same error with Israel that he had with the Arabs, that is, thinking that there was a connection between what Netanyahu said in public, and what he did in practice.

The end result? A foundering of the first phase of the peace process that had been so painstakingly brokered by Obama’s Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, and finally brought to the point of direct face-to-face talks at the start of September.

Can Humpty Dumpty be put back together again? Well, in the nursery rhyme all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t achieve it – but in international politics anything is possible. Nil desperandum, as the Roman poet Horace has it – “Don’t despair.”

For two senior US officials arrived in Israel on Sunday (19 December) to continue discussions with Israeli and Palestinian leaders and officials, as part of the Obama administration's attempt to revive the diplomatic process between the two sides. Dan Shapiro, Director of the US National Security Council, and David Hale, deputy to US Middle East Envoy George Mitchell, are set to meet with senior prime ministerial aides Isaac Molho, Ron Dermer and Uzi Arad. They will also meet Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, and the PA's chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat.

Also on Sunday, a group of over 100 Israeli politicians and activists from across the political spectrum visited PA President Mahmoud Abbas and other Palestinian leaders in Ramallah, under the auspices of the Geneva Initiative. The delegation was led by former Labour Chairman Amram Mitzna. It included members of Israel's parliament, the Knesset, from the centrist Kadima and left-leaning Labour and Meretz parties, as well as activists from the centre-right Likud party and ultra-Orthodox Shas party. Abbas told the gathering that he had reached understandings with former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert on security issues during talks in 2008, and rejected accusations that he had failed to respond to Olmert's peace proposal.

With many in Israel sceptical about the chances of a breakthrough in final status talks, there are various voices calling for an alternative approach, including the opposition Kadima party’s deputy leader and former Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz. Ideas include some form of interim agreement, as opposed to a final status accord, which would give the Palestinians greater control over the West Bank, whilst deferring for now the final status issues.

All of which are straws in the wind, indicating ways in which the peace process might indeed be revived, and Phase Two launched, in 2011. "A consummation," as Shakespeare so felicitously puts it, "devoutly to be wished."

Israeli-Palestinian peace – Phase Two

The Obama administration clearly has no intention of turning its back on the Israel-Palestinian peace process. Phase One, which climaxed at the end of August in an unparalleled display of bonhomie between Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, has run itself into the ground. At the launch the two sides agreed on the goal of a framework agreement within a year. But since the conclusion of Israel's 10-month settlement freeze at the end of September, the process has stalled. Netanyahu found it politically impossible to extend the freeze and keep his coalition together, while Abbas was unwilling to continue direct talks without an extension of the freeze.

The US attempted to address this problem by getting Israel to extend the freeze for a temporary period, in return for a package of US incentives. Washington hoped that Israeli-Palestinian negotiations over a 90-day period might make enough progress on core issues, particularly on borders, to build trust between the parties and keep them both at the table. At the end of last week the US acknowledged that this approach had not worked. Netanyahu was struggling to get the deal past his coalition, and the Palestinians looked set to reject the settlement freeze anyway because it would not explicitly include East Jerusalem.

Frankly admitting that Phase One of the peace process had foundered, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last week provided a detailed explanation of the Obama administration's plans to move it forward. Whilst the US had given up for now the hope of direct talks, Clinton also made clear that they did not support any attempt to impose a solution. Instead, they now proposed to try to make progress by getting the parties to set out their positions in dialogue with the US. Washington will then try to narrow gaps by asking ‘tough questions and expecting substantive answers', and will ‘offer our own ideas and bridging proposals when appropriate.'

Clinton stated that the defined goal remains ‘a framework agreement that would establish the fundamental compromises on all permanent status issues and pave the way for a final peace treaty', as agreed by the parties at the September summit. The one-year timetable has been conspicuously dropped, but the determination of the US to move forward with this issue appears as strong as ever.

US special envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, maintains a pivotal role in this process, and so a first step was for him to return to the region, and virtually resume the “proximity talks” which preceded the reopening of face-to-face negotiations.

George Mitchell met with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak yesterday (Wednesday, 15 December), and briefed him on the latest developments. Now, according to a news agency report today, 16 December, Mitchell has proposed that the United States holds separate, parallel talks with Israelis and Palestinians for six weeks, to discuss security and borders, in order to enable Washington to develop a strategy for the eventual re-launch of direct negotiations. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to convene his 'septet' of senior ministers to discuss the new proposal.

Mitchell’s meeting with President Mubarak came as Arab League foreign ministers rejected any talks between Israeli and Palestinian representatives unless the US commits itself on the issue of the borders of a future Palestinian state. The ministers also agreed to go to the UN Security Council to seek a resolution against the construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

What is, perhaps, significant, is that the Arab League has as yet not endorsed either of the two threats made by Palestinian Authority President, Mahmoud Abbas, and which appear to represent his current position. One is to break off – or at least not to re-enter – the peace process unless Israel agrees to a complete freeze on building in all West Bank settlements including East Jerusalem. The other is to seek UN Security Council recognition for what might be termed a “unilateral declaration of statehood” by the Palestinian Authority. A significant factor inhibiting any such action by the League might be that Hillary Clinton’s recent speech included an explicit rejection of the idea. And since the US is in a position to veto any such move in the Security Council, a statement by the Arab League supporting the idea would be a somewhat empty gesture.

It may also be of significance that earlier in the week the EU, although reaffirming its readiness to recognise a Palestinian state at an "appropriate" time, stopped short of outright recognition despite mounting pressure from a minority of states to seek to break the Middle East impasse in this way, and despite Argentina and Uruguay joining Brazil in actually declaring that they recognised an independent Palestinian state.

The fact is that, following long and prickly negotiations, EU foreign ministers meeting in Brussels adopted a statement that falls short of an ultimatum and breaks little new ground. So while the EU statement expresses "regret" at Israel's rejection of a new freeze, describing settlements as "illegal" and "an obstacle to peace", it underlines EU support for "a negotiated solution" between the two sides "within the 12 months set by the Quartet" of international mediators.

It does, however, also welcome a recent World Bank assessment that the Palestinian Authority "is well positioned for the establishment of a state at any point in the near future" and goes on to say that the EU "reiterates its readiness, when appropriate, to recognise a Palestinian state." “When appropriate” are the operative words and, in the light of what the EU foreign ministers say, appear to mean “following a negotiated settlement.”

Let us hope so, as the hazard-strewn peace process sets out on Phase Two of its uncertain journey.