ISRAEL MATZAV: A big secret that the Left can't hear This video is a collection of statements in Arabic (with Hebrew subtitles and mostly with English subtitles as well), which tells the truth about the 'Palestinian' desire for 'peace.'

ISRAEL MATZAV: How the 'Palestinians' are preparing for peace

On official 'Palestinian Authority' television, 'Palestinian' factions unite to beat up Jews and cut off their sidelocks (peyoth).

Let's go to the videotape.


This is how they're preparing for 'peace' as the 'peace process' goes on. What could go wrong?

Who Wants Peace? Who Doesn't?

Ever wonder why there's no peace in the Middle East. Why the Israelis and Palestinians can't just sit down and talk things through. Maybe it's because one side wants peace, while the other wants, well, something else. See for yourself the truth about the conflict, the facts that aren't being reported in the media. From the mouths of Israeli and Palestinian leaders themselves.

Peaceful celebrations? are you kidding me?

Palestinians Rejected Statehood 3 Times, But Claim Frustration with Israel

Palestinians may indeed be frustrated after more than 18 years of on-again, off-again negotiations, but the question is with whom should they be frustrated – Israel, or their own leaders, such as Mahmoud Abbas, who have consistently fumbled opportunities to end the conflict with Israel and create a state of Palestine? 

 

Just as the legendary Israeli diplomat Abba Eban once said about relations between the Arabs and Israel, "The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity," and there have been many statehood opportunities that Palestinian leaders have wilfully missed.

 

In fact, the Palestinians have consistently refused statehood when it was offered to them through negotiations, most recently just a few years ago when present leader Mahmoud Abbas rejected Ehud Olmert's peace plan. Just as his predecessor, Yasir Arafat, rejected President Clinton's plan in 2000 (which Israeli PM Ehud Barak accepted).

 

Why do the Palestinians refuse a negotiated peace? Because a negotiated peace means the end of the conflict, or at least promising the end of the conflict. But the Palestinian leadership wants a state so that they can continue the conflict from a stronger position. In particular, they want a state andthey want to keep pressing in every way for the "right of return" to Israel. 

 

Israel would not agree to that in negotiations, which is why Palestinians want a state without negotiations, and without having to make any compromises.

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• Palestinian "frustration" and their unilateral plans are unwarranted – if not totally contrived – given the reality that Palestinians have rejected statehood no fewer than three times. It's Israel that has a right to be frustrated – having offered so much so often to no avail.

 

• Palestinians rejected a state in 1948, again in 2000/01 at Camp David/Taba and in 2008 under Israel Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. These were extensive concessions by Israel, but the Palestinians walked away and in some instances launched war and terrorism.

 

• What does it signify that Palestinians are still supposedly frustrated even though they've been offered all this territory? Do they expect more than the West Bank and Gaza?

 

• Palestinians reject a negotiated peace and negotiated state of Palestine, and instead want a unilateral state? Why -- are they for some reason afraid of peace?

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Palestinian spokesmen from PLO leader Mahmoud Abbas on down have expressed their frustration with the Oslo peace process, charging that it failed and is dead, thanks to alleged Israeli intransigence, and that therefore they have no choice but to go to the United Nations to seek full membership and therefore statehood.

It should be noted at the outset that for the Palestinians to unilaterally declare statehood, or even to take the issue to the United Nations,would be a grave violation of the PLO's signed agreements with Israel, which explicitly barred such unilateral actions and appeals to outside parties. All of these agreements were also witnessed by outside parties including the United States, Russia, Norway, the EU, etc. If any of these countries now go along with material violations of agreements that they witnessed, that would raise serious questions about the worth of such agreements and the worth of such witnessing.

As for Palestinian frustration, they may indeed be frustrated with more than 18 years of on-again, off-again negotiations, but the question is with whom should they be frustrated – Israel, or their own leaders? For the fact is, just as the legendary Israeli diplomat Abba Eban once said about relations between the Arabs and Israel, "The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity," and there have been many statehood opportunities that Palestinian leaders have wilfully missed.
In fact, at least three times the Palestinians have refused statehood when it was offered to them, most recently just a few years ago. Here are the details:
1. In 2008, after extensive talks, then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert met with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and presented a comprehensive peace plan. Olmert's plan would have annexed the major Israeli settlements to Israel and in return given equivalent Israeli territory to the Palestinians, and would have divided Jerusalem.
Numerous settlements including Ofra, Elon Moreh, Beit El and Kiryat Arba would have been evacuated, and Hebron would have been abandoned. Tens of thousands of settlers would have been uprooted. Olmert even says preliminary agreement had been reached with Abbas on refugees and the Palestinian claim to a "right of return."
Olmert recounted much of this in an interview with Greg Sheridan in theAustralian newspaper:

From the end of 2006 until the end of 2008 I think I met with Abu Mazen more often than any Israeli leader has ever met any Arab leader. I met him more than 35 times. They were intense, serious negotiations.
On the 16th of September, 2008, I presented him (Abbas) with a comprehensive plan. It was based on the following principles.
One, there would be a territorial solution to the conflict on the basis of the 1967 borders with minor modifications on both sides. Israel will claim part of the West Bank where there have been demographic changes over the last 40 years...
And four, there were security issues. [Olmert says he showed Abbas a map, which embodied all these plans. Abbas wanted to take the map away. Olmert agreed, so long as they both signed the map. It was, from Olmert's point of view, a final offer, not a basis for future negotiation. But Abbas could not commit. Instead, he said he would come with experts the next day.]
He (Abbas) promised me the next day his adviser would come. But the next day Saeb Erekat rang my adviser and said we forgot we are going to Amman today, let's make it next week. I never saw him again. (Nov. 28, 2009)

And this is not just a self-serving claim by Olmert – Abbas, in an interview with Jackson Diehl of the Washington Post, confirmed the outlines of the Olmert offer and that he turned it down:

In our meeting Wednesday, Abbas acknowledged that Olmert had shown him a map proposing a Palestinian state on 97 percent of the West Bank -- though he complained that the Israeli leader refused to give him a copy of the plan. He confirmed that Olmert "accepted the principle" of the "right of return" of Palestinian refugees -- something no previous Israeli prime minister had done -- and offered to resettle thousands in Israel. In all, Olmert's peace offer was more generous to the Palestinians than either that of Bush or Bill Clinton; it's almost impossible to imagine Obama, or any Israeli government, going further.
Abbas turned it down. "The gaps were wide," he said. (May 29, 2009)

Ha'aretz published Olmert's map, showing a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza with a free passage route to connect them. The map, which also showed the Israeli territory that would have been swapped with the Palestinians in return for annexing some Israeli settlements to Israel, is reproduced below:

 

 

2. In the summer of 2000 US President Bill Clinton hosted intense peace talks at Camp David between Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and Israeli leader Ehud Barak, culminating in a comprehensive peace plan known as the Clinton Parameters, which was similar to the later Olmert Plan, though not quite as extensive.

Despite the vast concessions the plan required of Israel, Prime Minister Barak accepted President Clinton's proposal, while Arafat refused, returned home, and launched a new terror campaign against Israeli civilians (the Second Intifada).
Despite the violence, Prime Minister Barak continued to negotiate to the end of his term, culminating in an Israeli proposal at Taba which extended the Clinton proposal. Barak offered the Palestinians all of Gaza and most of the West Bank, no Israeli control over the border with Jordan or the adjacent Jordan Valley, a small Israeli annexation around three settlement blocs balanced by an equivalent area of Israeli territory that would have been ceded to the Palestinians. As chief US negotiator Ambassador Dennis Ross put it in a FoxNews interview:

... the Palestinians would have in the West Bank an area that was contiguous. Those who say there were cantons, completely untrue. It was contiguous... And to connect Gaza with the West Bank, there would have been an elevated highway, an elevated railroad, to ensure that there would be not just safe passage for the Palestinians, but free passage. (Fox News, April 21, 2002)

According to Ambassador Ross, Palestinian negotiators working for Arafat wanted him to accept the Clinton Parameters, but he refused. In response to Brit Hume's question as to why Arafat turned these deals down, Ross said:

Because fundamentally I do not believe he can end the conflict. We had one critical clause in this agreement, and that clause was, this is the end of the conflict.

Arafat's whole life has been governed by struggle and a cause. Everything he has done as leader of the Palestinians is to always leave his options open, never close a door. He was being asked here, you've got to close the door. For him to end the conflict is to end himself.

Here's the Taba map proposed by Israel, which was once again turned down by Arafat:

 

 

3. UN Resolution 181, the Partition Resolution, passed in November 1947, called for the creation of a Jewish state and an Arab state in the land which at that point was controlled by the British-run Palestine Mandate. All the Arab countries opposed the resolution, voted against it, and promised to go to war to prevent its implementation. Representing the Palestinians, the Arab Higher Committee also opposed the plan and threatened war, which the Jewish Agency, representing the Jewish inhabitants of the Palestine Mandate, supported the plan.
The Arabs and the Palestinians were true to their word and did launch a war against the Jews of Palestine, violating both Resolution 181 and the UN Charter. Much to the surprise of the Arab side, the Jews were able to survive the initial onslaughts and eventually win the war.
The fundamental fact remains that had the Arabs and the Palestinians accepted the Partition Resolution and not violated the UN Charter by attacking Israel, there would be a 63-year-old Palestinian state today next to Israel, and there would not have been a single Palestinian refugee.
Just as today, it seems that even in 1948 the Arab side was more concerned with opposing and attacking the Jewish state than with creating a Palestinian state.

Besides the above statehood opportunities, there were other notable opportunities that were missed too, such as the 1978 Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, whichprovided for Palestinian autonomy in the territories of the West Bank and Gaza. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat begged the PLO and Yasir Arafat to accept what he had negotiated with Israel, and to engage in talks with Israel. President Carter also called on moderate Palestinians to come forward and join the Cairo conference. Unfortunately Arafat refused and did everything he could to undermine Sadat and the Camp David Accords, withPLO gunmen even murdering West Bank Palestinians who supported Sadat's approach.

 

While the Palestinian people have much to be frustrated about, the object of their frustration should be not Israel, but their own leaders, who have thrown away opportunity after opportunity to establish the Palestinian state they claim to desire above all else.

No to statehood OP-ED | JEFF JACOBY Palestine has refused statehood in the past because it’s not its real goal

IF THE Palestinian Authority genuinely desired international recognition as a sovereign state, Mahmoud Abbas wouldn’t have come to New York to seek membership in the UN General Assembly this week. There would have been no need to, for Palestine would have long since taken its seat in the United Nations.

Were Palestinian statehood Abbas’s real goal, after all, he could have delivered it to his people three years ago. In 2008, then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert proposed the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state on territory equal (after land swaps) to 100 percent of the West Bank and Gaza, with free passage between the two plus a capital in the Arab section of Jerusalem. Yet Abbas turned down the Israeli offer. And he has refused ever since even to engage in negotiations.

“It is our legitimate right to demand the full membership of the state of Palestine in the UN,’’ Abbas declared in Ramallah on Friday, “to put an end to a historical injustice by attaining liberty and independence, like the other peoples of the earth.’’

But for the better part of a century, Arab leaders of Palestine have consistently said no when presented with the chance to build a state of their own. They said no in 1937, when the British government, which then ruled Palestine, proposed to divide the land into separate Arab and Jewish states. Arab leaders said no again in 1947, choosing to go to war rather than accept the UN’s decision to partition Palestine between its Jewish and Arab populations. When Israel in 1967 offered to relinquish the land it had acquired in exchange for peace with its neighbors, the Arab world’s response, issued at a summit in Khartoum, was not one no, but three: “No peace with Israel, no negotiations with Israel, no recognition of Israel.’’

At Camp David in 2000, Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians a sovereign state with shared control of Jerusalem and billions of dollars in compensation for Palestinian refugees. Yasser Arafat refused the offer, and returned to launch the deadly terror war known as the Second Intifada.

There is no shortage in this world of stateless peoples yearning for a homeland, many of them ethnic groups with centuries of history, unique in language and culture. Kurds or Tamils or Tibetans - whose longstanding quests for a nation-state the world ignores - must find it maddening to watch the international community trip over itself in its eagerness to proclaim, again and again, the need for a Palestinian state. And they must be baffled by the Palestinians’ invariable refusal to take yes for an answer.

One of the Big Flaws in Obama's Middle East Policy: Islamists Don't Want to be His Pals

When Muhamad ElBaradei tried to vote March 19 in the referendum on Egypt's constitutional changes, he was attacked by hundreds of Islamists with stones, at least one of which hit him, and shoes. "We don't want you," the mob shouted. "He lives in the United States and wants to rule us. It's out of the question," one demonstrator said.

"We don't want an American agent," said another. ElBaradei ran away without voting.

Just five weeks after President Barack Obama helped overthrow the Egyptian regime, accompanied by endless media reports about how great and democratic this was all going to be, and after we were told by scores of instant "experts" that the Muslim Brotherhood was weak and harmless, Egypt is beginning to reap the whirlwind.

Why should anyone be surprised? This statement from Rashad Bayoumi, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood's number-two leader, as translated by MEMRI, should trigger memories:

"The thing I fear most is foreign intervention. Our people and societies must realize that their main enemy abroad is the U.S. and the Zionist gang, and that their main enemy within is Israel. Everybody must take this into account, and must be aware that this is the enemy that lurks in the midst of Middle Eastern society. This must be clear to everybody."

My thoughts flew back to 1979. After the Iranian Islamist revolution, which took power the previous February, the administration of President Jimmy Carter did everything possible to assure the new regime of American friendship. But the more the U.S. government tried to engage them, the more suspicious Iran's new leaders became.

Why? Because they understood that the U.S. goal was to moderate the revolution, which is precisely what they didn't want to happen. The last straw was when National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski met with Iranian Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan, the moderate front man for the regime.  This was seen in Tehran as a dire threat and led directly to the seizure of the U.S. embassy and the taking of the Americans there as hostages.

So Bayoumi's words remind us that the closer the Americans try to get to the Islamists--to prove that the United States is their good buddy--the more they fear "foreign intervention" and feel the need to express their anti-Americanism.

It also reminds us, of course, that Israel is the number-one obsession of the Brotherhood and they are sure to try to implement their plan for attacking and if possible destroying it.

But America can't make friends with revolutionary Islamists because:

--They hate America because they have an ideological view of it as the enemy. And they're right in doing so because the United States will not ultimately support and help them achieve their goals.

--They want to keep their distance because they correctly believe America will help strengthen moderate non-Islamists against them.

--They want to keep their distance because they correctly believe America will try to help and strengthen the most relatively moderate tendencies among Islamists, thus coopting them and destroying their movement.

--They wish to push America away to prove to each other and their rivals that they are not American agents.

There are two ways for the United States to understand this: the hard way and the easy way. The easy way is to understand the history, ideology, and behavior of the Islamists.

The hard way is to ignore all of the evidence and experience, create catastrophic situations, and only then wake up and try to repair the damage done by their own policies.

I think U.S. policy is doing this the hard way.

Jewish couple almost lynched Here's another case of an attack on Jews in Jerusalem that was eagerly photographed by reporters who just happened to know ahead of time the location of the attack.

PMW: Fatah Official: Our Goal Has Never Been Peace

Fatah Official: Our Goal Has Never Been Peace