This is an improved formulation over the earlier version (which former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon included in Israel’s 14 reservations to the U.S.-backed Road Map in 2003) of requiring acceptance of a “Jewish State”.

However, there is no real clarity about what, exactly, that would mean. Palestinians fear it is formula to withdraw rights and citizenship from the one million or so (20-25% of Israel’s population) who are Palestinian Arabs, and that it also means agreement acquiescence in wiping out any and all residual claims of some 4 or 5 million Palestinian refugees and their descendants living in a diaspora around the world.

So far, it is a dialog of the deaf.

Palestinians of almost all political views react with outrage, anger… and smoldering fury.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) is reported to have just said, in New York, that “Israel can call itself… the Jewish-Zionist Empire”, if it wants. This is reported on YNet, here.

Now, according to a report today in the Jerusalem Post, Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon caused a spat with Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad at a periodic meeting of major donors at UNHQ in New York. According to the JPost’version, “Ayalon refused to approve a summary of the meeting which said ‘two states’ but did not include the words ‘two states for two peoples’ … What I say is that if the Palestinians are not willing to talk about two states for two peoples, let alone a Jewish state for Israel, then there’s nothing to talk about’, Ayalon told the Post in a telephone interview. ‘And also, I said if the Palestinians mean, at the end of the process, to have one Palestinian state and one bi-national state, this will not happen … I also said that I don’t need the Palestinians to say Israel is a Jewish state in Hebrew. I need them to say it in Arabic to their own people’.” This JPost report is published here.

So, what does that mean, exactly? Each state should have only one people? You can see where this is leading… it’s confirming the worst fears of the Palestinians, of course. What I have written, in the past, in several places, is that the Palestinians have already accepted Israel as a Jewish State when Yasser Arafat issued the Declaration of Independence of the
Palestinian State in November 1988, then more explicitly (at U.S. insistence) in December 1988 — which explicitly accepts
the UN General Assembly resolution 181 of 29 November 1947, partitioning the British mandate of Palestine into two states, one Arab and one Jewish.

The Palestinians seem to have forgotten…

Earlier, according to the same YNet report, Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu “told the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations that the recognition would be a central part of peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. ‘Just say it’, Netanyahu called on Abbas. ‘Say yes to a Jewish state’. The prime minister explained that he was insisting on this because ‘this is a move the Palestinians have refused to make for 62 years. Its significance is Palestinian recognition of the right of the Jewish people to self-definition in their historic homeland. I recognized the Palestinians’ right to self-definition, so they must do the same for the Jewish people’.”

In an interview with Ma’an News agency, also according to this YNet report, Abbas reportedly said that “if Israel wants negotiations in which the Palestinians recognize it, then it must also recognize a Palestinian state”.

By coincidence, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was asked about this whole matter in an interview for Palestine TV conducted by Maher Shalabi (who did the extraordinarily embarassing “The Cedar and the Olive Tree” program in refugee camps in Lebanon recently, in which he grandly handed out $100 U.S. dollar bills after asking stupid questions like, “What is the capitol of Palestine?”).

Here is an excerpt:
” (Maher Shalabi of Palestine TV) QUESTION: I mean, when you talk about Jewish state –

SECRETARY CLINTON: “Yes”.

QUESTION: — don’t you think you’re imposing the outcome of the negotiation and many times, you’re saying, “We want to impose the outcome”?

SECRETARY CLINTON: “Well, of course, that, to me, is a fact, that if you go back and look at the original UN documents, and even if you look at some of the PLO documents over the last many years, everyone recognizes that Israel is a homeland for Jewish people. Palestinians have the right to work toward a homeland for themselves. And I don’t think that takes anything away from either side in saying that”. The full transcript of this interview is available on the State Department website, here.

See our sidebars, here, on the Road Map and on Israel’s reservations.

Eldar continues: “Netanyahu argues that Sharon reached an oral agreement with George W. Bush that the construction freeze would not apply to the ‘settlement blocs’ and that the United States would take into account natural-growth requirements. The prime minister therefore expects the Palestinians to honor not only formal agreements to which they were a party, but also informal understandings reached behind their backs between Israel and America. Yet when the Palestinians demand an acknowledgment of understandings they reached with the Olmert government on a number of final-status principles, Netanyahu says this is a ‘precondition that predetermines the outcome of negotiations’. The prime minister also contemptuously rejects the Palestinian demand that the talks be resumed where they were halted in December 2008. He is not prepared to even listen to the parameters for a final-status agreement proposed by Bill Clinton in December 2000. Netanyahu insists he has the right to start negotiations from square one, ignoring every agreement already reached with the Palestinians. He has even forgotten the Wye River Memorandum of 1998, under which he undertook, in Clinton’s presence, to transfer 13 percent of Area C to the Palestinians. Netanyahu sticks only to those clauses in the interim agreement (Oslo 2) that removed responsibility for the Palestinians’ welfare from Israel’s hands and left Israel in control of Area C (60 percent of the West Bank). And of course, Netanyahu is totally committed to those clauses that require the Palestinians to combat terrorist infrastructure and incitement and refrain from asking the United Nations to condemn the injustices of the occupation. Netanyahu is setting conditions for negotiations that no country would accept. His opposition to a settlement freeze and his refusal to resume talks where they left off expose his Bar-Ilan declarations as a cunning diversionary tactic”. This Akiva Eldar article can be read in full here.

Here are some excepts from Henry Siegman’s latest article, entitled Imposing Middle East Peace, published on 7 January 2010 in the January 25, 2010 edition [yes] of The Nation magazine:

It is now widely recognized in most Israeli circles–although denied by Israel’s government–that the settlements have become so widespread and so deeply implanted in the West Bank as to rule out the possibility of their removal (except for a few isolated and sparsely populated ones) by this or any future Israeli government unless compelled to do so by international intervention, an eventuality until now considered entirely unlikely. It is not only the settlements’ proliferation and size that have made their dismantlement impossible. Equally decisive have been the influence of Israel’s settler-security-industrial complex, which conceived and implemented this policy; the recent disappearance of a viable pro-peace political party in Israel; and the infiltration by settlers and their supporters in the religious-national camp into key leadership positions in Israel’s security and military establishments.
…
Olmert was mistaken in one respect, for he said Israel would turn into an apartheid state when the Arab population in Greater Israel outnumbers the Jewish population. But …  the turning point comes when a state denies national self-determination to a part of its population–even one that is in the minority–to which it has also denied the rights of citizenship
…

Henry Siegman’s article continues: “By definition, democracy reserved for privileged citizens–while all others are kept behind checkpoints, barbed-wire fences and separation walls commanded by the Israeli army–is not democracy but its opposite. The Jewish settlements and their supporting infrastructure, which span the West Bank from east to west and north to south, are not a wild growth, like weeds in a garden. They have been carefully planned, financed and protected by successive Israeli governments and Israel’s military. Their purpose has been to deny the Palestinian people independence and statehood–or to put it more precisely, to retain Israeli control of Palestine ‘from the river to the sea’, an objective that precludes the existence of a viable and sovereign Palestinian state east of Israel’s pre-1967 border.
…
Prime Minister Netanyahu’s conditions for Palestinian statehood would leave under Israel’s control Palestine’s international borders and airspace, as well as the entire Jordan Valley; would leave most of the settlers in place; and would fragment the contiguity of the territory remaining for such a state. His conditions would also deny Palestinians even those parts of East Jerusalem that Israel unilaterally annexed to the city immediately following the 1967 war–land that had never been part of Jerusalem before the war.
…
Sooner or later the White House, Congress and the American public … will have to face the fact that America’s ‘special relationship’ with Israel is sustaining a colonial enterprise. President Barack Obama’s capitulation to Netanyahu on the settlement freeze was widely seen as the collapse of the latest hope for achievement of a two-state agreement. It thoroughly discredited the notion that Palestinian moderation is the path to statehood, and therefore also discredited Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas … Indeed, Netanyahu assured the settler leadership and his cabinet that construction will resume after the ten-month freeze–according to minister Benny Begin, at a rate ‘faster and more than before’–even if Abbas agrees to return to talks. In fact, the Israeli press has reported that the freeze notwithstanding, new construction in the settlements is ‘booming’. None of this has elicited the Obama administration’s public rebuke, much less the kinds of sanctions imposed on Palestinians when they violate agreements.
…
The international community has shown signs of exasperation with Israel’s deceptions and stonewalling, and also with Washington’s failure to demonstrate that there are consequences not only for Palestinian violations of agreements but for Israeli ones as well. The last thing many in the international community want is a resumption of predictably meaningless negotiations between Netanyahu and Abbas.
…
Ironically, it is Netanyahu who now insists on the resumption of peace talks. For him, a prolonged breakdown of talks risks exposing the irreversibility of the settlements, and therefore the loss of Israel’s democratic character …
…
It would not take extraordinary audacity for Obama to reaffirm the official position of every previous US administration–including that of George W. Bush–that no matter how desirable or necessary certain changes in the pre-1967 status may seem, they cannot be made unilaterally. Even Bush, celebrated in Israel as ‘the best American president Israel ever had’, stated categorically that this inviolable principle applies even to the settlement blocs that Israel insists it will annex. Speaking of these blocs at a May 2005 press conference, Bush affirmed that ‘changes to the 1949 armistice lines must be mutually agreed to’, a qualification largely ignored by Israeli governments (and by Bush himself). The next year Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was even more explicit. She stated that ‘the president did say that at the time of final status, it will be necessary to take into account new realities on the ground that have changed since 1967, but under no circumstances…should anyone try and do that in a pre-emptive or predetermined way, because these are issues for negotiation at final status’
…
In short, Middle East peacemaking efforts will continue to fail, and the possibility of a two-state solution will disappear, if US policy continues to ignore developments on the ground in the occupied territories and within Israel, which now can be reversed only through outside intervention”.

This Henry Siegman article can be read in full here.

But, what is actually happening?

He accused both sides of “desistance” — or do-nothingness — which he said he fears means there will be no peace unless it is imposed upon both sides.

Grossman wrote in mid-week in Haaretz that “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech was indeed, as it has been decribed, the speech of our lives. Our bogged-down, hopeless lives. Once again, most Israelis can snuggle up around what appears to be a daring and generous offer, but what is in fact, as usual, a compromise between the anxieties, the weakness and the self-righteousness of the center just-to-the-right and the center a-little-left. But what a great distance between them and the harsh demands of reality, as well as the legitimate needs and rightful claims of the Palestinians, now accepted by most of the world, including the United States.  Now, after every word of the speech has been analyzed and weighed, we should step back and look at the whole spectacle, the big picture. What the speech exposed, beyond all its juggling and parities, is the desistance we have come to, we Israelis, in the face of a reality that requires flexibility, daring and vision. If we turn from the skilled orator to his audience, we will see how passionately it barricades itself behind its anxieties, and we will feel the sweet stupor from pulsating nationalism, militarism and victimhood, which were the heartbeat of the entire speech.

“Other than acceptance of the two-state principle, which was wrung out of Netanyahu under heavy pressure and sourly expressed, this speech contained no tangible step toward a real change of consciousness. Netanyahu did not speak ‘honestly and courageously’ – as he had promised – about the destructive role of the settlements as an obstacle to peace. He did not look the settlers in the eye and tell them what he knows full well: that the map of the settlements contradicts the map of peace. That most of them will have to leave their homes. He should have said it. He would not have lost points in future negotiations with the Palestinians; rather, he would have allowed these negotiations to begin. He should have spoken to us, the Israelis, like adults, and not have swaddled us in more insulation from the facts known to all. He should have related specifically and in detail to the Arab peace initiative. He should have pointed out the clauses that Israel accepts and those it does not. He should have initiated a challenging call that would have allowed them to respond, and begun Israel’s most essential process.

“He spent many minutes regaling the audience with the promises and assurances that Israel had to receive from the Palestinians even before negotiations began. He did not speak of the risks Israel had to take or its desire to achieve peace. He persuaded no one that that he really intends to fight for peace. He did not lead Israel to a new future. He only collaborated with its old, familiar anxieties. I looked at him, and at the impressive data on the support he received after the speech, and I knew how far we are from peace. How distant, and perhaps even whithered within us, are the ability, the talent and the wisdom to make peace, and even the instinct to save ourselves from war. I saw my prime minister in his tight-lipped juggling act, a sophisticated performance of close-eyed rejection. I saw how his ever-ready internal mechanism turns every attempt-to-talk-peace into self-persuasion that an edict from heaven commands us to live by the sword forever. I saw, and I knew that none of these will bring forth peace.

“I also observed the Palestinians who responded to the speech, and I thought that they are the most faithful partners to desistance and missed opportunities. Their response could have been much wiser and more prescient than the speech itself; could they not have grasped even the drooping branch Netanyahu offered them, unwillingly, and challenged him to begin negotiations with them immediately, as he proposed at the beginning of his address; negotiations with some chance that the two parties will climb down from the lofty heights of reverberating declarations onto the soil of reality, and perhaps to each party’s promised land. But the Palestinians, trapped like we are in a mechanism of contention and haggling, prefered to speak of the thousand years that would pass before they would agree to his conditions”.

It seems, Grossman wrote, that “there will be no peace here if it is not forced upon us”.

David Grossman’s analysis can be read in full here.

On Netanyahu’s choice of ministers, Avnery wrote that “All these appointments look like the desperate efforts of a cynical politician who does not care about anything other than returning to power, and then quickly putting together a cabinet, whatever its composition, paying any price to any party prepared to join him, sacrificing even the most vital interests of the state”.

The worst problem, Avnery stated, is in the political field, “Because there the unpreparedness of Netanyahu meets the overpreparedness of Obama. Obama has a plan for the restructuring of the Middle East, and one of its elements is an Israeli-Palestinian peace based on ‘Two States for Two Peoples’. Netanyahu argues that he is not in a position to respond, because he has no plan of his own yet. After all, he is quite new in office. Now he is working on such a plan. Very soon, in a week, or a month, or a year, he will have a plan, a real plan, and he will present it to Obama. Or course, Netanyahu has a plan. It consists of one word, which he learned from his mentor, Yitzhak Shamir: ‘NO’. Or, more precisely, NO NO NO – the three no’s of the Israeli Khartoum: No peace, No withdrawal, No negotiations. (It will be remembered that the 1967 Arab summit conference in Khartoum, right after the Six-day War, adopted a similar resolution.) The ‘plan’ which he is working on does not really concern the essence of this policy, but only the packaging. How to present to Obama something that will not sound like ‘no’, but rather like ‘yes, but’ … As a taster for the ‘plan’, Netanyahu has already presented one of its ingredients: the demand that the Palestinians and other Arabs must recognize Israel as ‘the State of the Jewish People’.”

Now, here, Avnery makes a distinction: “Most of the media in Israel and abroad have distorted this demand and reported that Netanyahu requires the recognition of Israel as a ‘Jewish State’. Either from ignorance or laziness, they obliterated the important difference between the two formulas. This difference is immense. A ‘Jewish State’ is one thing, a ‘State of the Jewish People’ is something radically different“.

Avnery explains what he sees as the distinction — though not everybody will agree with him: “A ‘Jewish State’ can mean a state with a majority of citizens who define themselves as Jews and/or a state whose main language is Hebrew, whose main culture is Jewish, whose weekly rest day is Saturday, which serves only Kosher food in the Knesset cafeteria etc. A ‘State of the Jewish People’ is a completely different story. It means that the state belongs not only to its citizens, but to something that is called ‘the Jewish People’ – something that exists both inside and outside of the country. That can have wide-ranging implications. For instance: the abrogation of the citizenship of non-Jews, as proposed by Lieberman. Or the conferring of Israeli citizenship on all the Jews in the world, whether they want it or not. The first question that arises is: what does ‘the Jewish People’ mean? The term ‘people’ – ‘am‘ in Hebrew … – has no accepted precise definition. Generally it is taken to mean a group of human beings who live in a specific territory and speak a specific language. The ‘Jewish People’ is not like that. Two hundred years ago it was clear that the Jews were a religious community dispersed throughout the world and united by religious beliefs and myths (including the belief in a common ancestry). The Zionists were determined to change this self-perception. ‘We are a people, one people’, Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, wrote … The idea of ‘the State of the Jewish People’ is decidedly anti-Zionist. Herzl did not dream of a situation in which a Jewish State and a Jewish Diaspora would coexist. According to his plan, all the Jews who wish to remain Jews would immigrate to their state. The Jews who prefer to live outside the state would stop being Jews and be absorbed into their host nations, finally becoming real Germans, Britons and Frenchmen. The vision of the ‘Visionary of the State’ (as he is officially designated in Israel) was supposed, when put into practice, to bring about the disappearance of the Jewish Diaspora … David Ben-Gurion was a partner to this vision. He stated that a Jew who does not immigrate to Israel is not a Zionist and should not enjoy any rights in Israel, except the right to immigrate there. He demanded the dismantling of the Zionist organization, seeing in it only the ‘scaffolding’ for building the state. Once the state has been set up, he thought quite rightly, the scaffolding should be discarded”.

OK, for what that’s worth. Now, Avnery turns back to Netanyahu, and writes that: “Netanyahu’s demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as ‘the State of the Jewish People’ is ridiculous, even as a tactic for preventing peace. A state recognizes a state, not its ideology or political regime. Nobody recognizes Saudi Arabia, the homeland of the Hajj, as ‘the State of the Muslim Umma’ (the community of believers.) Moreover, the demand puts the Jews all over the world in an impossible position. If the Palestinians have to recognize Israel as ‘the State of the Jewish People’, then all the governments in the world must do the same. The United States, for example. That means that the Jewish US citizens Rahm Emmanuel and David Axelrod, Obama’s closest advisors, are officially represented by the government of Israel. The same goes for the Jews in Russia, the UK and France. Even if Mahmoud Abbas were persuaded to accept this demand – and thereby indirectly put in doubt the citizenship of a million and a half Arabs in Israel – I would oppose this strenuously. More than that, I would consider it an unfriendly act”.

Now, it’s important to note that the Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel are prime movers behind the Palestinian Authority’s refusal to make a calm, rational consideration of this demand, which has been made by the last two Israeli governments — once before the start of the Annapolis process, in November 2007, and now again recently.

Advice, like Avnery’s, from the Israeli “left” (which has a scattered and varied criticism of the demand, and multiple positions of their own), has most probably only bolstered and reinforced this rigid PA position. But it is far from clear that the interests of the Israeli Arabs coincide with the interests of those Palestinians who will only have the choice of being citizens of some future Palestinian state.

The PA has chosen to support the Israeli Arab position, as a purely political calculation — whether as payback, or as a deposit on some future reciprocal support (or both). However, this political calculation has only let Palestinians (in the West Bank and Gaza at least) off the hook. They haven’t needed to take the time to reflect on what this really might imply for them.

And, if they really were afraid that recognition of Israel’s “Jewishness” in one or another forms would result in either immediate ethnic cleansing (expulsion en masse of Israel’s Arab citizens as well as Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem), as well as of total barring of the return of any or all Palestinian refugees, they could have asked for guarantees from the international community that it would not happen. And they would have gotten such guarantees, which would be worth a lot more than the puffed-up pride they have now in being stubborn and resisting a critical examination of the demand

In any case, Avnery wrote that “The character of the State of Israel must be decided by the citizens of Israel (who hold a wide range of opinions about this matter). Pending before the Israeli courts is an application by dozens of Israeli patriots, including myself, who demand that the state recognize the ‘Israeli nation’. We request the court to instruct the government to register us in the official Population Registration, under the heading ‘nation’, as Israelis. The government refuses adamantly and insists that our nation is Jewish. I ask Mahmoud Abbas, Obama and everyone else who is not an Israeli citizen not to interfere in this domestic debate. Netanyahu knows, of course, that nobody will take his demand seriously. It is quite obviously just another device to avoid serious peace negotiations. If he is compelled to drop it, it will not be long before he comes up with another” …

Along the lines of Avnery’s argument, the Palestinian editor and co-Chairman of IPCRI (the Israel-Palestine Center for Research and Information) Hanna Siniora proposed the following formula, and asked for reaction: “What about this: Israel is for the Israelis — and in this way we do not disenfranchise miniorities. How do you receive that formula?”

Siniora was speaking in answer to a question from an Israeli (in the audience at IPCRI’s 27 April discussion of the marked expansion in Israeli settlements in the West Bank since the start of the Annapolis process in November 2007) about PA President Mahmoud Abbas’ statement that he would refuse to recognize Israel as a Jewish State. The Israeli questioner did not respond.

Earlier on the same day, 27 April, the Foreign Press Association (FPA) in Israel held its annual General Membership meeting at the King David Hotel in West Jerusalem, and invited Palestinian negotiator Sa’eb Erekat to address the group after the business of hearing the treasurer’s report and the election of a new committee was over. One of the journalists asked Erekat, “What is the problem in accepting Israel as a Jewish State”.

Erekat was, in fact, prepared for the question. “Israel can call itself anything it wants … but when you signed the peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, you did not put this as a precondition”.

Then, Erekat pulled out one (1) copy of a letter which he said was a reply from U.S. President Truman to a group of American Jewish leaders who had written, Erekat said, on 14 May 1948 (the eve of — or with the time difference, perhaps even after the proclamation of the State of Israel which happened at midnight) asking that the U.S. should accept Israel, Erekat said, apparently correcting himself as he spoke, as “the state of the Jewish people, or as the Jewish state”.

According to Erekat, the American Jewish leaders proposed this formula: “The U.S. recognizes the provisional government as the de facto government of the new Jewish State.”

But what happened, again according to Erekat, was that President Truman crossed out the words,
“the new Jewish State”, and replaced them with the words, “the State of Israel”.

That’s it, Erekat said, proof that even the United States did not recognize Israel as a “Jewish State”. To conclude his argument, Erekat, said: “Check the UN Charter, and see if the Vatican is recognized as a Catholic State”.

Well, first of all, the Vatican is represented by an observer delegation in the United Nations, and it has not been admitted to membership, so it’s identity has not been subject to any agreement or approval, as happens when states are admitted as full UN members.

And, second of all, it seemed to me that all Harry Truman was doing when he crossed out one phrase and replaced it with another, “the State of Israel”, was correcting the identification of the new entity as it was announced.

A couple of years ago, Uri Avnery, writing on this subject, said that what the name of the State of Israel would be, was not known in advance. In fact, it was not known until right up to the actual announcement.

The New York Times’ Isabelle Kershner, who was present at the FPA meeting, managed to get a look at the actual letter that Erekat gave to the outgoing chairman (Steve Gutkin of AP), and she later also took issue with Erekat’s argument [despite the very chummy "Hi Isabelle" that Erekat said when she asked a question on another subject at the FPA briefing ].

In a piece that had a few non-sequitors in its editing, Isabelle wrote that “Palestinian negotiators have refused to recognize Israel’s Jewish character in the past, contending that it would negate the Palestinian refugees’ demand for the right to return to their former homes and would be detrimental to the status of Israel’s Arab citizens, who make up a fifth of the population. In an attempt to bolster the Palestinian argument, Mr. Erekat on Monday produced a copy of a letter signed by President Harry Truman on May 14, 1948. In its original form, it recognizes the provisional government of the new Jewish state, but the typed words ‘Jewish state’ in the second paragraph have been crossed out and replaced with the handwritten words ‘State of Israel’.
Shlomo Avineri, a professor of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said Mr. Erekat was misinterpreting the American president’s intention. According to Mr. Avineri, the Truman letter had been prepared hours before Israel declared its independence, before the new country had chosen its name. It was later corrected by a Truman adviser, Clark Clifford, after the declaration of independence to call the country by its name, not to refute its Jewish character, Mr. Avineri said”. This article can be read in full here.

“QUESTION: On the topic of Benjamin Netanyahu stepping in as Israel’s prime minister today, I guess what kind of steps, if any, could we see – could we expect from the Administration regarding the – furthering the notion of a two-state solution, as well as curtailing expanding Jewish settlements in the West Bank area?

MR. DUGUID: Had the government been installed before I just walked in?

QUESTION: Yes.

MR. DUGUID: It had been installed just before I walked in. We will then, of course, meet with the new government and begin our discussions, where we will go in and explain to them what our policies are and our support for a two-state solution and the way we see the best way going forward. But I don’t have anything more than that for you, as we have just now had a new Israeli Government”.

Akiva reports that it will be based in large part on “a report drawn up at the end of 2008 by 10 senior figures from the two principal political parties in the United States. One of them, former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, has in the interim been appointed a senior economic adviser to the president. The authors of that report recommended to the president that he replace ‘the conditions of the Quartet’ with a readiness to recognize a Palestinian unity government, on condition that that government would agree to a cease-fire with Israel, authorize Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas to conduct negotiations on a final-status solution, and bring the agreement to a referendum” …

Akiva Eldar’s article continues: “Since Netanyahu refuses to accept the principle of a Palestinian state being established alongside Israel, he would have some difficulty complaining about the U.S. relieving Hamas of the same demand. The report’s authors proposed that the president adopt the following positions with regard to the components of a final-status agreement: an Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders, with the exception of large settlement blocs; Jerusalem being the capital of both Israel and Palestine, and divided on a demographic basis; adoption of a special regime in the Old City; the rehabilitation of refugees within the Palestinian state, with Israel accepting a degree of responsibility for the problem; and the stationing of a multinational force in the territories during an interim period”.

In this article, Akiva says that “The experts who drew up the report placed the Palestinian channel ahead of the Syrian channel in urgency, and expressed the opinion that 2009 constitutes the last opportunity for a partition solution”.

Akiva noted that “In his column in The New York Times last week, Roger Cohen wrote that the approach of Volcker and the other authors of the report, an updated version of which Volcker recently presented to the president, was to a large extent in keeping with the approach of Obama’s national security advisor, James Jones, and special emissary George Mitchell. The 10 members of the team that prepared the report included Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, both of whom headed the National Security Council; former Democratic congressman Lee Hamilton, former Republican senator Chuck Hagel; James Wolfensohn, formerly president of the World Bank as well as the Quartet’s Middle East emissary; and Thomas Pickering, a former under secretary of state. All of them are members of the U.S. Middle East Project, headed by Henry Siegman. True, Siegman is considered a member of the ‘far left’, but Netanyahu will have a hard time accusing him of anti-Semitism, since he is an ordained Orthodox rabbi, and he served as executive director of the American Jewish Congress”.

On the new government coalition put together by Netanyahu, Akiva wrote that “One paragraph that stands out in the coalition agreement between Likud and the Labor Party is that which states that “the government will take steps to enforce the law with regard to the illegal [settlement] outposts.” (Someone apparently forgot that their name was laundered to ‘unauthorized’). This is the first time that a politician has dictated a demand viv-a-vis himself.
According to data collected by Peace Now, Defense Minister Barak not only defaulted on his commitment to freeze construction in the settlements and to dismantle at least 24 outposts, but 1,518 new buildings were constructed on his watch last year in the territories, 261 of them on outposts. Barak found devious ways to circumvent the High Court of Justice’s order to evacuate the outpost of Migron, which had been set up on stolen private land. Hagit Ofran, a member of Peace Now’s follow-up team, says that there are no grounds for the claim made recently before the Court that the Israel Defense Forces had evacuated 30 outposts. In return for the settlers’ agreement to evacuate some of their mobile homes, the vast majority of which were in any case unoccupied, Barak gave the go-ahead for ‘new neighborhoods’, a code name for new settlements.
The coalition agreement makes no mention of renewing the work of the ministerial committee for applying the recommendations of the report on the outposts, which was intended to block practices of this kind. Nor does a single word appear in it about the voluntary evacuation by settlers who live east of the separation fence, an idea that had won the wall-to-wall support of the Labor faction and even received the blessing of Barak himself”.

And, Akiva, points out, “the report presented to President Obama calls for Israel to evacuate all of those settlements. Those that are willing and those that are not”.

The article, published today in Haaretz, can be read in full here .