In this mailing:
- Khaled Abu Toameh: Palestinians: Kerry Trying to Bribe Us to "Sell Out"
- Douglas Murray: The Fear of Causing Offense
- Shoshana Bryen: Israel Should Be Poor; Palestine, Rich
Palestinians: Kerry Trying to Bribe Us to "Sell Out"
by Khaled Abu
Toameh
May 28, 2013 at 5:00 am
May 28, 2013 at 5:00 am
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The
Americans and Europeans are clearly not listening to what the Palestinians are
telling them: that dollars and euros will not change the hearts and minds of
the people. They will continue to stick to their demands,including the
"right of return" for Palestinians refugees to their former homes and
a full Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines. If Palestinian President
Mahmoud Abbas accepts Kerry's economic plan and returns to peace talks with
Israel, he will be accused of "selling out" to Israel and the U.S. in
return for money.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is trying to bribe the Palestinians by
offering them economic projects in return for political concessions,
Palestinian Authority officials claim.The claim was made in response to Kerry's plan for peace in the Middle East, which envisages a $4 billion investment in the Palestinian private sector.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum conference at the Dead Sea, Kerry said that an independent Palestinian economy is essential to achieving a sustainable peace.
But Kerry's plan to boost the Palestinian economy has hardly impressed the Palestinian Authority leadership.
The Palestinians say that Kerry and President Barack Obama have convinced themselves that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be solved through economic prosperity.
But Mohamed Mustafa, chairman of the PLO's Palestine Investment Fund, a body established in 2003 as an independent investment company to strengthen the Palestinian economy through strategic investments, said that Kerry was wrong to believe that the Palestinian Authority would make political concessions in return for money.
Mustafa said that any economic plan should be part of a political framework that would ensure a full Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines, including east Jerusalem, and guarantee the "right of return" for Palestinian refugees to their former homes inside Israel.
Palestinian Authority officials say that Kerry has been focusing on boosting the Palestinian economy, but that he still has not come forward with a new initiative to revive the peace talks with Israel. "There is no such thing as economic peace," Saeb Erekat, another leading official, explained. "The political and economic factors are intertwined and go together."
Hamas has also rejected Kerry's economic plan to help the Palestinian economy. Hams has dubbed it a deception on the part of the US Administration.
This is not the first time that the Americans or the Europeans try playing the economic card in an effort to get the Palestinians to make concessions to Israel. Billions of dollars that were given to the Palestinians over the past two decades have not had a moderating effect on any Palestinian.
The Americans and Europeans are clearly not listening to what the Palestinians are telling them: that dollars and euros will not change the hearts and minds of the people.
This does not mean, of course, that the Palestinians will refuse what they are being offered. They will take the money, but at the end of the day, they will continue to stick to their demands, including the "right of return" of Palestinian refugees and a full Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines.
In wake of the Palestinian reactions to Kerry's "bribes," it is hard to see how Palestinian Authority leader will be able to return to the negotiating table with Israel. If Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas accepts Kerry's economic plan and resumes peace talks with Israel, he will be accused of "selling out" to Israel and the U.S. in return for money.
Kerry's talk about boosting the Palestinian economy has only complicated his mission of seeking to bring Israelis and Palestinians back to the negotiating table. It would be better if the Americans and Europeans started listening to what the Palestinians are telling them out loud and in public.
Related Topics: Khaled Abu
Toameh
The Fear of Causing Offense
by Douglas Murray
May 28, 2013 at 4:30 am
May 28, 2013 at 4:30 am
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There are
people literally trying not to see the story and not to admit
what the story is. This was an attack that made plenty of sense and had been
whipped up, as well as aspired to by others, for many years.
Drummer Lee Rigby, 25 years old, was walking down a street in South London,
heading back to his barracks, when the two men drove a car into him. Drummer
Rigby, who had done tours of duty in Afghanistan, was pinned down by the two
men. They then attempted to decapitate and disembowel him with knives and a
meat cleaver. Passing members of the public looked on in horror.While they were decapitating Drummer Rigby they men shouted "Allahu Akhbar" ["Allah is Greater" -- than whom is left implied]. Both men were Muslims of African extraction. Both had been living in Britain. Both were affiliated with a group that many of us have warned about for years – Anjem Choudary's group Al-Muhajiroun. So much in this attack was predictable. It fitted a pattern of radicalization and opportunism that we have seen, and some of us have foreseen, for years. Yet so much about it appears to be unsayable in Britain.
Anyone who can manage to watch the press conference with the Rigby family that took place on Friday will know there are many things very wrong in this proceeding. The act itself has stunned an entire nation. But the response of our political and commentator class has been lacking at precisely the moment they have been most needed.
Everyone has been in agreement, of course, that what occurred was a brutal and appalling act. But the British people owe it to Drummer Rigby, who served his country in many places yet was killed on his own streets, to understand what has happened.
Already there is a deep unwillingness to do this, proven by a whole range of people from the Prime Minister down. David Cameron declared that the attack was "not just an attack on Britain – and on the British way of life. It was also a betrayal of Islam and of the Muslim communities who give so much to our country. There is nothing in Islam that justifies this truly dreadful act."
There are good reasons – now that Britain has right-wing street-protest movements of its own – to attempt to dampen potential flare-ups of violence in the immediate aftermath of an attack. But so completely to misrepresent the ideology of the extremists is not only to ignore the startlingly obvious, it is to risk further enraging extremists on any and all sides.
That is, politicians. Perhaps they have to speak in a particular way. But the amazing thing has been seeing journalists refuse – utterly refuse – even to acknowledge that there exists any motivation behind such an attack. From the left-wing Guardian to the right-wing Telegraph, there has been a consistent effort to misread the atrocity. A huge number of commentators, for instance, insisted that the acts were simply "senseless" or "pointless." One described it as "confusing, horrific, bizarre – the horror that made literally no sense." He rambled on like this for paragraphs of endlessly limp, self-pitying yet not self-questioning prose.
Do these people believe what they write? I am not sure that they do. There is something so willful in their posture that it cannot be caused by simple ignorance. And somewhere underneath this is a further fear. It is not a fear of terrorists. It is not even the fear of facing up to terrorists. It is a fear of what will happen if you do face up to them.
The two men who slaughtered Drummer Rigby used the lull before the police arrived to explain to cameras – a truly bizarre modern twist, with meat-cleavers in hand – why they had done what they had done. They said the murder had to do with British troops being in "our lands." Although the men spoke in a London accent, the lands they were talking about were not the streets of London. These men were not speaking as British men. They were speaking as – and wanted to be understood as – Muslims. Certainly they are fundamentalist Muslims, and certainly most Muslims would condemn them. But they had got to the place they had got to by a process which is familiar, predictable and, by their own lights, not insane.
And here is the problem for us and our society. There now exists a greater fear of causing offense than a desire to tell truths. This is not something new among politicians, but it is new for it to be so rampant in the free press. These are people who are literally trying not to see the story and not to admit what the story is. So they become distracted and self-censoring -- willfully. The BBC's Nick Robinson has been forced to apologize after mentioning at an early stage in the attacks that the two men were of "Muslim appearance." A country that seeks to deflect itself from the butchery of one of its soldiers by jihadists by engaging in a round of "did someone say something racist?" seems to me to be a country in a serious amount of trouble.
The whole country honours Drummer Rigby. But it not only dishonours him, but dishonours our nation, to see in his brutal death not an aggressive ideology with clear aims, but a mere nothingness. This was not an attack that made "no sense." It was an attack that made plenty of sense and had been whipped up, as well as aspired to, by others for many years. What makes "no sense" is for a country to continue to ignore that fact, and hope, by ignoring it, to pretend it away.
Related Topics: Douglas Murray
Israel
Should Be Poor; Palestine, Rich
Then We'll Have Peace?
by Shoshana Bryen
May 28, 2013 at 4:00 am
May 28, 2013 at 4:00 am
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Palestinian
poverty is not a plague or an earthquake: it is intimately related to
Palestinian government policy.
Last week, before meeting with Israeli President Shimon Peres, U.S.
Secretary of State John Kerry pronounced
Israel's prosperity an impediment to "peace" with the Palestinians.
"I think there is an opportunity [for peace], but for many reasons it's
not on the tips of everyone's tongue. People in Israel aren't waking up every
day and wondering if tomorrow there will be peace because there is a sense of
security and a sense of accomplishment and of prosperity."He appears to have meant that if Israel is stable, educated, prosperous, free and democratic, these accomplishments have somehow made Israelis feel that peace is not important, not a pressing matter, because, after all, life is pretty good right now.
If that is so, however -- if Israel would place a higher priority on "peace" if it were struggling economically or felt its security to be precarious -- what is one to make of Mr. Kerry's announced determination to raise $4.2 billion in private investment for the West Bank with the aim of increasing Palestinian GDP by 50%, cutting its unemployment by 66% and just about doubling median Palestinian income? But wouldn't such economic benefits make the Palestinians less interested in "peace"? Wouldn't that give them a "sense of security and a sense of accomplishment and of prosperity" that would make them self-satisfied?
Or is that true only of Jews?
But Secretary Kerry appears to have forgotten one general point about investment, and one specific point about the Palestinians.
Generally, in the real world, investment flows organically to places that have an educated population, security, and rule of law that protects intellectual property and the repatriation of profits. It flows, for example, to Israel. Countries or areas with corrupt financial practices, a dictatorial, bifurcated government, multiple security services and an education system that is heavy on ideology and the veneration of violence get less.
Palestinian poverty is not a plague or an earthquake; it is intimately related to Palestinian government policy. Palestinian leadership is at war with the country best able to employ its people – Israel. And Israel does, in fact, periodically employ a great many of them. Kerry promised that his plan would be "bigger, bolder and more ambitious" than anything since the Oslo Accords, so a quick review of post-Oslo Palestinian economics shows that open warfare against Israel is the best predictor of Palestinian economic difficulty. The Oslo timeline, from an article I published in 2012, includes:
- 1992: 115,600 Palestinian workers entered Israel every day.
- 1996: A devastating series of bus bombings, including a particularly gruesome nail bomb in the center of Tel Aviv killed more than 100 Israelis. Palestinian workers in Israel were temporarily reduced to 63,000.
- September 1995-September 2002: Despite the interruption in 1996, Palestinians unemployment decreased from 18.2% to 11%. In mid-2000, 136,000 were working inside Israel -- 40% of all employed Palestinians. Another 5,000 worked in the joint Israeli/Arab run Erez Industrial Zone in the Gaza Strip. Thousands more worked in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in Israeli-owned businesses.
- September 30, 2000: Arafat launched the so-called "second intifada." Begun at the peak of Palestinian economic integration with Israel, the terrorist war killed more than 1,000 Israelis and wounded more than 5,600 (comparable U.S. figures would be 40,000 and 224,000). The number of Palestinians working in Israel was reduced within six months to 55,000. The Erez Industrial Zone was closed after 11 Israelis were killed there.
- 2005: There was no impediment to independent Palestinian economic activity at the time Israel removed its presence from the Gaza Strip. The Palestinian news agency Ma'an waxed ecstatic about economic opportunities, particularly the acquisition of greenhouses and agricultural equipment the Israelis were leaving behind in a $14-million deal brokered by then-World Bank President James Wolfenson.
- 2006: Palestinian looters destroyed the greenhouses almost immediately, and by early 2006, the greenhouses and the $100 million in annual exports to Europe they had produced were gone.
- 2007: Hamas took control of Gaza after a brief and brutal war with Fatah and then escalated the rocket war that had begun in 2001. After more than 9,000 increasingly long-range and accurate rockets and missiles, Israel launched Operation Cast Lead in 2008/09.
- 2009: Israel and Egypt instituted the security blockade of Gaza, which the UN has acknowledged to be a legitimate security measure.
If Secretary Kerry thinks that economic dislocation and threats beyond its borders will make Israel cede territory and security to a Palestinian Authority that adamantly places warfare above a settlement and the economic growth that such a settlement could produce, he misunderstands both Israel and the Palestinians.
Shoshana Bryen is Senior Director of The Jewish Policy Center.
Related Topics: Israel
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