Netanyahu Offers a Dose of Truth about Palestine to John Kerry

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered a rather negative assessment of peace prospects with the Palestinians on Thursday in a press conference in Jerusalem with US Secretary of State John Kerry, who is beginning his tenth visit to the region in an attempt to broker a deal between Israel and Palestine. Netanyahu said, "There is growing doubt in Israel that the Palestinians are committed to peace," speaking with unusual bluntness as Kerry stood beside him. The Israeli prime minister accused Palestinian officials of orchestrating a campaign of "rampant" incitement against Israel, and he directly reprimanded Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas for giving a hero's homecoming welcome to a group of Palestinian prisoners convicted of murdering Israelis. The prisoners were released from Israeli jails on Tuesday as part of a prisoner release program reluctantly agreed to by Israel as a preliminary gesture in the latest effort to restart peace talks. Netanyahu said, "To glorify the murderers of innocent women and men as heroes is an outrage." Speaking after Prime Minister Netanyahu, Kerry said that Israeli and Palestinian leaders "are nearing the point, or are already at it, where they will have to make tough decisions," and he pledged to work with both sides more intensely to try to narrow the differences through a framework agreement that would address core issues, including the borders of a future Palestinian state, security, Palestinian refugees and the status of Jerusalem, Kerry said : "It would create the fixed, defined parameters by which the parties would then know where they are going and what the end result can be,....This will take time and it will take compromise from both sides, but an agreed framework would be a significant breakthrough." Kerry is in fact proposing that Israel and Palestine agree to an outline containing a series of compromises on the major issues, with the details to be filled in later. This is asking a lot from two opponents whose negotiating history has been difficult and who do not trust each other, thus making it seem to each side to be extremely risky to make substantial concessions without having concluded a complete agreement. For example, what could Israel and Palestine agree to in outline format concerning one major point in the conflict - the creation of a Palestinian state - while Palestine says it cannot agree to recognizing Israel's right to exist as a nation, and Israel says it cannot agree to the Palestinian demand that its state borders be based on the borders pre-dating the 1967 Six-Day War, in which Israel captured and occupied Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank. "The Jordan Valley must be under Israel sovereignty forever," Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Zeev Elkin said on Thursday, referring to the border area with Jordan, from which Palestinians want a full Israeli withdrawal. "The 1967 borders are Auschwitz borders," Elkin was quoted as saying by the Ha'aretz newspaper, suggesting that Elkin thinks a return to the narrower boundaries that existed before the 1967 conflict would lead to the destruction of Israel. ~~~~~ And, dear readers, this is just one of the key issues that Israel and Palestine must somehow agree on. Other major issues include the Israeli settler question, with Israel rejecting Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' call for all Israeli settlers and soldiers within the lands captured in 1967 to be withdrawn. Another critically important issue involves the future of Jerusalem. Israel says it will never agree to dividing the holy city of Jerusalem by ceding East Jerusalem to Palestine. Palestine insists that East Jerusalem must be its future capital. Anyone who wants to see Israel survive sees the logic of its position. And, as Netanyahu has said, if Palestine will recognize Israel's right to exist, then all other issues become negotiable. But so far, the Obama administration has asked Israel to make all the preliminary gestures without demanding similar gestures of Palestine. This may well be yet another example of President Obama's tendency to favor the opponents of Israel, but it could also be an indirect admission that Obama and Hillary Clinton-John Kerry have no idea how to broker the Israel-Palestine deal, just as they failed to negotiate their own deals with Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran and North Korea. I stand with Israel on these issues. There is no reason to abandon America's most loyal ally to a 'death by a thousand cuts' at the hands of Palestine and its terrorist allies, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Moslem Brotherhood.