Israelis are in uproar over what The Jerusalem Post called in its editorial headline Thursday “The recognition sham” - the Palestinian Arab’s “sudden” adopting of a position whereby they refuse to recognize Israel as a JEWISH state.
After listing some of the numerous occasions when “Palestinians” claimed to have accepted Israel’s right to exist - Arafat in 1988 and 1993; the PLO in 1998 and the PA in 2003, the paper says:
“So the Palestinians accept Israel’s existence, right? Well, perhaps not. Now, on the eve of Annapolis, we discover that all of these claims of recognition may have been a giant sham.”
It describes what happened this week:
On Monday, chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said, “The problem of the content of the document [setting out joint principles for peacemaking post-Annapolis] has not been resolved… One of the more pressing problems is the Zionist regime’s insistence on being recognized as a Jewish state. We will not agree to recognize Israel as a Jewish state,” Erekat said. “There is no country in the world where religious and national identities are intertwined.”
On Tuesday, another prominent Palestinian negotiator, Yasser Abed Rabbo, said, “It is only a Zionist party that deals with Israel as a Jewish state, and we did not request to be a member of the international Zionism movement.”
[On Wednesday] Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salaam Fayad joined in these statements. And Erekat chimed in again on Al-Arabiya TV: “Israel can define itself however it sees fit; and if it wishes to call itself a Jewish state, so be it. But the Palestinians will never acknowledge Israel’s Jewish identity.”
For The Jerusalem Post “all this is mind-boggling. … The Palestinian refusal to accept Israel as a Jewish state suggests that all their solemn and myriad expressions of Israel’s right to exist did not mean anything.
Wakey, wakey!
To this (once more right-wing, but in recent years increasingly left-leaning English-language) Israeli newspaper - and so, we can assume, to a good number of Israelis - the whole thing, then, is a “sham.”
“Scam” would describe it better, for according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “sham” is something pretended; scam, is a “trick or swindle, a fraud.”
Maybe call it a “shcam” - a pretense intended to trick Israel into falling into the Arab trap.
And how easily, almost willingly, Israel fell.
Of course, on this occasion, the PLO/PA did not raise this issue of its refusal to recognize a JEWISH Israel until after US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had made it quite clear that the Bush administration has tied what’s left of its reputation to this deal; that Annapolis has to happen; that “failure” as Rice put it to the General Assembly of the United Jewish Communities in Nashville Tuesday, “is simply not an option.”
Just like their brother store keepers in Jerusalem’s Arab souk, the PLO/PA leaders are masters at bartering. They can gauge within a hair’s breadth at what point the prey has taken the bait; then they yank the line. Their gamble this time is that Bush and Rice have simply staked too much on achieving ANYTHING at Annapolis to pull out at this late date, no matter what price the PA now demands.
It only helps the “Palestinians” that Syria has reportedly agreed to attend, and that Rice made it her business earlier this week to impress on the Israelis her expectation of even more concessions from them in order to secure some sort of success at the conference.
Perhaps what’s really “mind boggling,” is that the Post’s editorial staff, and anyone else who has been watching the way this whole “peace process” has unfolded since Madrid and Oslo, was actually taken aback by this shrewd “Palestinian” move.
The PLO/PA has been playing this semantic game for a long time. And if Israelis truly were deaf to it, then all they had to do was tune into the Palestinian Arabs in their midst, the so-called Israeli Arabs who enjoy full representation in Israel’s parliament.
On February 28 2006, in a by-no-means-unusual speech, Arab Knesset Member Ahemd Tibi stated bold as brass: “I certainly oppose Zionism and the Jewish character of the State. … [A] state can’t be equal and democratic and prefer one ethnic group over another. Despite the fact that I’m aware of the presence of Basic Laws defining the country as a Jewish state, this does not take away from the logical contradiction between the two definitions of Jewish and democratic in our opinion, and our opinion is also shared by a wide echelon of a group of intellectuals and Israeli left-wingers.”
Tibi continued: “We [Israeli Arabs] won’t accept a coercion of Zionism, which we oppose as we oppose the foreign and defense policies of the government, and the validity of the occupation. A million Arabs in the country oppose the occupation, oppose Zionism, and oppose the liberation of land which is a Zionist value. You can’t force these things on us and our public. … [O]ur platform talks about equality of rights for the Arab public as a national minority in the context of a legal battle to change the country into a state of all of its nations.”
So much for this dyed-in-the-wool traitor to the country he enjoys all his benefits from.
More significantly, more seriously, JEWISH leaders have advocated this re-formulating of Israel so that it no longer need be a Jewish state.
As Professor Paul Eidelberg noted in an opinion piece published on Israel National News (November 15, 2007), Israeli President Shimon Peres “has long advocated the transformation of this country from a Jewish state into ‘a state of its citizens.”
Eidelberg “replays” an interview Peres gave the far-left paper Ha’aretz after Benjamin Netanyahu trounced him in the May 1996 prime ministerial election:
Interviewer: What happened in this election?
Peres: “We lost.”
Interviewer: Who is we?
Peres: “We, that is the Israelis.”
Interviewer: And who won?
Peres: “All those who do not have an Israeli mentality.”
Interviewer: And who are they?
Peres: “Call it the Jews.”
Yes, Israeli Arabs, Israeli leftists, the PLO/PA and others who hate Jews have long been working to change Israel from a Jewish state into a state of its citizens.
And yet, Israelis are all agog at this “new development?”
It’s not a development, it’s a God-given opportunity to get out of this mess.
Addressing her Nashville audience Tuesday, Rice said she believes “that most Palestinians and most Arab states are ready to end the conflict [and] that most Israelis are ready to leave most of the …nearly all of the West Bank, just as they were ready to leave Gaza for the sake of peace.”
Her Israeli counterpart, Tzipi Livni, has said concerning Israel’s quest to find peace with the Palestinian Arabs that she “whole-heartedly believe[s] that this is not a zero sum  game.”
All this is clearly optimism packaged for public consumption. It is very likely, in fact, that even before the PLO unleashed its latest salvo of deception, neither woman had much if any hope left for a successful Annapolis event.
The hour is late, but it is not too late: Let Livni and Rice pull the carpet out from under Abbas, Erekat and Co. Let these two diplomats demonstrate that they are realists, and that they are no longer prepared to play by the Arab rules, to be seduced by “Palestinian” wheeling and dealing.Let them cancel the conference, saving themselves and their governments from the fiasco that it is set to become, and depriving the Arab side from the excuse its failure will give them to unleash another intifada - the Annapolis War.
All the blame for the failure to convene the conference can - quite accurately - be laid yet again at the door of the Arabs who have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
Let the “Palestinians” hold accountable those they have chosen to lead them to statehood.
If, as “Condi” says she “believes” most of the Palestinians and most Arab states are ready to end the conflict, let’s see them mean business.
Original Source