Nonsense Round-Up: Direct Talks

There is likely to be a good deal of nonsense in the media this week with the restart of direct negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians in Washington. Two recent examples are features in today's nonsense round up. Let's begin this column in today's Washington Post, a paper where it seems there is a three-way competition between Charles Krauthammer, George Will and Richard Cohen for "Most anti-Arab columnist."

Today, in a column titled "Time stands still in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict" Cohen begins:

"Say what you will about the Arab world, it's hard to earn its gratitude. President Obama went to Egypt and not Israel. He demanded that Israel cease adding new settlements in the West Bank. He treated Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu with a chilling disdain. For all of that, though, Obama's approval rating in Arab countries has sunk. Unlike almost a fifth of Americans, the Arab world clearly knows Obama is no Muslim."

Cohen sets the tone for his readers with an opening line that insinuates that the Arab world (which he seems to conflate with the Islamic world throughout this piece) is a monolith of insatiable ingrates. For Cohen, asking Israel to fulfill its first phase obligation in the Road Map, which it accepted back in 2003, is a demand the Arabs should be grateful that the United States weakly made 7 years late. He then reminds us that the Arab world is probably better educated than almost a fifth of Americans who fall prey to the fear-mongering of majoritarian politicos.

"The polls show some startling numbers. When this spring the Pew Global Attitudes Project asked residents of Islamic countries what they thought about Obama, he got good marks when it came to such matters as climate change. But when the question was the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the numbers not only declined in Indonesia and Turkey, they nearly went through the floor in the three Arab countries polled. In Jordan, 84 percent disapproved of the way Obama was handling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In Egypt, the figure was 88 percent and in Lebanon it was 90 percent."

There is nothing startling about this rather predictable result. The Arab world was dismayed with Bush, they got Obama and expected a change; and after a year and a half of waiting for it, they don't see much of a difference between Obama and his predecessor.

"For Obama, the figures must be disheartening. They strongly suggest that his attempt to woo the Arab world, to convince it that America can be an honest broker between Israel and the Palestinians, has dismally failed. In fact, the extent of this failure is most stark in Lebanon. There, 100 percent of Shiite respondents -- in other words, Hezbollah and others -- have no faith in Obama and his good intentions. This may be a setback for Obama, but it is paradoxically a success for American values."

So for Cohen, if Shiites think something is bad, that something must be a success for American values since, well, Hezbollah is a Shiite organization. He goes from this guilt by association game to basically making things up.

"What the Arab world seems to appreciate is that America will never agree to what the Arab world most wants -- an Islamic state where a Jewish one now exists. This entirely reasonable conclusion is based on what has long been American policy -- not what the State Department wanted but what the American people supported. America has always liked the idea of Israel. The Arab world, for totally understandable reasons, has always hated it. Nothing has changed."

Cohen is convinced he knows that the Arab world wants to replace Israel with an Islamic state but what supports this bold claim? The Arab world is made up of nearly 300 million souls and regular polling of this population shows significant majorities support a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders (although most are skeptical about it actually happening.)

"A fundamental document in this area -- a once-secret CIA analysis from 1947 -- was unearthed (to my knowledge) by Thomas W. Lippman and reported in the winter 2007 issue of the Middle East Journal. The CIA strongly argued that the creation of Israel was not in America's interests and that therefore Washington ought to be opposed. This was no different than what later diplomats and military men (most recently, David Petraeus) have argued and it is without a doubt correct. Supporting Israel hurts America in the Islamic -- particularly the Arab -- world and, given the crucial importance of Middle Eastern oil, makes no practical sense.

The CIA further argued that the so-called Arab-Israeli conflict would soon widen to become an Israeli-Islamic conflict -- another bull's-eye for what was then an infant intelligence service. That process was already underway, which is why some non-Arabs (Bosnian Muslims, for instance) fought the creation of Israel, and has only intensified as radical Islam, laced with healthy doses of anti-Semitism, has gotten even stronger.

But where the CIA went wrong -- and not, alas, for the last time -- was in predicting that the Arabs would defeat Israel and that the state would not survive. The CIA was pretty sure of the outcome, what a later CIA figure might have called a 'slam dunk.'

What neither the CIA nor, for that matter, the anti-Israel State Department recognized in the late 1940s is that America's interests are not always measurably pragmatic -- metrics, in the jargon of our day. Sometimes, our interests reflect our national ethic, an affinity for other democracies, sympathy for the underdog. These, too, are in America's interests and they may be modified, but not abandoned, for the sake of mere metrics."

It's one thing to suggest that our policies should be based something other than our material interests, its another to suggest, as Cohen does here, that our interests be based on something other than what is best for us. But let's leave that point aside for a moment and just accept the notion that our policies can be crafted to support "other democracies" and be based on "sympathy for the underdog".

There was nothing democratic, especially in the 1940s and 1950s about the state of Israel. This was a state that came to being on the basis of ethnically cleansing the vast majority of the native population. While this can also be said for the United States, I doubt these are the common values between Israel and the United States that Cohen wants to share with his readers.

Further, to imply that the Israelis were the "underdog" is another obfuscation of history. The oft repeated mantra that Israel repelled five invading Arab armies in 1948 insinuates that in that conflict Israel was the "underdog". This farce is best exposed when putting the analogy in different terms. Could you imagine someone arguing that the United States would be the underdog if it was invaded by the combined forces of the 20+ nations in the Caribbean? This is, of course, lunacy because despite the lopsided number of nations involved, the resources and might of the United States would overwhelm this combination of island nations. But most people don't know anything about the relative power balance of nations in the Middle East during the 1940s, and Cohen knows and relies on this fact to peddle the underdog claim. The reality of course is that the Arab armies at the time were, combined, fewer in number than the Israeli forces at every stage of the war, invaded only after Israel had depopulated the majority of the native inhabitants of Palestine and also had incomparable weapons and training.

"This is why Obama's overture to the Arab world, clumsily executed, was never going to succeed. America can please some Arab governments -- Egypt and Jordan, for instance -- but not the Arab people. What they want, and what they have been told repeatedly they deserve, is a return of Palestinian refugees to what is now Israel and control over all of Jerusalem. These are both out of the question as far as Israel is concerned. It is not willing to give up its capital and, in a relatively short time, its Jewish majority.

This week, Palestinians and Israelis will once again talk peace in Washington. But until both sides, particularly the Arab peoples, give up on what they really want, the clock will remain where it has been. Those Pew polls show that's around 1947."

Cohen returns to where he began, the Arabs want more than they deserve. What they want, he says, is the right to return. For Cohen, it doesn't matter that the right to return is a human right enshrined in the UN Declaration of Human Rights (UNDHR), the foundational human rights document adopted in 1948. What is clear from this column is that the clock in Cohen's head is stuck around 1947, a time before the UNDHR, when human rights were not afforded to all peoples.

The nonsense continues with Cal Thomas writing this piece recently in the Miami Herald. Here is the opening:

"Never has George Santayana's oft-quoted warning had greater significance than when it comes to Middle East 'peace talks,' including the latest round scheduled to begin Sept. 2 in Washington, D.C. In constantly pressuring Israel to go far beyond the multiple and unreciprocated concessions it has already made, the United States ensures repetition of past mistakes, which will produce the same outcome."

Welcome to another twisted mind who thinks Israel, which continues to received unrivaled support from the United States, has been pressured to make concessions. He goes on to present "some history" to support his claim, like Cohen's, that you can never make a greedy Arab happy, therefore, taking more of there land is okay.

"Some history and the results for those who would learn:

• The Balfour Declaration (1917) and the Palestinian Mandate (1922). These called for the formation of a Jewish homeland while recognizing 'nothing shall be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.' The Arab response: A series of riots, largely instigated by Mufti Mohammad Amin al-Husayni."

Predictably, Thomas' Israel-Palestine History 101 begins at 1917 with the Balfour Declaration. There is no mention of who Balfour is (a Brit), or why a Brit is dictating things to the people of Palestine. No mention of the Husayn-Macmahon correspondence which predates and contradicts Balfour. No mention that Balfour sought to establish a Jewish state in a land where 90% of the inhabitants were not Jewish or that this could be problematic. No mention that the disingenuous Balfour declaration would prejudice the political rights of 90% of the population. Nope, no mention of anything that may make you understand why the Arab response was "a series of riots." For Thomas' reader is simply supposed to accept that the Arab is a violent, reactionary creature with whom little talking can be done.

• The Peel Commission (1936) was formed to investigate the cause of the Arab Revolt (1936-1939). The commission recommended the partition of Jews and Arabs. The Zionist Congress accepts the proposal as the basis of negotiation. The Arab response: Outright rejection and a continuation of the revolt.

He gets the date of the Peel Commission wrong, probably because he plagiarized his talking points from George Will's column from two weeks ago. There are always A students and C students like George Will who get their facts wrong, in any class. Then, there are F students like Thomas, who can't even cheat off the right person.

• U.N. Partition Plan for Palestine (1947) proposed a two-state solution and a divided Jerusalem supervised by the United Nations. The Arab response: Outright rejection, followed by violence. When Israel declared its independence, May 15, 1948, armies of the neighboring Arab states invaded. According to the secretary general of the Arab League at the time, Azzam Pasha, the goal was 'a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.'

The UN Partition Plan in 1947 was rejected for much the same reasons as Balfour was. It would give disproportionate political control to a minority over the majority population of native inhabitants. But Thomas don't want to fuss with the details, all you need to know is that the Arabs are greedy rejectionists. I rebut the"Arabs invaded when Israel declared its independence" myth above.

• Oslo Accords (1993). Negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians lead to a Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements. The response, according to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs: The killing continues. By one estimate, almost 300 people were killed by Palestinian terrorism between 1993 and 2000.

Thomas makes no mention that the cycle of violence in the Oslo period was kicked off by an Israeli settler who killed 30 Palestinians and injured over 120 more as they prayed in a mosque. Or that during this same period (1993-2000) 804 Palestinians were killed. Nor does he mention that during this period Israel aggressively built settlements in the West Bank, especially around Jerusalem, making a contiguous Palestinian state nearly impossible.

• The Camp David Offer (2000). Prime Minister Ehud Barak offers PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat most of what he asks for. The response: rejection and the second intifada, which according to Israel's Foreign Ministry, killed more than 500 and injured more than 8,000.

Camp David was a failure for a number of reasons and explaining the details takes far more than the measly lines Thomas dedicated to misleading his readers about them. Here is a good explanation. Note that again, only Israeli deaths matter to Thomas, as there is no mention of the 6500+ Palestinians killed by Israelis since the year 2000.

"There were other 'peace talks' and initiatives, among them the Madrid Peace Conference (1991), the Wye River Memorandum (1995), Oslo II (1995), Taba (2001), Road Map for Peace (2003), and the Geneva Accord (2003). Some of these led to Israeli withdrawal from land it had occupied for security purposes, amid continued threats and terrorism, following the 1967 War. These withdrawals predictably led to more terror attacks from Arab regions."

None of these things led to Israeli withdrawals from anywhere. Even though it maintains effective control over the sea, airspace and borders of Gaza, Israel removed its settlers, whose presence there was illegal, in 2005. It also ended, a significant part of its occupation of southern Lebanon in 2000 after two decades during which hundreds of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians were killed. The end of belligerent occupation was required by international law and these decisions were made unilaterally by the Israelis, with no coordination with other parties. None of the talks or initiatives mentioned by Thomas precipitated this withdrawals. This is pure fabrication.

"To Israel's enemies, talks and agreements are incremental steps toward their ultimate goal of annihilating the Jewish state. Two examples: According to the Endowment for Middle East Truth, 16 years after Oslo, in 2009, the official of the terrorist organization Fatah continues to affirm 'armed struggle' against Israel. And the Palestinian Authority continues to practice incitement against Israel through student textbooks, television programs, sermons, editorials and the naming of public streets and buildings after terrorist 'martyrs.'"

According to the Endowment for Middle East Truth (which sounds too Orwellian for Orwell), it describes itself as "unabashedly pro-Israel". 'Nuf said.

"At the upcoming talks in Washington, the issues will likely be the same as Camp David 2000:

• Jerusalem. The Palestinian demand for a 'right of return' for 'refugees' and their descendants to places in Israel from which the original 'refugees' claim to have come. This would overwhelm Israel, which is the point of the demand.

• Territorial compromise (again). Agreement on the legitimacy of Israel's sovereignty in the region, producing an end to the war and termination of future claims, which Hamas and Hezbollah have promised never to accept.

• If the all-too-familiar scenario plays out, Israel will give up more land, the Palestinians will make more promises that, like the others, they will break and more riots and terrorism will follow under the pretext that Israel has not ceded enough. After the maximum propaganda value has been extracted, the Palestinians will agree to more talks and the scenario will be replayed.

To top it off, the Obama administration has assured Israel that Iran is not an 'imminent' nuclear threat. This claim has been made before and then withdrawn. Why should it have credence now?

The United States and the West have learned nothing from history and, thus, are doomed to repeat it."

If we have learned anything from Cal Thomas' column, it is that we are surely doomed if we are relying on his history.

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Nonsense Round-Up: George Will and Steven Rosen

Every day we see numerous articles, opinion pieces or blog posts which flat out get the story wrong when it comes to the question of Palestine. On as regular as a basis as I can keep up with, I'll put together this PTN feature called "Nonsense Round-Up". I'll feature a few items which are off base and explain some of the problematic areas in the arguments or reporting. Some might ask why I'd bother spending time on this, well, the reality is that nonsense is too often part of the discourse on Palestine and unless its confronted and corrected it becomes accepted. So after you read through the nonsense, you can take action by either writing a letter to the editor or leaving comments in the comment section at the bottom of online articles.

Let's start with this piece today by George Will in the Washington Post. Will argues that world leaders should not dare ask Israel to "take risks for peace" because Israel is the ultimate victim and knows more about the cost of war than any other. I'm not going to go through every part of Will's piece because it is frankly so filled with distortions that I'd have to dedicate this entire post to it and, well, there is plenty of other nonsense out there today. But let's take a few examples from the piece. Will writes:

In the intifada that began in 2000, Palestinian terrorism killed more than 1,000 Israelis. As a portion of U.S. population, that would be 42,000, approaching the toll of America's eight years in Vietnam. During the onslaught, which began 10 Septembers ago, Israeli parents sending two children to a school would put them on separate buses to decrease the chance that neither would return for dinner. Surely most Americans can imagine, even if their tone-deaf leaders cannot, how grating it is when those leaders lecture Israel on the need to take "risks for peace."

This is Will's opening paragraph. An Israeli death toll is in the first line of his piece. No where, in the entire article, will you find that the Palestinian death toll was 5 times as high and that the vast majority of Palestinian casualties were civilians. Will is quick to put the Israeli toll in terms of the US population but had he done so with Palestinian figures he would have written 450,000 or almost 8 times the American death toll in Vietnam.

He goes on later:

In 1936, when the British administered Palestine, the Peel Commission concluded that there was "an irrepressible conflict" -- a phrase coined by an American historian to describe the U.S. Civil War -- "between two national communities within the narrow bounds of one small country." And: "Neither of the two national ideals permits" a combination "in the service of a single state." The commission recommended "a surgical operation" -- partition. What followed was the Arab Revolt of 1936 to 1939.

It's sad to see accomplished journalists willfully toeing the Israeli line about the historical narrative. Here, Will repeats the oft used Israel taking point that the Arabs respond to offers of compromise with rejection and violence. He purposefully neglects to mention that the revolt had much deeper origins than the Peel partition plan and that, in fact, the Peel commission came to Palestine after the start of the revolt, not before it. The deliberations he speaks of did not take place until 1937, a year after the revolt started. Of course, these are simple historical facts, Will cannot be bothered with them.

Then, there is this bit of nonsense:

On Nov. 29, 1947, the United Nations recommended a partition plan. Israel accepted the recommendation. On Nov. 30, Israel was attacked.

If Israel isn't created until 1948, how did Israel accept the partition plan and who attacked the yet to exist Israel the following day? Notice, Will says 'Israel' was attacked. Full stop. But by whom? From where? Why? No other information is given. You are just supposed to accept it because it doesn't matter what the facts are. Don't you get it, you shouldn't lecture the Israelis.

Of course the reality is that Israel was created at the end of the British Mandate in Palestine in mid-May 1948. By that point, Israel had commenced the systematic depopulation of Palestine from its native Arab inhabitants. It's was not until more than half of the total refugee population was created that Arab armies, which were in total weaker than the Israeli forces, entered into Palestine.

Then the kicker:

The creation of Israel did not involve the destruction of a Palestinian state, there having been no such state since the Romans arrived. And if the Jewish percentage of the world's population were today what it was when the Romans ruled Palestine, there would be 200 million Jews. After a uniquely hazardous passage through two millennia without a homeland, there are 13 million Jews.

What is this even supposed to mean? Is Will really arguing that because there are proportionately fewer followers of the Jewish faith today than there was in the Roman era that this proves hundreds of millions of more Jews would be alive today if they had a homeland? There is no doubt that Jews suffered through the ages from persecution, as have other minorities, but to reduce this reality to such absurd calculations without considering that many Jews, like Ancient Egyptian Pagans or Zoroastrians or other contemporary religions, probably converted to other religions and were not, as Will's argument suggest, subjected to termination over the years. There is a lot less Whigs in the American political system today, in fact, a mere 150 years ago more than 50% of the House of Representatives were Whigs and today there a none. Did I miss the persecution and en masse termination of the Whigs?

Will's piece is at the top of the nonsense pile today. If you'd like to write a letter to the editor of the Washington Post you can do so here.

Then there is Steven Rosen, who spent 23 years working for AIPAC, writing this piece in ForeignPolicy.com today. He argues that Obama should pick up where Bush left off in the Middle East. This is terrifying when you recall that where the lame duck Bush left off was a period of silent consent in the face of Israel's devastating 23-day attack on Gaza which left hundreds of children dead. Here is Rosen:

The Palestinians deeply distrust interim arrangements, and they have frequently asserted that they will not enter another interim agreement. For example, Abbas told then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Aug. 31, 2008, that the Palestinians would accept nothing less than a complete settlement. "Either we agree on all issues, or no agreement at all." His prime minister, Salam Fayyad, reiterated the point three times in December 2009: "We strenuously reject ... solutions involving interim arrangements ... We have no intention of continuing with the formula of interim arrangement...We will reject every attempt to once again enter ... long-term interim arrangements."

Since Rosen provides no context for why the Palestinians oppose interim agreements, the uninformed reader is left thinking that the Palestinians are greedy hasty maximalists. The reality of course, which Rosen conveniently neglects to mention, is that interim agreements have only provided the illusion that peace talks were functioning, giving Israel time and cover to further expand its settlement enterprise in the West Bank, the territory that is supposed to be part of the new Palestinian state which would, at best, give only 22% of historic Palestine to Palestinians. In deed, during the Oslo period, which was an interim agreement, the number of Israel settlers in Palestinian territory doubled, home demolitions and residency revocations increased dramatically, and Israel built a wall deep into the West Bank.

Rosen continues:

But the Palestinian Authority might not hew to this uncreative position if intelligent American mediation led the way. Abbas accepted the Quartet's Middle East Roadmap in 2003 knowing that it called very clearly and explicitly for an interim arrangement with a Palestinian state having "provisional borders and attributes of sovereignty ... as a way station to a permanent status settlement." The Roadmap made this interim Palestinian state Phase II of the process, after Phase I ("Ending Terror and Violence, Normalizing Palestinian Life, and Building Palestinian Institutions") and before Phase III ("Permanent Status Agreement and the End of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.") During Phase II, the Quartet members are to "promote international recognition" of the provisional state, "including possible U.N. membership." And during this period of the Palestinian state with provisional borders, the Arab states are to "restore pre-intifada links to Israel (trade offices, etc.)" and "revive multilateral engagement" with Israel "on issues including regional water resources, environment, economic development, refugees, and arms-control issues." In other words, the Palestinians have already accepted the idea of "interim arrangements." (Palestinian objections to interim agreements have been a continuing feature of Middle East diplomacy, but the record is replete with past examples where they did in fact agree to the step-by-step approach.)

Will Obama build on this recorded agreement to pass through an interim stage, or will he throw it away in a headlong rush to the dream of a millennial rearrangement?

This is where the argument borders on comical. But in case there are any doubts about what Rosen is saying, it's made clear by his last paragraph:

Will Obama take the advice of the pressure-on-Israel enthusiasts who twice led him into the cul-de-sac of the "freeze on natural growth" of settlements? If he does, we are headed for another nasty squall with no constructive outcome. He has another choice, staring right at him in the Roadmap. Does the Roadmap's provenance in the hated Bush administration make it so repulsive to this administration that miss the opportunity Bush left him?

OK. So Rosen is saying Obama should adopt the Road Map as opposed to pressuring Netanyahu for a settlement freeze...or is he? Well, if you actually read the Road Map, you will see why Rosen is a walking talking contradiction and why this piece made the nonsense list today. Linked in Rosen's Foreign Policy article, from the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs' website, is the Road Map document. One wonders if Rosen has ever read it. Despite elaborating above on the different obligations Palestinians had under the different phases of the Road Map, he missed this one important obligation the Israelis had in Phase 1 which consequently blows a hole in his entire argument:

Settlements

* GOI immediately dismantles settlement outposts erected since March 2001.
* Consistent with the Mitchell Report, GOI freezes all settlement activity (including natural growth of settlements).

By asking Netanyahu to freeze all settlement activity, including natural growth, Obama is merely asking him to follow his obligations under the Road Map which, as Rosen points out in his article, "Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon accepted it on May 23, 2003, and Sharon's government, by a majority vote, accepted it on May 25, 2003."

So what Rosen is really saying, in true AIPAC fashion, is that he wants Obama to adopt the interim nature of the Road Map, one that would draw out this peace process for years on end while Israel continues to colonize the West Bank, but he also wants Obama to turn a blind eye while Israel violates it's obligations under that same Road Map.

Huh, I guess that would be just like President Bush.

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