Report: PA President Mahmoud Abbas worked as KGB agent in Damascus during 80's

[Ken Burch]

13. It's a waste of time NOT to try and sit down and negotiate.

We've all been taught by the history of this dispute that refusing to negotiate with the existing Palestinian leadership, while continuing to expand the West Bank settlements(settlements that should never have been started in the first place, as Ben-Gurion himself pointed out many times, since they achieve no good that outweighs the harm they cause) can never lead to the emergence of a BETTER Palestinian leadership-and that there will NEVER be a credible Palestinian leadership willing to settle permanently for something short of independence(the years have proved to Palestinians that nothing short of independence can give them any hope of a decent life).

Netanyahu's approach is precisely the tactic tried over and over again by Begin and Shamir (under who Netanyahu served as a diplomat and spokesman for years) throughout the Eighties and early Nineties. They not only refused to accept the necessity of negotiating with the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people, they anathemized (with Labor's support, to be fair) anyone who supported a two-state solution as "anti-Israel" (and often as antisemitic as well). When Netanyahu returned to power after Oslo, he resumed the use of this tactic-humiliating Arafat with the pointless siege of his compound in Ramallah and collectively punishing rank-and-file Palestinians for violence done by the militants. No BETTER Palestinian leadership ever emerged from this, only Hamas. If immiseration and refusal to negotiate, while expanding illegal settlements and collectively immiserating the Palestinian population and simultaneously equating any public dissent from this failed strategy with hatred of Jews has failed to achieve anything at all since 1967, how could staying that failed and discredited course achieve anything different now? Or at least, anything different in a positive way?

The Palestinians can't achieve final military victory. Neither can the Israelis. The only chance there is at all of changing any of this(and change is the ONLY hope) is through negotiations.

Who should the Israeli government sit down with? The people who have the guns. Any agreement end to the conflict must have buy-in from the current armed factions, or it will be useless. It's not possible to invent some other leadership, get that other leadership to sign something, and then expect Fatah and Hamas to just voluntarily stop(and then to expect that other leadership, if it ever came into existence, to either create a new military force just to liquidate Hamas and Fatah with extreme prejudice OR to let the IDF come into newly-"independent" Palestinian territory and stage an epic "mop-up" operation of the sort the same IDF has never been able to come close to achieving under the Occupation).

And if Netanyahu is going to keep demanding that the Palestinian side not bring any preconditions into the talks, then he needs to give up demanding preconditions of his own-it should be enough that Fatah reiterate its existing recognition of the State of Israel and that Fatah simply recognize it in the exact same way Egypt and Jordan recognize it; neither should have to totally abandon any form of RoR(it's enough that they not insist on physical RoR for all descendants of the expellees of '48 and '67); and they shouldn't have to accept NOT getting East Jerusalem as the capital or the preservation of most settlements. If Netanyahu wants actual negotiations, he shouldn't be insisting that Palestinians accept terms for having them that read to them as humiliation and defeat. The negotiations need to start with "parity of esteem", mutual respect, and an acknowledgment that both national communities have deep roots in the same soil.

None of that is asking all that much. None of it harms Israeli security or costs the country any international prestige.

And nothing is safer in leaving things as they are. There is no real security in the safety in the status quo, and certainly nothing worth demonizing everyone who questions it.