If this news is true the U.S. may have dodged a major bullet from God.
John Kerry, the US Secretary of State made an attempt to get President Obama to confront Israel and force them to accept his peace proposal, despite their objections to it. Given this refusal, Israeli television reported last night that the peace deal has “pretty much collapsed.”
According to Channel 10 News, Kerry sought Obama’s “political backing for confrontation primarily with Israel,” but was rebuffed, with the US President saying that now “was not the time for such moves,” this, according to unnamed sources close to the negotiations.
As a result, Kerry’s effort to get agreement on the “framework” has “pretty much collapsed for now.” No independent confirmation of the report was available.
In its present state, the document being finalized by the US Secretary of State still includes clauses for the recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, and provides for a Palestinian state based on the pre-1967 lines, but the document’s handling of the city of Jerusalem is “very problematic” for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
One crucial point noted in the news report, is that the status of the framework accord is no longer to be binding, and as things stand now, the document is so non-threatening even to Israeli hardliners, that it is not likely to cause any sort of coalition crisis.
Kerry himself said in a recent interview with the Washington Post, that Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Abbas would have a chance to “express reservations” over the framework agreement, adding that such caveats provide “the only way for them to politically be able to keep the negotiations moving…For them as leaders to be able to embrace an endgame, they need to have the right to be able to have some objection.”
Channel 10’s Sunday night report said that Kerry’s intent was that the framework agreement, regardless of its lack of substance or authority, would govern the talks that would continue on for the remainder of the year. However, when Kerry announced the resumption of talks last July, he laid out a nine month time period, during which he said the goal was the brokering of a full, permanent peace agreement. Those nine months end in April, and chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said just last week that he saw no reason to extend the talks beyond that date.
Last week, reports suggested that Netanyahu and his colleagues were inclined to accept the framework accord, as a non-binding agreement. This is contrasted by persistent reports that the Palestinians intend to reject it, and are already planning a series of legal and diplomatic moves against Israel. With the framework accord so weakened, the channel 10 report concluded that Kerry would face an even more difficult uphill battle in the ongoing struggle to get the Palestinians to accept it.
One politician who won't be sad to see the current talks collapse is Jewish Home leader Naftali Bennett who has called Kerry's diplomatic gestures “illusional,” “momentary” and "unsustainable".
Bennett argues that far from helping Israel achieve long-lasting tranquility, and helping the Palestinians prosper as well, twenty years of well-intentioned internationally brokered peace efforts have had the opposite effect — provoking violence and instability. “It’s a bit frustrating when people come from outside and think they have a magic solution,” he said. “Their entering the fray creates a whole new wave of terror. And then when it fails, we’re stuck with the consequences.”
The Jewish Home leader believes in much more practical solutions under which he envisions Israel annexing some 60 percent of the West Bank and granting full citizenship to the 70,000 Palestinians who live there. The rest of the West Bank would be given self-government but not statehood. At the heart of Bennet's argument is that "this is our land" referring to the West Bank as the Biblical lands of Judea and Samaria.
“Jerusalem has been our capital for 3,000 years. Beit El and Hebron have been our land for 3,600-700 years. Any Jew or Christian or Muslim can open a Bible and read it. You have it there. This distorted view as if we’re occupying some foreign land entered the international mind and then they see it as a model of colonialism and then, yeah, they ask ‘Why are you occupying some other person’s land?’ That’s not the case here.”
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