U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry hurriedly bailed from his trip to Rome to fly to Amman and do what he could to salvage the Arab/Israeli peace talks.
After meeting with Jordan's King Abdullah II, Kerry met with Mahmoud Abbas, the PA's unelected dictator, in an effort to get some kind of commitment from him he could take to the Israelis to show that Abbas was actually serious about continuing the negotiations. They reportedly met for four hours, and in the end Mahmoud Abbas basically told Kerry to go pound sand.
In fact, as he told Kerry, Abbas won't even discuss Kerry's over-hyped framework for a peace agreement further until the Israelis release the last batch of the 100 convicted terrorist killers they were arm twisted into agreeing to just to get Abbas to the table.Just to show you how cynical this was, the United States specifically asked that Israel not release any terrorists who have the blood of American citizens on their hands...but those who only murdered Israelis, of course, or even their fellow Arabs are just fine with President Obama and his team.
The Israelis are concerned that Abbas will simply accept the last shipment of terrorist killers free of charge and then simply bow out of the talks entirely, and with good reason.
The Israelis see that Abbas is rejecting every point Kerry included in the framework, including not committing to an end to the conflict, refusing to give up the idea of flooding Israel with genocidal refugees and refusing to recognize Israel as a Jewish State. So the Israelis are quite rightly saying, 'why bother to release more of these murderers? What's the point?' Especially since Abbas won't commit to extending the talks as Kerry wants anyway.
For that, Abbas wants more, you see. He wants a commitment to kick loose even more imprisoned terrorists and a building freeze in Jerusalem and all of Judea and Samaria, even in the places like Ariel and the Gush Etzion bloc that everyone agrees are going to remain part of Israel no matter what.
Kerry asked Abbas to send PLO negotiator Saeb Erekat, formerly the right fork of Yasser Arafat's tongue to Rome to try and work something out, but as Yediot reported, Abbas turned him down flat.
Abbas, of course, is taking his cues from his meeting with President Obama and from the Obama Administration's 180 degree turn on not recognizing Israel as a Jewish State and on Abbas's refusal to commit to ending the conflict. And having just come from a meeting of the Arab League in Kuwait, he's been assured of their support, since they're also taking their cues from the president and our State Department. President Obama, of course, could have told Abbas in no uncertain terms that a refusal this time was going to have serious consequences. But of course, President Obama, as the Palestinian's lawyer and community organizer in the White House had no intention of doing any such thing, and never has. it was far easier to sandbag John Kerry and leave him to cleanup the mess...which after all, can conveniently be blamed on Israel anyway.
The punchline, of course is that Mahmoud Abbas never had any intention of seriously pursuing peace talks with Israel anyway on any realistic basis. The intention was always to get as much as they could out of the Israelis, and then go to the UN.
Read the rest at The Times Of Israel
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