In spite of rumors and a few spastic twitches, it really does appear that the Israeli/Palestinian peace talks are not only really dead, but really, most sincerely dead to quote The Wizard of Oz.
Both Israel and the Palestinian Authority denied wide spread rumors that a deal was in the making.
For the Israeli's part, any deal would have to include the Palestinians retracting their membership applications to various UN bodies. Aside from Abbas flatly refusing to to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.this was the Palestinian move that actually torpedoed the talks contrary to Secretary Kerry's 'poof' speech. At this point the UN and the Swiss have already accepted the applications of 'Palestine' and there isn't any putting that toothpaste back in the tube. And Abbas has enjoyed a much needed boost in his shaky popularity with the Palestinians by televising his signing the application publicly on PA state TV and shoving this in the face of Israel and the Americans. He can't walk it back,even if he wanted to.
Also, Abbas is going to insist on having more of his convicted killers released from Israeli prisons, including a number of Israeli Arabs as yet another 'pre-condition'. As you can imagine,this is a major sore spot politically in Israel, especially as the Americans made a point of requesting that no Palestinian terrorists who had killed U.S. citizens be released.
There are a number of members of Israeli PM Netanyahu's coalition who have said outright they're opposed to any further prisoner releases. Both Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman of Israel Beiteinu and Economics minister Naftali Bennett of Bayit Yehudi(Jewish Home) have com eout against this, and Bayit Yehudi has actually said they would leave the government over it if a further release. especially of Israeli Arab prisoners was passed by Netanyahu and the Knesset. To add to the mix, a number of members of Netanyahu's own Likud are against it as well, and several prominent members like assistant defense minister Danny Danon have said they would leave the government under those circumstances.
That would mean that Netanyahu would have to find new coalition partners, which probably means Labor. Doing that would probably lead to a major revolt in Likud and Israel Beiteinu and to new elections, which is probably what President Obama was angling for all along.
As I've written before, President Obama had a major role in tanking the peace talks, but other details that have since emerged show that it was even more blatant than it appeared at first.
Adam Credo over at the Washington Free Beacon details exactly how the Administration prepared the ground to make the failure of the talks 'Israel's fault', both with selective anti-Israel and anti-Netanyahu leaks to the media and by creating a non-existent issue out of building homes in Gilo, a suburb of Jerusalem that's always going to remain part of Israel under any conceivable peace agreement.
At the same time, Jonathan D.Halevi at the Jerusalem Center For Public affairs provides some very useful material that lines up with what I've been saying for quite some time; that the Palestinian Authority planned to implode the talks from the very beginning.
Collusion? Possible, but more likely two like minded people headed in the same direction.Both the Palestinians and President Obama's regime want Israel deligitimized and forced back to indefensible borders, and both want a Palestinian state established along those indefensible pre-1967 borders. And both wanted the talks to break down in a way that they could be blame on Israel.This is exactly why it was a mistake for Israel to enter these 'talks' without strong preconditions of its own, if at all.
While the Palestinian's strategy is to continue to push for UN membership and wage diplomatic war on Israel while ramping up terrorism, Obama's strategy is along the same lines but from a slightly different angle.Netanyahu's coalition is shaky simply because he's been far too accommodating to the Obama regime's requests and because he's also alienated a lot of the Right's traditional constituency with domestic moves like the haredi draft bill and building freezes. If Netanyahu's coalition can be nudged into collapse and new elections follow, there's an outside chance that Isaac Herzog and Labor could end up forming the next coalition among the Israeli Left, who would be more than eager to gift all of Judea and Samaria including East Jerusalem to the PLO 'for peace.'
If this sounds familiar, it's straight out of the Clinton playbook. It's how Mr.Bill maneuvered behind the scenes to get Yitzhak Rabin and Labor in power so he could put together Oslo and empower his good buddy Arafat. And if Labor gets in again, the results, complete with another terrorist war on Israel's civilians will be similar,only this time with a much bigger body count thanks to the three combat brigades President Obama has trained and equipped for Arafat II courtesy of the American tax payer under General Keith Dayton.
For the president, aside from the object of possibly getting rid of Netanyahu and eviscerating Israel, another side benefit for him is to keep Israel too distracted to deal with Iran until the Ayatollahs go nuclear and it's too late to stop them.. I'm fairly certain that 's what the president and Kerry mean when they say that a Palestinian state (which will almost certainly end up as a reichlet for Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood) is 'important to U.S. interests.'
Whether this plays out the way President Obama envisions is another story altogether. Stay Tuned...
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