Column One: Fool me twice
By CAROLINE B. GLICK The Jerusalem Post 02/03/2012 17:54
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=256274

American “friends” like Wexler and Obama play Israel for a fool again and
again.

Former US congressman Robert Wexler is a man worth listening to. Wexler
served as then-senator Barack Obama’s chief booster in the American Jewish
community during the 2008 presidential campaign. He appeared everywhere and
said anything to convince the American Jewish community that the same man
who sat in the church pews listening to Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s anti-Semitic
vitriol for two decades, and listed among his closest friends and associates
a host of Israel-haters as well as former terrorists, was the greatest
friend Israel could ever have.

Once Obama was elected, Wexler continued to serve as his Jewish shill.
Wexler traveled to Israel multiple times in the early months of Obama’s
presidency, to pressure Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to submit to Obama’s
demand and embrace the cause of Palestinian statehood. After Netanyahu
finally announced his support for Palestinian statehood at his speech at
Bar-Ilan University in September 2009, Wexler returned with a new demand –
that Netanyahu enact a moratorium on Jewish property rights in Judea and
Samaria.

In an interview with The Jerusalem Post at the time, Wexler promised that
Israel would be richly rewarded if it took the unprecedented step of denying
Jews the right to their property in Judea and Samaria simply because they
were Jewish. Even if the moratorium were temporary, Obama would view the
discriminatory measure as proof of Israel’s good intentions.

Moreover, he would expect the Palestinians and the wider Arab world to
respond to Israel’s move by taking steps to normalize their relations with
Israel.

For instance, Wexler claimed that Obama had demanded that the Arabs respond
to an Israeli moratorium on Jewish property rights by among other things
opening trade offices and direct economic ties; conducting cultural and
economic exchanges; and permitting Israeli airplanes to overfly their
territory.

And in the event that the Arabs refused to rise to the occasion, Wexler
proclaimed, “You can rightly say that all bets are off.”

Wexler continued, “I want to call their bluff. I want to see, if Israel
makes substantial movement toward a credible peace process, whether they are
willing to do it. And if they are not, better that we should find out five
or six months into the process, before Israel is actually asked to
compromise any significant position.”

In the event, Netanyahu bowed to Obama’s demand and enacted a temporary ban
on the exercise of Jewish property rights in Judea and Samaria. And in the
aftermath of his stunning move, the Arab world did nothing.

Amazingly, far from calling their bluff, Obama doubled down on his pressure
on Israel.

Among other things, since squeezing the first temporary ban on Jewish
property rights out of Netanyahu, Obama has demanded that the moratorium be
made permanent and be extended to Jerusalem.

As for his vision of the “peace process,” Obama has demanded that Israel
accept the 1949 armistice lines as the basis for negotiations.

He has used the US veto at the UN Security Council as a means of pressuring
Israel to make further unreciprocated concessions to the Palestinians.

And the pro-Israel US president has demanded no similar concessions from the
Palestinians.

THIS WEEK, Wexler, now the head of the far-left S. Daniel Abraham Center for
Middle East Peace, was back in town. Speaking at the Herzliya Conference, he
said that Israel should consider extending the ban on Jewish property rights
to within the 1949 armistice lines. Wexler based his claim on then-prime
minister Ehud Olmert’s 2008 peace offer to Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas.

Olmert’s offer, which Abbas rejected, involved a “land swap,” in which in
the framework of a comprehensive peace deal, Israel would give the
Palestinians land from within its 1949 boundaries in exchange for land in
Judea and Samaria that Israel would permanently retain. According to media
reports, Olmert offered Abbas 4.5 percent of Israeli territory in exchange
for a similar amount of land in Judea and Samaria.

While Wexler appeared at the Herzliya Conference as the president of a
nonpartisan nonprofit organization, his continued intimate relationship with
Obama is well known. Last fall, Commentary’s Omri Ceren documented that
Zvika Krieger, Wexler’s vice president at the Daniel Abraham Center,
authored documents for Obama’s reelection campaign. Among other things,
those documents cited articles authored by Krieger and Wexler in which they
championed Obama’s record on Israel from their nonpartisan perch at the
Daniel Abraham Center.

Given Wexler’s close ties to Obama, it is reasonable to assume that his
suggestion that Israel cease exerting its national sovereignty over its
sovereign territory in the interests of the peace process is not simply his
personal view.

There is much to criticize about Wexler’s suggestion.

But more important than its arrogant, insulting absurdity, and more
disconcerting than Wexler’s own hypocrisy, is what his suggestion tells us
about the dangers inherent in Netanyahu’s current negotiations with the
Palestinians.

To understand the connection we need to recall the nature of Olmert’s offer
to Abbas.

Olmert’s negotiations with Abbas were based upon the proposition – repeated
ad nauseam to the Israeli public – that “nothing is agreed to until
everything is agreed to.”

The idea was clear. True, on the one hand, the prime minister was conducting
negotiations far from the spotlight, and refusing to tell the public what
was on offer. But on the other hand, we could rest assured that that nothing
he offered would have any significance whatsoever unless the Palestinians
agreed to a final-peace deal with Israel. If they rejected peace, then
everything Olmert said would become null and void, and be tossed down the
memory hole.

In accordance with this basic proposition, when Abbas rejected Olmert’s
offer, and made no counteroffer, it was naturally assumed that Olmert’s
proposal was rendered null and void.

Yet four years later, here is Wexler, Obama’s surrogate, advocating a policy
of unilateral abrogation of Israeli sovereignty over 4.5% of its national
territory in order to enable the eventual implementation of an offer that
was predicated on the notion that “nothing is agreed to until everything is
agreed to.”

AND THIS brings us to the current negotiations between Israel and the
Palestinians. For the past month, under the aegis of the Middle East
Quartet, Netanyahu’s representative attorney Yitzhak Molcho has been
conducting negotiations with Abbas’s representatives in Amman, Jordan. Last
week, Molcho reportedly outlined the government’s general positions on lands
it is willing to cede to the Palestinians.

Without presenting any maps, Molcho reportedly said that a permanent
agreement would involve most of the Israelis living in Judea and Samaria
remaining in Israeli territory. The media interpreted this to mean that like
Olmert, Netanyahu expects for Israel to retain perpetual control over large
blocks of Israeli communities that take up less than 10% of the overall
landmass in Judea and Samaria.

For his part, Netanyahu this week reiterated his position that Israel must
maintain a long-term military presence in the Jordan Valley. This has been
interpreted to mean that Netanyahu is willing to cede sovereign rights to
the area to the Palestinians.

Taken together, what Molcho’s statement and Netanyahu’s statement indicate
is that at a minimum, in exchange for peace, the Netanyahu government is
willing to expel some portion of the 350,000 Jews living in Judea and
Samaria from their homes and to transfer sovereignty over a significant
portion of the territory to a Palestinian state.

From the vagueness of what has been reported, it is apparent that Netanyahu
has been far less specific about the scope of the territorial concessions he
is willing to undertake than his predecessor was. But then again, Olmert
made his offer after conducting negotiations with Abbas for over a year.
Netanyahu only entered these talks a month ago.

And while no one in or out of government believes that these negotiations
have any chance of leading to a peace deal, the fact is that Netanyahu is
feverishly working to ensure that the talks continue. He spent a good part
of his day on Wednesday speaking on the phone to US Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton, and meeting with Quartet envoy Tony Blair and UN Secretary-
General Ban Ki-moon, begging the foreign leaders to convince the
Palestinians not to abandon the negotiations.

As he put it in his joint press conference with Ban, “You cannot complete
the peace process unless you begin it. If you begin it, you have to be
consistent and stick to it.”

For his part, Abbas is doing everything in his power to make clear that he
does not wish to negotiate, and that even if negotiations continue, he will
never cut a deal with Israel. To underscore his bad faith, next week Abbas
will travel to Egypt to meet with Hamas terror chief Khaled Mashaal. The two
men are set to discuss the means of implementing the unity government deal
they signed last May.

Netanyahu is obviously under great pressure to continue with these talks. A
day doesn’t go by without some US official or European leader talking about
the need for talks, or a leftist politician or political activist at home
blaming Netanyahu for the absence of peace. But none of this pressure can
justify the damage that is done to Israel’s position by continuing to engage
in these negotiations.

As Netanyahu’s own experience with Obama (and Wexler) shows, concessions
never bring a respite from the US leader’s pressure. They only form the
baseline for demands for further concessions.

Beyond the narrow confines of Obama’s personal hostility towards Israel,
Netanyahu’s current engagement in negotiations with the Palestinians is
devastating to Israel’s position in two ways.

First, it makes it impossible for Israel to extricate itself from the lie of
PLO moderation and to start telling the truth about its Palestinian
“partner.”

Quite simply, as Abbas’s continued courtship of Hamas and his open embrace
and glorification of mass murderers such as the murderers of the Fogel
family make clear, the PLO has returned to its roots as a terrorist
organization. It is no longer credible to claim that the PLO has abandoned
terror in favor of peace.

By engaging in peace talks with the PLO, Netanyahu renders it impossible to
make this critical claim. Consequently, he damns Israel to a situation in
which we continue to empower and politically legitimize a terrorist
organization committed to our destruction.

The second way continued negotiations devastates Israel’s position is by
eroding our ability to claim our rights to Judea and Samaria and so
extricate ourselves from this fake peace process with terrorists. As Wexler
made clear, from the international community’s perspective, everything that
Israel offers at the negotiating table is catalogued. Regardless of
Palestinian bad faith, irrespective of actual prospects for peace, every
theoretical Israeli concession becomes the new baseline for further
negotiations.

American “friends” like Wexler and Obama play Israel for a fool again and
again.

In truth, we should thank Wexler for coming here this week and reminding us
of his bad faith, and the bad faith of the president he serves. But it is up
to Netanyahu to draw the appropriate lessons.

caroline@carolineglick.com