Israel Matzav

Ralph Peters on the Israeli - 'Palestinian' negotiations

FrontPageMagazine interviews Ralph Peters, a retired Army officer and the author of 25 books, including best-selling, prize-winning novels and influential works on strategy, about President Obama's foreign policy. Peters is generally very pro-Israel - I've blogged his articles from the New York Post many times. Here's what he had to say about the 'negotiations' between Israel and the 'Palestinians.'

Well, there will be plenty of talk, but little peace. It’s disheartening that Obama’s foreign-policy priority is an attempt to add this particular (and particularly elusive) scalp to his (tiny) collection, when the great prize of the moment is Iraq–which he’s blowing off.

Obama may be able to bring enough pressure to get a flimsy deal of some sort that lets him go into 2012 claiming he made peace. But no agreement will last. Arabs remain incapable of accepting Israel’s right to exist. Israel’s destruction is about all they have left to believe in, since they’ve failed at everything else.

But let me be brutally frank: Although I am a lifelong and determined supporter of Israel, I agree with the many Israelis who see the more aggressive “settlers” as purely destructive and monstrously selfish. While Jerusalem is, and must, remain an undivided Israeli city, settlements in locations such as Hebron are unjust and unjustified. While I believe that the Arab demand for a return to the 1967 borders is unacceptable (Hey, you lost, guys, that’s how history works.), it’s idiocy to imagine that any solution can accommodate settlers whose out-lying presence is destructive to both sides. Now, the settlements in the West Bank are not uniform. They must be judged on a case-by-case basis. But surely there’s a point at which we can agree with most Israelis that the more extreme settlers are pathological cases.

For all that, 95% or more of the responsibility for making peace remains with the Arabs, whose behavior has been self-destructive and intoxicated by atrocity over the decades. In the end, Israel wants peace. Israel’s neighbors want Jews dead or gone–preferably dead. That’s pretty clear-cut to me.

Well sorry, but if you can't justify Jews living in Hebron you can't justify them living in Tel Aviv either (Sharon had that part right until he got scared of going to jail and decided to give Netzarim away). The issue is not Hebron or any other 'settlement' - it's the existence of a Jewish state. And by the way, since when do the winners in a war give any land conquered back to the losers? Name one other conflict where that has happened, especially when the loser was the aggressor.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:33 PM