You can't teach an old dog new tricks
Defense Minister Ehud Barak has lived through just about everything and learned nothing since leaving the IDF in 1995. He proved it again on Friday night, by calling for the division of Jerusalem, something to which he tried and failed to get Yasser Arafat to agree in 2000-01. Defense Minster Ehud Barak, who spoke after Clinton at the Saban dinner, also pledged to continue pursuing peace, stating that the contours of a two-state solution were well-known and going further than Clinton into the details of final status issues that have long rocked the process.We've been there before, haven't we? And the 'negotiations' broke down when Yasser Arafat refused to acknowledge any Jewish connection to the Temple Mount. Funny how things don't change with the 'Palestinians,' isn't it?
On Jerusalem – perhaps the most vexing issue – he described a solution splitting the city.
He said the issues would be discussed last and resolved along the lines of the Clinton parameters, namely “western Jerusalem and the Jewish suburbs for us, the heavily populated Arab neighborhoods for them, and an agreed upon solution in the ‘Holy Basin.’”
The Netanyahu government disavowed Barak on Sunday.
Netanyahu clarified that Barak's speech to the Saban Center for Middle East Policy over the weekend did not reflect the official Israeli stance.But that won't stop Barak from continuing to say it, because Fat Fouad (Binyamin Ben Eliezer) threatened on Saturday night that Labor would leave the government if there were no 'negotiations.'
In his address to the center's seventh annual forum in Washington, the defense minister said that Israel should retain control of all Jewish neighborhoods in the capital and relinquish sovereignty over heavily Arab areas to the Palestionian authority.
What could go wrong?
Labels: Binyamin Netanyahu, Brookings Institution, Ehud Barak, Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, Saban Center
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 2:39 PM
2 Comments:
From a distance, Ehud Barak seems like a sterling asset to Israel. He is Labor, so he can interface with the U.S. leftists, which is no easy task. And didn't he work over the years on some of the fighter jet set ups and some other high tech enterprises? And/but he has shown himself in his past to have a strong backbone on behalf of Israel and enormous personal courage. It takes a range from right to left to come out in the middle. My thought would be that as long as there are teams and not dictators, he brings beneficial factors to bear. He would probably be considered somehow "conservative" in the U.S. now, the way things are going in the Democrat ranks.
Labor's threat like Abu Bluff's is an empty one. The Palestinians aren't cooperating. And Barak's and Olmert's position is a minority view in Israeli politics. It would have zero chance of passing in a referendum and he knows it.
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