The Road Map has been awakened from its moribund state and bandied about a lot lately, particularly in the wire service reports about the upcoming mideast peace conference in Annapolis. For instance, the AP writes:

Israel continues to expand many of the 122 settlements in the West Bank, where 267,500 Israelis lived as of last month, according to government statistics.

Peace Now, an Israeli settlement-watchdog group, issued a report Wednesday saying building is going on in 88 of the settlements, though most of the work is in the areas Israel hopes to retain in a peace deal.

The Palestinians said Monday that they received assurances from Washington that Israel would meet its short-term obligations under the “road map,” a U.S.-backed peace plan being revived in hopes of boosting confidence between the two sides ahead of a peace conference later this month.

The plan’s initial stage called for Israel to freeze West Bank settlement construction and dismantle dozens of settlement outposts scattered across the territory. But the road map foundered after its introduction four years ago, with each side accusing the other of not meeting obligations.

And that is all you get about Palestinian obligations until you get to this paragraph:

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said this week that Israel is willing to meet its road map obligations. He also urged the Palestinians to fulfill their commitment under the plan to crack down on militant groups that stage attacks on Israelis.

The story, mind you, is all about settlements. The headline alone is biased: “Israeli Settlements Burden Peace Push.” Funny how rockets are falling on Sderot nearly every day, and that’s not burdening the “peace push.” Terrorists are trying to kill Israelis every day, but that’s not burderning the “peace push.”

And it’s interesting also how the Road Map is being applied only to Israel, not to the Palestinians. Because the Road Map was absolutely explicit about the Palestinians’ responsibility to end violence, incitement, and terrorism.

Phase I: Ending Terror And Violence, Normalizing Palestinian Life, and Building Palestinian Institutions — Present to May 2003

In Phase I, the Palestinians immediately undertake an unconditional cessation of violence according to the steps outlined below; such action should be accompanied by supportive measures undertaken by Israel. Palestinians and Israelis resume security cooperation based on the Tenet work plan to end violence, terrorism, and incitement through restructured and effective Palestinian security services. Palestinians undertake comprehensive political reform in preparation for statehood, including drafting a Palestinian constitution, and free, fair and open elections upon the basis of those measures. Israel takes all necessary steps to help normalize Palestinian life. Israel withdraws from Palestinian areas occupied from September 28, 2000 and the two sides restore the status quo that existed at that time, as security performance and cooperation progress. Israel also freezes all settlement activity, consistent with the Mitchell report.

At the outset of Phase I:

• Palestinian leadership issues unequivocal statement reiterating Israel’s right to exist in peace and security and calling for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire to end armed activity and all acts of violence against Israelis anywhere. All official Palestinian institutions end incitement against Israel.
• Israeli leadership issues unequivocal statement affirming its commitment to the two-state vision of an independent, viable, sovereign Palestinian state living in peace and security alongside Israel, as expressed by President Bush, and calling for an immediate end to violence against Palestinians everywhere. All official Israeli institutions end incitement against Palestinians.

Note that there is nothing ambiguous about the Road Map. The Palestinians must end violence and incitement. There is no exception clause for “resistance.” Done. Finis. End. The thing is, while you hear constant reproaches towards Israel for not freezing settlement construction, you hear not a word about ending Palestinian violence, terrorism, and incitement. Why is that, exactly? When did the Palestinian obligations cease to be obligations? If Condi Rice is being honest, why is she not demanding a cessation of all Palestinian violence and incitement? Why does she not demand the Palestinians stop teaching their children to hate the Jews? Why is she only demanding that Israel meet the obligations of the Road Map, while insisting only on “confidence-building measures” by the Palestinians?

I have no real answer for that, other than the standard answer: Apparently, the Palestinians have no obligations to do anything but demand a homeland, a “Palestine” that never existed on the land that was the Jewish homeland for thousands of years—except, according to Palestinians, that never happened, either.

You have to wonder why it is that only Israel is held up to any kind of Road Map standard, and only Israel is criticized for violations of a document that was never approved by the Israeli government, and is, quite frankly, about as non-binding as a document can get—because it was perfectly clear that in order for the Road Map to work, both sides had to implement responsibilities simultaneously.

A quick look around Palestinian Media Watch and MEMRI show that the Palestinians have never ceased teaching their children to hate Jews. Incitement has never ended. Nor has terrorism, nor have the rockets.

Why, exactly, is only Israel expected to fulfill her obligations? The only answer I can see is the soft bigotry of lowered expectations. Or perhaps that other reason, the one that makes the world so much more difficult for Jews: The Exception Clause.

Jackson Diehl rings the alarm bells in If this peace process fails.

For the next several days, Israel’s talk radio and op-ed pages converged on a single subject — but it was not Olmert’s groundbreaking speech. Instead, the buzz was all about something that took place at a soccer game in Haifa while Olmert was speaking. Before the game began, an announcer asked for a moment of silence in honor of former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, who led Israel toward peace in the early 1990s before being assassinated on Nov. 4, 1995. Hundreds in the crowd, most of them supporters of the visiting Jerusalem team, responded with boos; some began lustily singing songs in honor of Yigal Amir, the man who murdered him. The message drawn from this episode by Israeli security officials, as well as pundits, was grim: The return Olmert signaled to an aggressive pursuit of a final peace with Palestinians also will mean the comeback of the ugly and potentially violent resistance from Israel’s far right. The soccer game wasn’t the only sign. Posters showing Israeli President Shimon Peres, another peace advocate, wearing an Arab headdress have appeared on walls around Jerusalem this week, an explicit echo of the propaganda that preceded the attack on Rabin 12 years ago.

Treppenwitz neatly disposes of the idea that the booing was, in some way, significant.

When a bunch of unruly Beitar Yerushalayim fans booed during the moment of silence that was observed in memory of Rabin (and many even chanted “Yigal Amir”), MK Yossi Beilin urged Sports and Culture Minister Raleb Majadele to pull all government funding for the club and Peace Now Secretary-General Yariv Oppenheimer immediately demanded that Beitar Jerusalem be penalized for its fans’ conduct. I’m just wondering, do these people really think that the Beitar management has some sort of control over what the fans will say at a game? I could see it if they flashed “Boo” or “Yigal Amir” on the Jumbo-tron and the fans dutifully followed along. But this was a spontaneous occurrence… albeit in incredibly bad taste. My point is that the left seems to have an insatiable urge to inflict collective punishment upon the right for something that was the act of a lone lunatic.

I’d add that though PM Sharon did even more damage to the Right, by evacuating thousands from Gaza, and despite his claims to the contrary, no one attempted to kill him. The Right was furious and felt betrayed, to be sure, but no one lifted a finger against him. For Diehl to argue that Olmert is in some danger due to his expressed willingness to make reckless compromises insults our intelligence.

The problem will be the other legacies from the peace processes of the past. That’s not only potential Jewish violence. There is also the probable terrorism of Palestinian rejectionists, above all a Hamas movement that has been excluded from the upcoming U.S.-sponsored Annapolis conference and bottled up in the Gaza Strip. There is the inability of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s West Bank authority to control its own militia-gangs, and political rivalries in Israel that may prevent Olmert from taking quick steps on settlements. Then there is the incurable proclivity of both Israelis and Palestinians to burden negotiations with maximalist demands and negotiating tricks intended to elide what both sides know to be the available settlement terms.

And now, yes, we’re back to 1996 and Hamas will try to kill the peace process if negotiations are successful. What absolute bunk. Has Diehl been paying attention to Gaza? Has he read the news that thousands of citizens have fled Sderot? Palestinian violence doesn’t happen to derail the peace process, but it takes advantage of the gains in territory and freedom resulting from the peace process. Qassams raining down on Sderot became worse after Israel withdrew.

And the terror of early 1996 was a result of Israel’s withdrawals in late 1995. Hamas was able to organize in areas that had been abandoned by Israel because the Palestinian Authority refused to assert control as it had been obligated by the Oslo Accords. Diehl charges that Israel “burdens” negotiations. Baloney. Israel has real concerns. Israel has changed a lot since the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993.

As Daled Amos pointed out recently, the views of Rabin - whom Diehl cites as an ideal - at the time of his assassination would now be considered right-wing. But there’s been no similar movement on the Palestinian side. None. Yes Arafat is dead, but his ideology lives on even if it’s now expressed by a well groomed man who wears suits.

Diehl claims that Abbas is willing to compromise on the Palesitnian right of return. (This shouldn’t even be an issue as insistence on it, is insistence that Israel ceases to exist.) But as Elder of Ziyon observed, Abbas essentially gives veto power to Hamas. Finally Diehl tells us what’s really at stake.

For Olmert, Abbas and Rice, the motivation for bulling through this familiar pattern of resistance may not be just courage but fear. All three know that if they fail this time, the result will not be the mere continuation of a miserable status quo. More likely, it will be another eruption of bloodshed and the consolidation of Hamas as the preeminent Palestinian power. That means not Abbas but Hamas’s patron, Iran, will become the arbiter of whether Israel is accepted as “a Jewish homeland.”

Interesting that he sees the strengthening of Iran an outcome of a failed peace process. Last year Diehl recommended that Olmert make some bold moves of his own including

Israel cares less about who rules Lebanon. And it has something Assad wants at least as much: the Golan Heights. The Syrian president has been saying for months that he is ready to open talks about a swap of the territory for peace, a deal that his father came within inches of closing 6 1/2 years ago. Until recently Israel had little incentive to make that bargain with Bashar Assad. But the rise of the Iranian threat in the past year has changed the calculus for at least some of Olmert’s advisers. Imagine Ehud Olmert emerging from the White House to announce that Israel is prepared to explore peace with Syria. It might not turn the ugly tide in the Middle East. But it would, at least, get Israel and the United States back in the fight.

So strengthening an Iranian ally doesn’t bother Diehl. As long as it’s Syria and not Hamas. Nor does he consider that Israel’s making a deal with Abbas might have the same effect of strengthening Iran. Even if Israel deals with Abbas, there’s no guarantee that it won’t strengthen Iran. For one thing, it’s pretty clear that Abbas will still deal with Hamas. For another, if Israel cedes more territory now, it will no doubt embolden Hezbollah and Syria to demand more. Diehl, spends the first part of the article implicating the Israeli Right in fighting peace. Actually the Israeli Right was right. It was right about trusting Arafat. It was right that ceding territory to an unrepentant terrorist organization will only embolden it - as we saw with the PA in 1994, Hezbollah in 2000 and Hamas in 2005. So please spare us the lectures and the urgency. Following your prescriptions will only make matters worse. You don’t know how to make peace.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

via memeorandum

Thousands of Palestinians apply for Israeli citizenship

In the months leading up to the upcoming Annapolis peace conference talk of a future division of the city has prompted a staggering increase in nationalization requests by Palestinians seeking to escape life under the Palestinian Authority. Some 250,000 Palestinians currently reside in Jerusalem. Only 12,000 of them have sought to obtain an Israeli citizenship since 1967, an average of about 300 new citizens a year. But over the past four months the Interior Ministry has registered an unprecedented 3,000 applications, primarily residents of the Arab neighborhoods unlikely to remain under Israeli sovereignty according to the political initiative currently on the agenda.

This is, of course, nothing new. The BBC in August 2000 reported:

Israeli media reports today said the number of applications for citizenship had doubled in the past year to more than one-hundred and eighty. An Israeli interior ministry spokeswoman said that twelve-hundred Palestinians from east Jerusalem had been granted citizenship since it was captured by Israel in 1967.

Daniel Pipes showed that the objection Israeli Arabs to living under Palestinian Authority rule is longstanding and affects Arabs from Jerusalem and elsewhere.

Jerusalem. In mid-2000, when it appeared that some Arab-majority parts of Jerusalem would be transferred to Palestinian Authority control, Muslim Jerusalemites expressed less than delight at the prospect. Peering over at Arafat’s PA, they saw power monopolized by domineering and corrupt autocrats, a thug-like police force, and a stagnant economy. Arafat’s bloated, nonsensical claims (”We are the one true democratic oasis in the Arab region”) only exacerbated their apprehensions. ‘Abd ar-Razzaq ‘Abid of Jerusalem’s Silwan neighborhood pointed dubiously to “what’s happening in Ramallah, Hebron, and the Gaza Strip” and asked if the residents there were well off. A doctor applying for Israeli papers explained: The whole world seems to be talking about the future of the Arabs of Jerusalem, but no one has bothered asking us. The international community and the Israeli Left seem to take it for granted that we want to live under Mr. Arafat’s control. We don’t. Most of us despise Mr. Arafat and the cronies around him, and we want to stay in Israel. At least here I can speak my mind freely without being dumped in prison, as well as having a chance to earn an honest day’s wage. In the colorful words of one Jerusalem resident, “The hell of Israel is better than the paradise of Arafat. We know Israeli rule stinks, but sometimes we feel like Palestinian rule would be worse.”

Sounds sort of like Milton, doesn’t it?

Nor was the idea popular elsewhere.

The entrance to Umm al-Fahm, the largest Muslim town in Israel, sports the green flags of the Islamic Movement Party that rules the town, along with a billboard denouncing Israel’s rule over Jerusalem. That said, Hashim ‘Abd ar-Rahman, mayor and local leader of the Islamic Movement, has no time for Sharon’s suggestion: “Despite the discrimination and injustice faced by Arab citizens, the democracy and justice in Israel is better than the democracy and justice in Arab and Islamic countries.” Nor does Ahmed Tibi, an Israeli Arab member of parliament and advisor to Arafat, care for the idea of PA control, which he calls “a dangerous, antidemocratic suggestion.” Just 30 percent of Israel’s Arab population, a May 2001 survey found, agree to the Galilee Triangle being annexed to a future Palestinian state, meaning that a large majority prefers to remain in Israel. By February 2004, according to the Haifa-based Arab Center for Applied Social Research, that number had jumped to 90 percent preferring to remain in Israel. No less startling, 73 percent of Triangle Arabs said they would resort to violence to prevent changes in the border. Their reasons divided fairly evenly between those claiming Israel as their homeland (43 percent) and those cherishing Israel’s higher standard of living (33 percent). So intense was the Arab opposition to ceding the Galilee Triangle to the Palestinian Authority that Sharon quickly gave the idea up.

When the international community pressures Israel to make concessions on Jerusalem and Israeli leadership seems ready to oblige, why doesn’t anyone look at those who those concession are purported to help. They sure don’t seem to look forward to the development.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Hamas has been training with Iranians, and the battle of Gaza is going to be difficult, dangerous, and bloody.

Reserve-duty paratroopers who completed a month of duty in the Gaza Strip last week say that facing militant groups such as Hamas was like taking part in a “mini-war.”

During the patrol company’s operations deep in Palestinian territory, four Hamas militants and one Israel Defense Forces soldier, Sergeant-Major (Res.) Ehud Efrati, were killed. “The people we killed weren’t terrorists, they were soldiers,” an officer in the company told Haaretz.

“In a direct confrontation, the IDF has superiority over them, but in all parameters - training, equipment quality, operational discipline - we are facing an army, not gangs,” he said. “On the professional level, Hamas in the Gaza Strip is nothing like the terrorists we dealt with before. We saw the bodies of their men after the incidents. They had elastic bands on their pant legs. How many reservists do you know in the IDF who are that well kitted out, with elastics on their pants?”

This does not bode well. The Hamas fighters are fighting like an army.

The paratroopers were impressed by their adversaries’ discipline and good equipment. “The fingerprints of Iran and Hezbollah are all over it,” a veteran intelligence officer said. “The Palestinians never looked like this.”

On the bodies of the Hamas fighters the reservists found, in addition to their weapons, night-vision equipment identical to the IDF’s. And it was not from Israel. “It’s available on the Internet, you can order it from eBay and have it sent to an Arab country and then smuggle it to Gaza,” the intelligence officer said.

The good news is that the IDF is still better. But Hamas is improving. A lot.

Hamas, which provides a support “umbrella” for the smaller organizations launching the rockets, dispatches cells to harass the IDF. It also deploys defensive forces at the entrances to settled areas based on its analysis of the IDF’s routes.

The result, say the reservists, is that every penetration into the strip of more than one kilometer faces coordinated resistance from Hamas. “Shooting, sharpshooters, mortar shells. Pass the one-kilometer mark, the war is on. They’re not suckers,” a company officer says.

Something else that you find in this article is the news that doesn’t get highlighted as much: Israelis are still willing to do what has to be done to protect their nation.

The reserve officers accept both the method and their role of being in the advance force. “If these missions were left to the regular soldiers, like before the withdrawal from Lebanon, no one on the home front would understand what’s happening in Gaza. Every reserve soldier who returns home from a month in Gaza says exactly what’s going on there to the civilians around him,” the officer says.

They also know they’ll be called back to Gaza within a few months for a major offensive assault. Their commanders are already readying them with cliches about “two trains heading full force at each other.”

In contrast, perhaps, to what the public has heard, they don’t blame anyone. They were equipped and trained properly and feel ready for their appointed missions. “We didn’t come to whine. The state must see to two things: To compensate properly the few who bear the burden of reserve duty and to [budget] sufficient reserve days for training so the failure of the Second Lebanon War isn’t repeated.”

And it is very important to them to speak about Ehud Efrati, their friend for over 20 years. “At Ehud’s funeral his father, Avishai, said the state must protect the people of Sderot,” an officer in the company says.

“That was true nobility, and it is typical of his family. Ehud was a hero, pure and simple.

Time and again, we read the negative aspects of the IDF. We heard only this week that one out of four Israelis is refusing to enlist in the IDF. But the 75% who do go are more than willing, it seems, to do the job.

And the job is going to be done. Ehud Barak is warning that a major Gaza operation is nearing.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak (Labor) said in a meeting with Labor activists in Tel Aviv on Wednesday that the Israel Defense Forces are approaching a major incursion into the Gaza Strip.

“We are getting closer to a large-scale operation in Gaza and we’re likely to say there for a long time,” he said. He emphasized, however, that before such an operation, all other means to stop Qassam rocket fire should be exhausted.

I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that it will happen after Annapolis. But I think it may happen before the end of the year. It needs to be done, no matter when it occurs—but it’s not going to be easy. And the world, of course, will scream in outrage, although the world is utterly ignoring the near-daily rocket fire toward Israeli schools, homes, and hospitals in Sderot. More on that later.