Lieberman further expressed his disappointment with the Palestinian leadership: “You can’t have it both ways. You can’t accept our help on one hand and ask the ICC to charge us with crimes against humanity on the other.

“(Such actions) go against all of the treaties we have signed, in letter and in spirit, and there is no way we will agree to it. We are not looking for confrontations. We support negotiations and we are trying to come up with a solution for coexistence, but we are done groveling.”

Say what you want about the man, but he certainly knows how to speak his mind. That reminds me of someone else who has a tendency to shoot from the hip….

The next few years of Israeli negotiations are going to be very interesting.

Probably they are better than at any time since the early 1980s. With the end of the Palestinian intifada in 2003, Israelis withdrawal from and the Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip, some European experience with radical Islamist terror, and the growing threat from Iran’s nuclear drive, the situation has shifted. Today, the governments of the four main European countries–France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom–are all quite friendly toward Israel, the first three especially so.

Especially noteworthy is the fact that the readiness to isolate Hamas politically has not eroded, helped no doubt by Hamas’s own explicit intransigence. Nor has there been a political rapprochement with Hizballah or Syria. At the same time, European states have participated in raising higher levels of sanctions against Iran and expressed strong opposition to Tehran’s nuclear project. Criticism of Israel has declined while pressure is almost non-existent.

In France, the antagonistic regime of President Jacques Chirac has been replaced by the warmth of President Nicholas Sarkozy. With Germany’s Angela Merkel and given the results of the Italian elections, in which Silvio Berlusconi returned to power, the same is true. The transition from Prime Minister Tony Blair to Gordon Brown in Britain has maintained a good relationship.

Similarly, David Hazony notes:

But leaving all that aside, one wonders whether the damage to Israel’s relations with Europe is real at all. Over the last decade, European governments have largely shifted towards far greater support for Israel. The willingness of countries like Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Germany to boycott Durban II, alongside the most pro-Israel government France has had since the early 1960s, and the overtly friendly government in the Czech Republic, reflects a Europe that is the most heavily supportive of Israel in a very long time. Part of this may have something to do with Israel’s pulling out of Gaza in 2005, which made it politically easier for European leaders to soften their stances. But there are alternate explanations as well: the combination of 8 years of unflinching American solidarity with Israel, an increasing European awareness that its true enemies are the same Islamic extremists that Israel is fighting, and the actual rise of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the prospect of a nuclear Iran — all these have made a great many Europeans understand that pressuring Israel may hurt Europeans in the long run more than alienating the sources of their oil. If Europe once managed to present a united front in support of Israel’s concessions to the Palestinians, today Europe seems utterly divided.

And that’s despite FM Avigdor Lieberman!

However, Daniel Pipes writes that on a grassroots level, Israel’s generally more popular in the East than in the West.

I wonder if the change in Europe is somehow also the result of one of the Bush administration’s efforts. In an article called the Frequent Abstainers Club, Jerusalem Post columnist Evelyn Gordon explained this approach. Since the article is no longer extant, I quote it here.

Bush achieved this shift by setting a clear, consistent standard for what constitutes bias: Condemnations of Israel are biased unless the resolution also condemns anti-Israel terror.

And, more importantly, vague condemnations of “all violence against civilians” do not qualify. The resolution must explicitly condemn Palestinian perpetrators such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Aksa Martyrs Brigades.

That is such a simple and reasonable demand that some countries have found it impossible to ignore. Yet the Palestinians, and hence the Arab countries that sponsor Security Council resolutions on their behalf, have never once been willing to agree.

The result is that a handful of nations that once voted consistently against Israel – England, Germany, Norway, Romania, Bulgaria and Cameroon – turned into frequent abstainers.

John Danforth, Washington’s current ambassador to the UN, provided an eloquent example of how the new system works during last week’s debate on the latest anti-Israel resolution, which would have condemned Israel’s current military operation in Gaza and demanded that it cease immediately.

Danforth did not say that the US was unwilling in principle to condemn the operation, which began after Hamas killed two Israeli children in Sderot with a Kassam rocket launched from Gaza on September 29. That would have been unacceptable to every other Security Council member, and therefore counterproductive. Instead he explained in detail why the resolution was unbalanced as it stood and what would have to be added to make it acceptable to the US.

The resolution, he said in addresses to the council on Monday and Tuesday, “tends to put the blame on Israel and absolves terrorists in the Middle East – people who shoot rockets into civilian areas, people who are responsible for killing children, Hamas. Nothing was said in this resolution about that problem.”

Specifically, he said, “it does not mention even one of the 450 Kassam rocket attacks launched against Israel over the past two years It does not mention the two Israeli children who were outside playing last week when a rocket suddenly crashed into their young bodies.

At the time Gordon noticed that more and more Western countries were following the lead of the United States. Once the United States with its veto made the resolutions inoperative on a consistent basis, Western diplomats were more inclined to go along with the American veto. If the Bush administration’s principled insistence on even-handedness may have had a long term effect of changing European minds. Too often it’s forgotten that diplomacy is a long term, not a short term effort.

In a related issue, the Czech Republic expelled David Duke and its outgoing Prime Minister declared that the EU underestimates the Iranian threat.

The question of Iran was a subject on which Topolanek and his Israeli interlocutors, Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, found they had a common language.

“The rhetoric of the Israeli officials is understandable” on the issue of Iran, Topolanek said, making reference to the speeches of Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres during Holocaust Memorial Day last week.

“I believe that at this very moment, there is no imminent threat of a war between Israel and Iran,” the Czech continued. “But the fact that Iran is a threat whose danger can be magnified if the country will have a nuclear weapon – that is something the entire world knows about. The fact that the EU is somewhat underestimating this threat is also true. Nevertheless all of us are looking at this twin track approach toward Iran. I think that there is still time for hard power against Iran, but only after all soft- power means have been already used. At this moment I see an Israeli attack against Iran as very improbable.”

(On other issues the Czech Prime Minister doesn’t necessarily agree with Israel but he doesn’t seem confrontational about those disagreements.)

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Palestinian officials have long rejected calls to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

Now George Mitchell and his boss, President Obama, may think that putting pressure on Israel will necessarily bring peace and the two state solution in his first term, but they have to remember that it takes two, to make peace. And if one party denies the premise of the other’s existence, peace won’t be viable.

The Washington Post runs an AP article magnifying the differences between the Obama and Netanyahu governments.

Again there’s a throwaway line of some significance here:

Former senator George J. Mitchell emphasized that the U.S. administration is aiming for creation of a Palestinian state. But the Israelis avoided mention of Palestinian statehood, and the new foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, said past Israeli concessions had led to violence, not peace.

Yes Lieberman said that. But that seems like a rather non-controversial observation. Terror against Israel after Oslo. Hezbollah was strengthened by Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon and Hamas has been strengthened by Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza. All of these are Israeli actions that should have helped the cause of peace, but had the opposite effect.

In another area the AP is less than honest than (and less honest than Kershner).

Netanyahu also demanded that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state, a step they have refused to take, the officials said.

Notice how the Palestinian refusal to accept a Jewish state is qualified as a statement attributed to “officials,” when, as Kershner reported that Palestinian officials have refused to acknowledge Israel as a Jewish state. And it’s not a problem with just Hamas, but with the purported “moderates” too.

(This is a point made by Martin Peretz, no fan of Lieberman’s in contrast to Saeb Erakat:

Let me recount two historical events, even if I am revealing a secret. On July 23, 200, in his meeting with President Arafat in Camp David, President Clinton said: “You will be the first president of a Palestinian state, within the 1967 borders – give or take, considering the land swap – and East Jerusalem will be the capital of the Palestinian state, but we want you, as a religious man, to acknowledge that the Temple of Solomon is located underneath the Haram Al-Sharif.” Yasser Arafat said to Clinton defiantly: “I will not be a traitor. Someone will come to liberate it after 10, 50, or 100 years. Jerusalem will be nothing but the capital of the Palestinian state, and there is nothing underneath or above the Haram Al-Sharif except for Allah.” That is why Yasser Arafat was besieged, and that is why he was killed unjustly.

In November 2008… Let me finish… Olmert, who talked today about his proposal to Abu Mazen, offered the 1967 borders, but said: “We will take 6.5% of the West Bank, and give in return 5.8% from the 1948 lands, and the 0.7% will constitute the safe passage, and East Jerusalem will be the capital, but there is a problem with the Haram and with what they called the Holy Basin.” Abu Mazen too answered with defiance, saying: “I am not in a marketplace or a bazaar. I came to demarcate the borders of Palestine – the June 4, 1967 borders – without detracting a single inch, and without detracting a single stone from Jerusalem, or from the holy Christian and Muslim places. This is why the Palestinian negotiators did not sign…

Just remember, here is a leading Palesitnian “moderate” telling Al-Jazeera, that any compromise over Jerusalem is a non-starter. Not only that, but it shows that denying the historical Jewish ties to Jerusalem, is a basic tenet of Palestinian nationalism. Elder of Ziyon has more on Erakat’s “moderation.”)

According a report in Yedioth Ahronoth (but not available in the same detail in the English), Chief of Staff Rahm Emanual has made it clear that President intends for there to be two states at the end of his first term. Stephen Walt finds this report encouraging. (The closest English article on the topic, appears to be this.)

American pressure on Israel won’t bring peace to the Middle East. It may force Israeli withdrawals or lead to strained relations between Israel and the United States. As long as American involvement in the peace process fails to change the Palestinian perspective, it will fail to bring peace.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.