U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry called Mahmoud Abbas Monday, just by coincidence when the Palestinian Authority chairman was sitting down for a chat with U.S. Middle East Peace Envoy Martin Indyk in Amman.
The PA’s official WAFA news agency reported that Abbas’ negotiator Saeb Erekat and his spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeineh also were at the meeting.
The same day, an official of the Palestinian Authority who spoke on the basis of anonymity, told the Bethlehem-based Ma’an News Agency that Abbas will extend the talks if Israel simply will make a couple of peace-loving gestures. All Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has to do is see his government collapse by prohibiting Jews from building in Judea and Samaria and freeing Arab terrorists, including those with Israeli citizenship.
The conditions were widely expected but the timing of the statement with Kerry’s phone call is impeccable.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has been playing along with this diplomatic farce with both hands tied behind his back and his ankles chained to the diplomatic time bomb that will explode in Israel’s face – not because the talks will fail but because they started in the first place.
The script was written with the recent visits of Netanyahu and Abbas at the White House, where President Obama welcomed them into his Machiavellian den.
Before Netanyahu’s plane touched down, Obama already was on the attack, using as his mouthpiece Jeffrey Goldberg, a journalist he can count on to toe the party line.
If Netanyahu “does not believe that a peace deal with the Palestinians is the right thing to do for Israel, then he needs to articulate an alternative approach,” the president said. “It’s hard to come up with one that’s plausible….
“Do you resign yourself to what amounts to a permanent occupation of the West Bank? Is that the character of Israel as a state for a long period of time? Do you perpetuate, over the course of a decade or two decades, more and more restrictive policies in terms of Palestinian movement? Do you place restrictions on Arab-Israelis in ways that run counter to Israel’s traditions?”
We’ll leave it to the reader to figure out President Obama’s understanding of “Israel’s traditions.” Maybe he has a secret Zionist past when he went to school in Indonesia.
Other comments from the U.S. president who has an “unbreakable” bond with Israel,” included, “We have seen more aggressive settlement construction over the last couple years than we’ve seen in a very long time.” True. All it takes is a building freeze to fix that problem.”
Obama and Netanyahu then held their usual photo-op conversation before their talks and a high-profile conclusion.
But when Abbas visited, there was a short prelude and then, “Lights out. No sound. No action.”
Zilch.
Obama was totally non-committal, with no demands from Abbas, after having previously repeating time after time the lie that Abbas has stopped incitement and is against terror, simply because he says so. His war against terror consists of the IDF arresting and killing terrorists under Ramallah’s nose.
All the president had to say to the press was, “It’s very hard; it’s very challenging. We’re gonna have to take some tough political decisions and risks if we’re able to move it forward.”
Who is “we,” Kemosabe?
We is Israel.
Obama made no comment on Abbas’ recognizing as a Jewish state. He made no comment on Abbas’ silence on dropping the demand to import a few million Arabs into Israel to guarantee the end of a Jewish state of Israel, and Obama did not say they he told Abbas that if a deal is reached, it is final. No ifs, ands or buts. No “it’s a deal if…”