Israel needs its own Logan act

[humus_sapiens]

After at least two flops of Oslo and Geneva, which started as a secret guerilla negotiations behind the democratically elected govt 's back, Israel desperately needs its own Logan act.
-hs


Geneva sellout (By Charles Krauthammer)
http://www.jewishworldreview.com |

On Monday, a peace agreement will be signed by Israelis and Palestinians. This "Geneva accord" has gotten much attention. And the signing itself will be greeted with much hoopla. Journalists are being flown in from around the world by the Swiss government. Jimmy Carter will be heading a list of foreign dignitaries. The U.S. Embassy in Bern will be sending an observer.

This is all rather peculiar: The agreement is being signed not by Israeli and Palestinian officials, but by two people with no power.

On the Palestinian side, the negotiator is former information minister Yasser Abed Rabbo, who at least is said to have Yasser Arafat's ear. The Israeli side, however, is led by Yossi Beilin, a man whose political standing in his own country is so low that he failed to make it into Parliament. After helping bring his Labor Party to ruin, Beilin abandoned it for the far-left Meretz Party, which then did so badly in the last election that Beilin is now a private citizen.

There is a reason why he is one of Israel's most reviled and discredited politicians. He was the principal ideologue and architect behind the "peace" foisted on Israel in 1993. Those Oslo agreements have brought a decade of the worst terror in all Israeli history.

Now he is at it again. And Secretary of State Colin Powell has written a letter to Beilin and Rabbo expressing appreciation for their effort, and is now planning to meet with them.

This is scandalous. Israel is a democracy, and this agreement was negotiated in defiance of the democratically (and overwhelmingly) elected government of Israel. If a private U.S. citizen negotiated a treaty on his own, he could go to jail under the Logan Act. If an Israeli does it, he gets a pat on the back from the secretary of state.

Moreover, this "peace" is entirely hallucinatory. It is written as if Oslo never happened. The Palestinian side repeats solemn pledges to recognize Israel, renounce terror, end anti-Israel incitement, etc.  all promised in Oslo. These promises are today such a dead letter that the Palestinian side is openly bargaining these chits again, as if the Israelis have forgotten that in return for these pledges 10 years ago, Israel recognized the PLO, brought it out of Tunisian exile, established a Palestinian Authority, permitted it an army with 50,000 guns and invited the world to donate billions to this new Authority.

Arafat pocketed every Israeli concession, turned his territory into an armed camp and then launched a vicious terror war that has lasted more than three years and killed more than 1,000 Israelis. It is Lucy and the football all over again, and the same chorus of delusionals who so applauded Oslo  Jimmy Carter, Sandy Berger, Tom Friedman  is applauding again. This time, however, the Israeli surrender is so breathtaking it makes Oslo look rational.

A Palestinian state, of course. Evacuating every Jewish settlement in new Palestine, of course. Redividing Jerusalem, of course. But that is not enough. Beilin gives up the ultimate symbol of the Jewish connection and claim to the land, the center of the Jewish state for 1,000 years before the Roman destruction, the subject of Jewish longing in poetry and prayer for the 2,000 years since  the Temple Mount. And Beilin doesn't just give it up to, say, some neutral international authority. He gives it to sovereign Palestine. Jews will visit at Arab sufferance.

Not satisfied with having given up Israel's soul, Beilin gives up the body too. He not only returns Israel to its 1967 borders, arbitrary and indefensible, but he does so without any serious security safeguards.

Palestine promises to acquire and buy no more weapons than specified in some treaty annex. This is a joke. Oslo had similarly detailed limitations on Palestinian weaponry, and nobody even pretended to enforce them. Last year, a massive illegal boatload came in from Iran on the Karine A. What did the world do about it? Nothing.

Today, however, Israel still has control over Palestine's borders. Under Beilin, this ends. Palestine will be free to acquire as much lethal weaponry as it wants.

And on the critical question that even the most dovish Israelis insist on  that the Palestinians not have the right to flood Israel with Arab refugees  the agreement is utterly ambiguous. Third parties (including among others the irredeemably hostile Syria and its puppet Lebanon) are to suggest exactly how many Palestinians are to return to Israel, and the basis for the number Israel will be required to accept will be the mathematical average!

This is not a peace treaty, this is a suicide note  by a private citizen on behalf of a country that has utterly rejected him politically. That it should get any encouragement from the United States or from its secretary of state is a disgrace.

[wellofvow]

I do so appreciate Charles Krauthammer. He calls them as he sees them.

The following was in the Friday Jerusalem Post. As if there weren't enough agreements, accords, initiatives, and maps, there is now yet another being brewed! Well, it's marginally more sane than Geneva, with the countries involved taking responsibility for solutions, and I, as an Israeli, feel a bit more secure with NOT having the UN and the EU set up as my "guardians". But as Krauthammer implies, is this really the point? The hardliners at the PA can go on signing agreements, accords and maps until Doomsday, but if they don't honor their commitments, what has been accomplished, except for Israel losing more?

Nov. 28, 2003
Pentagon funds Track 2 peace plan
By JANINE ZACHARIA
WASHINGTON


A US academic center, which receives $1.5 million in Pentagon funding annually to encourage Middle East dialogue, recently assembled a group of Israelis and Palestinians, and quietly drafted a plan for resurrecting the Bush administration's road map, The Jerusalem Post has learned.

Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat's financier, Muhammad Rashid, was among the group.
The plan – the latest in a series of grassroots initiatives – emerged from a two-day conference November 7-8 at Jordan's Dead Sea Marriott. It was organized by UCLA's Ronald W. Burkle Center for International Relations, which designs projects to maintain dialogue between parties when official negotiations break down.

The Bush administration has sharply criticized PA financial irregularities. PA legislators have claimed that Rashid, who now lives in Cairo, is holding at least $200 million for Arafat in a secret bank account. PA Finance Minister Salaam Fayad is reportedly looking into Rashid's management of PA funds.

Rashid and Abed Alloun, former chief of staff to ex-Gaza Strip Preventive security service chief Muhammad Dahlan, represented the PA at the conference, according to a list of participants attached to the plan, which was circulated within the Bush administration.

The Israeli participants included Labor MK Ephraim Sneh, former Foreign Ministry and Mossad official David Kimche, and Haaretz defense analyst Ze'ev Schiff.

Prof. Steven Spiegel, of the Burkle Center, who is also a consultant to the left-leaning Israel Policy Forum, organized the effort. Seymour Reich, an IPF board member, said the group was not associated with the effort.

Spiegel did not respond to calls and e-mails seeking comment. Two people close to him said funding for the conference and the paper it produced was not drawn from the annual US allocation, but from another source.

The Pentagon-backed National Defense University's Near East-South Asia Center for Strategic Studies is overseeing the contract with the Burkle Center. Its Track Two Mideast Program has been funded by the US since the mid-1990s.

Rep. Howard Berman (D-California) said he has routinely ensured funding for the initiative, which appears as a line-item in the Defense Department budget.

"When the multilateral [negotiations] collapsed in the Oslo years, Steve Spiegel came up with the idea of trying to put together people from Israel, the Arab countries, and the United States on an informal basis because of the political issues and the absence of diplomatic relations," Berman said.

Sneh is due here Tuesday to meet with senior US officials, sources familiar with his itinerary said. It was not immediately clear if Sneh was coming to help promote the plan. A US official said Spiegel had tried earlier this month to arrange meetings for the group, including Sneh and Rashid. The trip never materialized.

An executive summary of the plan reads, "This document was prepared by a group of Israelis and Palestinians who are committed to focusing on the immediate and present ways of restoring the cease-fire and resurrecting the road map. In this purpose, it differs markedly from other recent private Israeli-Palestinian efforts that focused on a permanent settlement."

The primary recommendations include:

An indefinite cease-fire between the PA and Israel, which would be monitored by a US-Israel-Palestinian trilateral committee. This differs from previous short-lived cease-fires, which were between the PA and terrorist groups and did not involve Israel.

Future construction of the security fence should be "basically along the Green Line."

A Middle East association on terrorism, consisting of the US, Egypt, Jordan, Israel, the PA, and the Iraqi Governing Council, should be established, with a headquarters in Cairo.

As a corridor between phase I and phase II of the road map, a pilot program should be implemented in the Gaza Strip, which would be based upon the evacuation of Israeli communities following the achievement of a period of stabilization and full cessation of terrorist attacks.

A three-stage economic road map is presented to help improve the economic situation in the PA.
As part of the cease-fire phase, the PA would "take practical steps" to prevent Hamas, Islamic Jihad, al-Aksa Martyrs Brigades, and other groups from carrying out attacks, dismantle illegal militias, close weapons workshops, and curb weapons smuggling.

Israel would be encouraged to release more Palestinian prisoners, lift roadblocks, increase the number of Palestinian work permits to 50,000, and dismantle illegal outposts.

Israel should accelerate the transfer of collected duties to the PA, and the international community should devise an emergency fund of about $1 billion for the Palestinians.

The plan calls on Egypt and Jordan to immediately return their ambassadors to Israel, and on Morocco, Tunisia, and Qatar to initiate the resumption of diplomatic ties, which halted with the outbreak of violence in September 2000.

The Gaza pilot project is included in an addendum called the "Road Map Reinforcement Package." It is "premised on nine months of the cessation of hostilities and terror in and from Gaza. Based on the termination of violence, the Israeli government will evacuate the Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip and the Israeli troops which protect them."

It includes a package of security, economic, and other measures designed to "energize the road map and give it concrete shape" and to be implemented in three phases over 12 months.

The drafters of the plan write that this one would be more likely to succeed than previous initiatives, because it is "underpinned by a regional association to address the problems of terror," Israel would be included in the cease-fire, and it involves a trilateral monitoring committee.

The plans is only now starting to circulate within the administration, and it is not yet clear if officials will adopt its recommendations. Secretary of State Colin Powell has praised other so-called Track Two initiatives, including the Geneva Accord to be signed on Monday. He is likely to meet with its drafters, Yossi Beilin and Yasser Abed Rabbo, next week.

Both he and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz have also spoken warmly of another grassroots peace initiative led by former Shin Bet chief Ami Ayalon and Palestinian academic Sari Nusseibeh. But administration officials have continued to insist that the road map is the only peace plan it is endorsing at this time.