Prepared for the Conference of Presidents | |
| DAILY ALERT |
Thursday, January 30, 2020 |
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News Resources - North America, Europe, and Asia:
Officials in Arab capitals have been frustrated by Palestinian leaders' reluctance to compromise, which has prevented them from strengthening ties with Israel. The U.S. has wooed officials from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman, Bahrain, and other nations in the region in an effort to transcend the political impasse, and to some extent they are responding. Saudi Arabia and the UAE both urged Palestinian leaders to accept the U.S. plan as a basis for new talks with Israel. "It's the first time, I think since the start of the conflict, that the Arab position has not been a replica of the Palestinian position," said David Makovsky, director of the Project on Arab-Israel Relations at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "That speaks to a wider sense of regional priorities that the Arab countries have." The modified tone in Arab capitals is a reflection of the shifting relationships in the region, where nations officially at war with Israel are strengthening ties with its companies and leading figures. (Wall Street Journal) See also Arabs Prioritize Key Ties with U.S. Against Iran in Reacting to Peace Plan - Stephen Kalin (Reuters) See also Palestinians Feel Betrayed by Arab World following U.S. Peace Plan - Mark MacKinnon (Globe and Mail-Canada) U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday said Palestinians who rejected President Donald Trump's Middle East peace plan were "free to come up with a counter offer" that could win Israeli support. (AFP) News Resources - Israel and the Mideast:
Palestinian protests against the U.S. peace plan began Tuesday in the West Bank and continued Wednesday, but the demonstrators were careful not to let things get out of hand. Attendance was pretty sparse and there were no serious clashes. Demonstrations were expected to continue, but the atmosphere did not point to serious escalation. Palestinian security forces have been accompanying the demonstrators as they approach Israeli checkpoints. It isn't clear to what degree the wider public would be willing to broaden the protest for a lengthy period. (Ha'aretz) See also U.S. Peace Plan Unlikely to Lead to Major Violence in West Bank - Yaakov Lappin Col. (res.) Moshe Elad, one of the founders of security coordination between the IDF and the PA, said he doubted any significant popular violence would occur following the announcement of the U.S. peace plan. "The Palestinians are...also looking at Gaza; they see the conditions there, and they do not want to reach that. The conditions for them are good, and they fear closures and disorder disrupting their lives." The Palestinian leadership in the West Bank had assumed that future talks would resume where past talks left off, based on the idea of establishing a state roughly on the 1967 Green Line. "The Palestinians are not prepared for the new proposal," Elad noted. (Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies-Bar-Ilan University) "Iran will not risk a major war because it would put its survival at risk" and "Hizbullah will not risk a full war" with Israel "unless it is pushed into a corner," ex-CIA director Gen. David Petraeus told the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv on Wednesday. Petraeus explained that a combination of U.S. and Israeli military power had established deterrence with both Iran and Hizbullah, even as they might risk smaller confrontations. He said Israel's use of force against Hizbullah in 2006 deters Hizbullah from a larger fight to this day. (Jerusalem Post) Balloons with a possible explosive charge attached to them were found Thursday in Dimona, over 70 km. from Gaza. (Jerusalem Post) El Al announced Thursday that it was suspending its flights to Beijing until March 25 because of the outbreak of coronavirus. (Globes) See also How Are Jews in China Coping with the Coronavirus? - Rossella Tercatin (Jerusalem Post) On my second day in the IDF, when I met the friends in my room, and I told them about myself, they took me in in a way I won't ever forget. I'm Hadeel, 21 years old, a Christian Israeli who lives in northern Israel. In 10th grade I started to learn more about Israel and that's when I realized how important it is to serve the country that protects me, that protects my family, that gives me all the rights I have. So I felt the obligation to give as much as possible to my country. Every day that I put on my uniform, I feel proud. (Israel Defense Forces) Global Commentary and Think-Tank Analysis:
Nobody will benefit less from a curt dismissal of the U.S. peace plan than the Palestinians themselves, whose leaders are again letting history pass them by. Nearly every time the Arab side said "no," it wound up with less. That was true after it rejected the 1947 UN Partition Plan, which would have created a Palestinian state on a much larger footprint. It was true in 1967, after Jordan refused Israel's entreaties not to attack, which resulted in the end of Jordanian rule in the West Bank. It was true in 2000, when Syria rejected an Israeli offer to return the Golan Heights, which ultimately led to U.S. recognition of Israeli sovereignty of that territory. It was true later the same year, after Yasir Arafat refused Israel's offer of a Palestinian state with a capital in east Jerusalem. The U.S. plan offers Palestinians a sovereign state, mostly contiguous territory, and $50 billion in economic assistance. What it demands is an end to anti-Jewish bigotry in school curriculums, the restoration of legitimate political authority in Gaza, and the dismantling of terrorist militias. The Jewish state has thrived in part because it has always been prepared to make do with less. The Palestinian tragedy has been the direct result of taking the opposite approach: of insisting on the maximum rather than working toward the plausible. (New York Times) Throughout the dense text of the peace plan that President Trump announced on Tuesday is a stark but unstated question to the Palestinians: If you reject this deal, as bad as you think it may be, what are you going to get instead? He is telling the Palestinians that after three decades of rejecting better offers than this one, they're in danger of being abandoned by the Arabs, who will decide to move on and normalize relations with Israel even if the Palestinians say no. Trump's leverage is that many leading Arab states are giving what's close to tacit support to the proposal and its promise of eventual normalization between the Arabs and Israel. (Washington Post) While it was always presumed that a Palestinian state would be forged through talks with the Israelis, the landscape has shifted much in recent years with a divided Palestinian leadership and an Arab world that has largely moved on. With only muted reaction from Arab neighbors and little apparent appetite among Palestinians for a violent response, a peace proposal that might have been considered outlandish a decade ago landed with little serious opposition. The assorted calls for action from Palestinian activists eager to shake up the prevailing inertia sounded like variations on a theme of admitting the failure of the Palestinian Authority to grow into a state. (New York Times) The U.S. peace plan redraws Jerusalem's municipal boundaries in a way that would place 140,000 residents in Arab neighborhoods beyond the security barrier under Palestinian sovereignty, mainly in the areas of Shuafat and Kafr Aqab in the northern part of the city. If the plan will ever get implemented, it will have a major impact on the demography in Jerusalem, with a third of the residents in east Jerusalem coming under PA jurisdiction. (Israel Hayom) The new U.S. Mideast peace plan is an effort to take the comatose peace process in a bold new direction. This is no "land for peace" approach, like the one tested in the 2005 Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, which resulted in the strip becoming a rocket launching pad for Hamas. Instead, Palestinians are being presented with a series of steps establishing a path for sovereignty. Critics said that recognizing united Jerusalem as Israel's capital and recognizing Israel's sovereignty over the Golan Heights would make future peace deals impossible, but what they signaled was that the president was willing to use his leverage to dislodge the stalled process and make those who rejected negotiations pay a real price. These moves were also long overdue recognitions of the reality that Israel would never hand over east Jerusalem or the Golan, so those issues might as well be taken off the table. By refusing to negotiate even using the plan as a baseline subject to change, the Palestinians are saying they really aren't up to the task of reaching a settlement. The writer served as a special assistant in the office of the Secretary of Defense. (USA Today) The worst part of the U.S. peace plan for the Palestinians is in allowing themselves to be cast as the cause of the plan's failure. Instead of engaging in the process of peace, the Palestinians demand "all or nothing." As a consequence, they always end up with nothing. They fan the flames of anger, hoping the Palestinian population will turn to violence to pressure Israel. However, the strategy of violence has been the Palestinians' greatest failure. By refusing to engage, Palestinians are unwittingly helping Israel achieve its goals. Instead, the Palestinian leadership should embrace the process. They should have insisted on being at the plan's unveiling, demonstrating that they are committed to peace. (Eurasia Review) Observations: Don't the Palestinians Regret Not Taking Previous Statehood Offers? - Dr. Shany Mor (Jewish News-UK)
The writer, who previously served on Israel's National Security Council, is a research fellow at the Chaikin Institute for Geostrategy at the University of Haifa. |
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