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Blaming the Victim
(Daily Mail-UK) Melanie Phillips - Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is routinely scapegoated for causing the breakdown of the so-called peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. This charge is based on the widespread fallacy that the peace process has stalled because Israel keeps building more Jewish "settlements" on "Palestinian land." The actual reason for the collapse of the peace process is that Mahmoud Abbas repeatedly maintains that he will never accept that Israel is entitled to be a Jewish state, hails Palestinian terrorists as heroes for murdering Israelis and does nothing to end the incitement to murder Jews disseminated in schools, mosques and media under his control. The Palestinians not only failed to deliver what was expected of them under the Roadmap, but now, with their UN gambit, have unilaterally reneged on their previous treaty obligations. Yet Abbas is given a free pass. The "settlements" take up no more than one or two percent of West Bank territory. Even when Netanyahu froze such new building for ten months as a sign of good will, Abbas still refused to negotiate. Under international law, Jews are entitled to settle anywhere in the West Bank. There is no such thing as "Palestinian land" and never was. The West Bank and Gaza never belonged to any sovereign ruler after the British withdrew from Mandatory Palestine; before that, it was part of the Ottoman empire. Israel's "borders" are in fact merely the cease-fire lines from its victory in 1948 against the Arab armies that tried unsuccessfully to exterminate it at birth.