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Source: http://www.jewishjournal.com/david_suissa/article/why_israel_palestinian_peace_talks_will_fail
No One Wants to Compromise with a Thief
(Los Angeles Jewish Journal) David Suissa - No one wants to negotiate - let alone compromise - with a thief. As long as you enter negotiations with the mark of "thief" on your forehead, good luck trying to get the other side to compromise. A crucial truth of the Middle East is that honor trumps all. If you don't defend your honor, you're worthy of contempt, not respect. For several decades now, the Palestinians have successfully sold the world and themselves on the narrative that Israel stole their land. A petition signed by 1,000 jurists from around the world was delivered to EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton asserting that the EU is wrong in holding that Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria are illegal, and that the term "1967 lines" does not exist in international law. Among the signatories are former Justice Minister Yaakov Ne'eman, former UN Ambassador Meir Rosenne, Britain's Baroness Ruth Deech, and law professors Eliav Shochetman and Talia Einhorn, as well as legal scholars from more than 20 countries around the world. If you have a legal right to the land, it makes your concessions worth something. The concessions of a thief are worthless. Israel's former ambassador to Canada and legal adviser to the Foreign Ministry, Alan Baker, explained: "It is true that most of the world thinks so [that the settlements are illegal], but that does not make it true legally. Legally, the clause in the Geneva Convention that they use to say that settlements are illegal was not intended to refer to cases like our settlements, but to prevent the forced transfer of populations by the Nazis. This is not relevant to the Israeli settlements." A three-person committee headed by former Supreme Court Judge Edmond Levy pronounced last year that Judea and Samaria were not occupied territory. The Levy committee showed there's plenty of evidence supporting Israel's legal right to settle the disputed land - including binding international agreements that predate the UN and were never abrogated.