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Everyone Does Not Know What Everyone Supposedly Knows

(Commentary) Rick Richman - For more than a decade, the guiding principle of the peace process has been that "everyone knows" what peace will look like: a Palestinian state on roughly the 1967 lines, with land swaps for the major Israeli settlement blocs, a shared Jerusalem, international compensation for the Palestinian refugees, and a "right of return" to the new Palestinian state rather than Israel. Yet a new poll conducted jointly by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research and the Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace shows that the Palestinian public opposes such a solution by a lopsided majority. Writing Wednesday in Yediot Ahronot, Sever Plocker asserts that while most Israelis are prepared to support a Palestinian state, they have in mind a state "not much different from the Palestinian Authority that exists today." "Ask now in a poll how many Israelis are ready for the evacuation of 150-200,000 settlers from Judea and Samaria, an IDF withdrawal from bases in the Jordan Valley, the deployment of Palestinian border police between Kalkilya and Kfar Saba, a new border in Jerusalem, and turning the territories into a foreign country that will absorb hundreds of thousands of militant refugees from the camps in Lebanon - and see how the numbers of those who support a 'two-state solution' drop to near zero." But all this is hypothetical. The Palestinians rejected the Clinton Parameters in 2000 and effectively rejected them again in 2008 in the Annapolis Process. The new poll makes it clear they would reject them a third time, despite what "everyone knows."
2010-12-30 11:14:11
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