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Why Europe Can't Bring Peace to the Middle East

(Council on Foreign Relations) Elliott Abrams - A group of former "European Eminent Persons" on the Middle East peace process has written a remarkable letter to Catherine Ashton, the EU's top foreign policy official, stating: "We have watched with increasing disappointment over the past five years the failure of the parties to start any kind of productive discussion." Five years ago, in the spring of 2008, the parties were negotiating, apparently seriously, as part of what was then called "the Annapolis process." That failed when Mahmoud Abbas refused an extremely generous offer from Israeli Prime Minister Olmert. Equally inaccurate is their line about the "failure of the parties," a phrase which refuses to acknowledge that only the Palestinians have refused to negotiate in the last four years, not "the parties." The letter also notes that human rights conditions in the West Bank are deteriorating due to the Israeli occupation. One can make a good argument that they are deteriorating, in Gaza due to Hamas and in the West Bank due to the growing pressure from the PA against journalists. The letter does not appear to consider the possibility that any problem in Palestinian areas might possibly be the fault of Palestinians. The letter's greatest sins are those quite familiar in letters from Europe: the sin of blaming everything on Israel and blaming nothing on the Palestinians, demanding nothing of the Palestinians, and treating the Palestinians like objects rather than people. Nowhere does the letter mention the issue of anti-Semitic broadcasting and hate speech in Palestinian official media, nor the matter of the glorification of terrorism and terrorists by the PA, and the impact such conduct has on prospects for peace. The writer is a Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at CFR.
2013-04-22 00:00:00
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