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How Dare Those Stubborn Israelis Deny Kerry His Nine-Month Peace Treaty

(Times of Israel) David Horovitz - John Kerry may feel heartfelt concern about the growing campaign to delegitimize Israel and to boycott it. However, one of the least constructive ways to tackle the danger is by issuing an anguished public prediction that this is what awaits Israel if his peace effort fails. It remains inexplicable how Kerry could decide that he was capable of bridging the gulfs between Abbas and Netanyahu, in an era of utter instability in the Middle East. Did he not recall that five years earlier, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert - operating at a time when extremists were not filling every possible territorial vacuum in Israel's immediate neighborhood - was rebuffed by Abbas with a peace offer Netanyahu would never come close to replicating? Kerry was undeterred by two decades of incontrovertible evidence that setting deadlines and trying to turn the screws on the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships to force a deal simply doesn't work. Yet in the last few weeks it has become clear that even a binding framework agreement is beyond reach. The true path to Israeli-Palestinian peace lies in identifying every potential grassroots advocate of reconciliation and gradually achieving change from the bottom up. Good diplomacy means addressing the boycott and delegitimization issue in public - to make plain that it is unconscionable to misrepresent Israel as some kind of illegal entity; to underline that historic Jewish Israel was revived by international mandate; and that it was those who spoke for mandatory Palestine's Arab residents who prevented the simultaneous establishment of a Palestinian state 66 years ago. The writer is the founding editor of The Times of Israel and former editor of The Jerusalem Post (2004-2011).
2014-02-07 00:00:00
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