Israel: Palestinians leave little hope for peace

ISRAEL TODAY MAGAZINE

For Israelis, the unilateral motion by the Palestinian Authority to gain admittance to the UN as a sovereign nation epitomized the Palestinian approach to the peace process over the entirety of the past 15 years.

In short, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put it in numerous interviews while visiting the US this week, "the Palestinians want a state, but don't want to give us peace."

On top of seeking to achieve their political goals in the absence of an agreement with Israel, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas' speech to the UN was, in most Israelis' eyes, an act of incitement.

Abbas' speech, during which he all but labeled Israel as illegitimate, "distorted the historical record and showed open hatred and hostility for the Jewish state," Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin told Japanese Ambassador Haruhisa Takeuchi on Monday.

Prior to his speech, Abbas' delegation handed out maps of "Palestine" to UN members. The maps erased Israel completely and replaced the entire Jewish state with a Palestinian one.

Rivlin concluded that Abbas' actions "leave little hope [for peace]."

Nevertheless, Netanyahu and Western leaders continue to urge Abbas to return to the negotiating table.

At the weekend, the Middle East Quartet - the US, EU, Russia and the UN - submitted a proposal for the immediate resumption of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

The proposal calls on both sides to set aside their differences and return to the negotiating table without preconditions. The Quartet plan envisions a rapid series of meetings, including a summit in Moscow, concluding with a final status peace deal to be signed no later than December 2012.

Israeli officials responded favorably to the proposal, while the Palestinians rejected it outright.

Palestinian Authority Foreign Minister Riad Malki called the Quartet proposal "incomplete" because it failed to incorporate the Palestinians' preconditions - that Israel immediately halt all Jewish building in Judea and Samaria and agree to the pre-1967 armistice lines as the future border even before negotiations have begun.

The Palestinian side's intransigence was clear for all to see.

US Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro told Army Radio on Tuesday that the Palestinian insistence on preconditions is not consistent with the terms of the peace process or American policy.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman said she spoke to Abbas by telephone "insisting" that he reopen peace talks with Israel based on the Quartet's proposal.

Israeli President and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shimon Peres on Monday urged Abbas to "not waste time."

Netanyahu expressed in an interview with NBC's Meet the Press his concern that Abbas and the Palestinians are trying to "detour negotiations" in such a way as to make a genuine peace impossible to achieve.

"They're trying to get a state to continue the conflict with Israel rather than to end it," stated Netanyahu.

The UN Security Council is expected to vote on the Palestinian motion for statehood in the coming weeks, but there are rumors it may purposefully delay the issue. If it does come to a vote, the US has vowed to veto the motion.

Jew arrested for praying on Temple Mount

ISRAEL TODAY MAGAZINE

A 76-year-old Jewish man was arrested and questioned for the crime of reciting a brief blessing over a bottle of water while touring Jerusalem's Temple Mount on Sunday.

Israel National News reports that Yosef Hacohen was part of a group of religious Jews visiting the most holy site in Judaism when he began to feel ill. Being religious, he wanted to say a quiet blessing before drinking his water in hopes that both the prayer and the refreshment would help him feel better.

The Muslim watchmen who were trailing the group were having none of it, and immediately complained to nearby Israeli police officers that a Jew had dared to pray atop the Temple Mount, which is today occupied by two mosques.

The officers arrested the elderly Hacohen and another group member who had helped him recite the blessing and took them both in for questioning.

The group leader, Rabbi Menachem Shouraki, said other Muslim guards had been taunting the Jewish visitors prior to Hacohen's arrest. He noted that the Muslims seemed more agitated and hostile than usual, and attributed it to this week's Palestinian statehood bid at the UN. Shouraki believe's Hacohen's arrest was the result of the Israeli authorities trying to appease the Muslims in order to avoid an outbreak of violence.

Jerusalem's Temple Mount remains one of the only places on earth where a Jew is legally forbidden to pray, simply because he is a Jew (Christians are also forbidden to pray there). What makes that fact all the more despicable is that the Temple Mount is Judaism's holiest site.

HAMAS says NO to Palestinian State - Would rather keep fighting

IMRA

Hamas concerned Palestinian state will not attack Israel

Abbas to soon launch ‘in-depth’ talks with Hamas

25-09-2011,09:37
http://www.qassam.ps/news-4944-Abbas_to_soon_launch_in_depth_talks_with_Hamas.html

Al Qassam website - De facto Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas said he
would launch “in-depth talks” with Palestinian resistance group Hamas on
issues pertaining to the government and “Palestinian horizons”.

This came in remarks by Abbas during his return trip from the UN General
Assembly after applying for full membership in the United Nations for the
Palestinians.

“We will hold in-depth talks with Hamas in the coming period not only to
address reconciliation but the in-depth talks will be around the general
horizons of the Palestinians’ action,” he said.

Meanwhile, Hamas’s refugees’ affairs department has criticized Abbas’s move
at the UN, saying it bolstered the Palestinians’ recognition of Israel as
never before.

The statement also predicts that Abbas would ask the Palestinians to refrain
from all armed resistance against Israel, because if recognized as a state
by the Palestinians, acts of armed resistance against Israel would be
classified as aggression from one state against another and could draw heavy
response from Israel and possibly result in a renewal of occupation.

The statement says that by conferring legitimacy to Israel and officially
recognizing it as a state with pre-1967 borders the right of the Palestinian
refugees ejected from beyond those borders to return is put at risk.

The statement also criticizes Abbas’s historic speech at the General
Assembly for not attaining guarantees from any country protecting the
fundamental rights of the Palestinians.

SIXTH TRUMPET WATCH! Palestinians prepare to submit UN statehood bid

Yahoo News

Nearly two decades after embarking on historic peace talks with Israel, Palestinians prepared to sidestep that troubled route on Friday to seek U.N. recognition of an independent state — hoping to leverage this dramatic move on the world stage to realize their dream of an independent homeland.

Earlier in the week, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas rebuffed an intense, U.S.-led effort to sway him from the statehood bid, saying he would submit the application to U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon as planned. A top aide, Mohammed Ishtayeh, said Thursday that Abbas asked Ban and the Council's Lebanese president this month to process the application without delay.

"We're going without any hesitation and continuing despite all the pressures," Abbas told members of the Palestinian diaspora at a hotel in New York on Thursday night. "We seek to achieve our right and we want our independent state."

To be sure, Abbas' appeal to the U.N. to recognize Palestinian independence in the West Bank, east Jerusalem and Gaza Strip would not deliver any immediate changes on the ground: Israel would remain an occupying force in those first two territories and continue to severely restrict access to Gaza, ruled by Palestinian Hamas militants.

Beyond that, Security Council action on the membership request could take weeks or months.

The strategy also put the Palestinians in direct confrontation with the U.S., which has threatened to veto their membership bid in the U.N. Security Council, reasoning, like Israel, that statehood can only be achieved through direct negotiations between the parties to the long and bloody conflict.

Also hanging heavy in the air was the threat of renewed violence over frustrated Palestinian aspirations — perhaps not immediate, because Abbas has vowed to prevent unrest, but possibly down the road if negotiations continue to stall.

Yet by seeking approval at a world forum overwhelmingly sympathetic to their quest, Palestinians hope to make it harder for Israel to resist already heavy global pressure to negotiate the borders of a future Palestine based on lines Israel held before capturing the West Bank, east Jerusalem and Gaza in 1967.

In recent weeks, international mediators have been furiously trying to piece together a formula that would let the Palestinians abandon their plan to ask the Security Council for full U.N. membership, and instead make do with the more modest goal of asking a sympathetic General Assembly to elevate their status from permanent observer to nonmember observer state. The other part of that formula would include the resumption of negotiations in short order.

The U.S. and Israel have been pressuring council members to either vote against the plan or abstain when it comes up for a vote. The vote would require the support of nine of the council's 15 members to pass, but even if the Palestinians could line up that backing, a U.S. veto is assured.

The resumption of talks seems an elusive goal, with both sides digging in to positions that have tripped up negotiations for years. Israel insists that negotiations go ahead without any preconditions. But Palestinians say they will not return to the bargaining table without assurances that Israel would halt settlement building and drop its opposition to basing negotiations on the borders it held before capturing the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Gaza in 1967.

Israel has warned that the Palestinian appeal to the U.N. will have a disastrous effect on negotiations, which have been the cornerstone of international Mideast policy for the past two decades. Netanyahu, who is to address the General Assembly later Friday, shortly after Abbas makes his own address, opposes negotiations based on 1967 lines, saying a return to those frontiers would expose Israel's heartland to rocket fire from the West Bank.

He also fears that if that principle becomes the baseline for negotiations, then Palestinians won't settle for anything less, despite previous understandings between the Palesitnians and previous Israeli governments to swap land where settlement blocs stand for Israeli territory.

Talks for all intents and purposes broke down nearly three years ago after Israel went to war in the Gaza Strip and prepared to hold national elections that ultimately propelled Netanyahu to power for a second time. A last round was launched a year ago, with the ambitious aim of producing a framework accord for a peace deal, but broke down just three weeks later after an Israeli settlement construction slowdown expired.

Palestinians say they turned to the U.N. in desperation over 18 failed years of peace talks. But Israelis say the Palestinians are to blame for their own predicament and accuse them of going to the United Nations precisely to avoid talks.

Hatch: Defund UN if it votes for Palestinian state

Washington Examiner

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, introduced the Solidarity with Israel Act today, a bill that would defund the United Nations if that body votes to recognize Palestine as a state.

“This vote undermines Israel’s security, and should the United Nations change Palestine’s current status, this legislation would prevent valuable American resources from funding the United Nations," Hatch said. "Make no mistake, there will be consequences associated with efforts to undermine the security of America’s friends and allies."

The United States will veto any vote by the UN Security Council that recognizes Palestine as a state, but Hatch's bill would pull funding if the General Assembly voted to classify Palestine as an "observer state," which the United States cannot interdict.