Two former heads of Israel’s National Security Council (NSC) spoke out Thursday at the ongoing failure of peace negotiations to bring about any sense of compromise on the part of the Palestinians.
Speaking at Bar Ilan University’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, former National Security Adviser Uzi Arad noted that since the Oslo accords were signed in 1993, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process has been a game of stages and phases and has never managed to focus on final-status talks in order to reach an actual end to the conflict – something Israel has always wanted and the Palestinians have always avoided. Throughout the years, Arad added, “you simply saw the building of a future [Palestinian] case before the current case was even closed.”
Arad said the Palestinians play with the terms “end game” and “win-win” as a tactic. “
These are terms that are hidden under flowery words that in fact leave issues open. Firstly, ‘end game’ is not a game – it is very serious business. Secondly, what they are saying is ‘the situation that will be created in the end,’ but they don’t give any concrete indications to what this will be. But they do turn it so that they demand that we will clarify to them in advance what the end game will be, and only then will they be prepared to come to the talks… the Palestinians speak in terms of ‘final status’ and ‘end game,’ but they do not intend to let this conflict end… From what we see, what they are doing is working on a partial arrangement. That is to say they are liable to agree to part of what we want, but they want concessions from us as if they have given us everything that we want.
Also speaking at BESA on Thursday, Maj.-Gen. (res.) Yaakov Amidror, who like Arad also recently headed Israel’s National Security Council, said that while Israel made huge changes in its policy towards the Palestinians since Oslo, “the Palestinians in the best case have not moved one millimeter.”
Amidror pointed out that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was a leader of the Israeli Left and was willing to sign the Oslo Accords and shake the hand of PLO leader Yasser Arafat, but nonetheless opposed a Palestinian state – the Oslo Accords only called for Palestinian autonomy – and the release of Palestinian terrorists with blood on their hands. Twenty years later, Israel’s supposedly hawkish government has moved to the left of Rabin’s views with Netanyahu endorsing an independent Palestinian state and his government releasing convicted terrorists responsible for the murder of dozens of Israelis.
The reality of Palestinian intransigence is sinking in to the political level, with a deputy minister in the office of the prime minister, Ofir Akunis, echoing Netanyahu in rejecting the proposal that Israel release even more convicts as a condition for the extension of negotiations for another six months.
“This situation in which Israel each time has to carry out a goodwill gesture to the other side just in order to talk is intolerable,” Akunis said in an Israel Radio interview. “I say on behalf of the great majority of my (Likud) party, not just the caucus members – we want the existence of negotiations with our neighbors. We have no problem with that. We cannot accept the situation where our neighbors are coercing us with conditions just for the existence of the negotiations.”
For an in-depth look at the cultural roots of Palestinian rejectionism, see Deborah Danan’s essay, “If Peace Never Comes, This Will Be the Reason,” in the June 2013 issue of The Tower Magazine.
[Photo: Harald Dettenborn / Wiki Commons]