Netanyahu and Abbas leading their people . . to a dead end

Today's Philadelphia Inquirer (AP) report on Netanyahu's White House visit (below) emphasizes the critical remarks of the White House press secretary Josh Earnest two hours after the actual visit.  Those disapproving remarks addressed Israel's plan to throw up 2,500 new units in East Jerusalem as well as Israel's allowing Jewish settlers to move into Silwan in East Jerusalem.  (Shocker: the State Department also disapproves!  Thank God it has never been up to State to determine U.S. Israel policy!)

Frankly, I am also critical of those policies of the Israeli leadership. 

However, I honestly don't know what to make of the Associated Press's editorial decision to frame Earnest's remarks as the foreground of the story and to cast the actual meeting of and remarks by the two leaders as merely the incidental background.  Maybe it is a journalistically fair and objective reading by the AP that the administration's reproach -- voiced by the spokesman but absent from Obama's actual post-meeting public remarks -- merits treatment as the lead and totally dominant element of the report. 

Or maybe that slant reflects either an interest in trumpeting U.S.-Israel disharmony or a choice to go with it as the most provocative and sensational way to bring attention to the report -- i.e., marketing.

Nevertheless, whatever drove the AP's take, the stark fact of Netanyahu's building plan is bad news for peace prospects.  Which is not news at all to Netanyahu. 

Meanwhile, as reported in the Boteach article below, Abbas spoke at the UN and showed right off the bat that he will not take a back seat to any "negotiating partner" when it comes to running his mouth with inflammatory invective and throwing said partner under the international bus.  No doubt there were many in that UN audience who already saw the Gazans as victims of Israel's genocidal bloodthirst rather than as victims of Hamas's ruthless strategy of using them as human shields for launching sites and command posts. 

One presumes that the members of the audience left the UN venue that day with the same views of the Gaza debacle that they'd arrived with, but maybe some there left a little more depressed about hopes for progress.

Abbas and Netanyahu deserve each other, but Israelis and Palestinians deserve better (some will say that they chose these guys, but dammit I do think I deserved better than Bush-Cheney).  Netanyahu feeds red meat to his domestic right flank, and Abbas is no better, now appearing to have decided to move away from accommodation for peace and toward Hamas and confrontation/resistance.  They both appear to be taking the cowardly route of shaking their fists at each other and thus bowing to the hatingest haters in their respective bases. 

Abbas says to Netanyahu, "I spit on you and your plans!" 

Netanyahu's reply, "Ha, I piss on your spit!!" 

Abbas: "Oh, yeah?!  I shit on your piss!!!" 

This is where you look to Kurt Vonnegut for the concluding commentary, "And so it goes."
Nurturing a greater constituency for peace among the two populations looks like an impossibly daunting prospect.  The Boteach article on Abbas's earlier speech at Cooper Union campus in New York doesn't touch at any point on finding common ground.  Au contraire, it's about Jewish kids standing up to on-campus anatagonism toward Israel.  Which is something I strongly support, but at the same time it's not altogether clear to me why so many New York college-age kids showed up to hear from Abbas.  Boteach assumes that they are anti-Zionist, but he presents no evidence of that.  The encounters he describes between his son and pro-Palestinians there sound like civil exchanges rather than hissing and spitting matches with BDS bullies.  Absent evidence of an audience hostile to Israel, I would ask, how many in that audience were in fact pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli -- i.e., pro-peace?  I don't know. 

My grandfather Harry Yellin A''H, after whom I'm named, attended Cooper Union, where Abbas spoke.  I'd love to know what in the world all this looks like from his vantage point.  If he is truly resting in peace, you'd have to think that this world is far from his mind, but what do we know?

U.S. criticizes Israel’s new housing project

  The rebuke came hours after Obama and Netanyahu met.

  By Julie Pace ASSOCIATED PRESS

      WASHINGTON — In a striking public rebuke, the Obama administration warned Israel on Wednesday that plans for a controversial new housing project in East Jerusalem would distance Israel from “even its closest allies” and raise questions about its commitment to seeking peace with Palestinians.

   The harsh criticism came just hours after President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met at the White House. Obama spokesman Josh Earnest said the president privately raised his concerns with Netanyahu though the two leaders made no mention of the matter in their public comments to reporters.

   “This development will only draw condemnation from the international community,” Earnest said. “It also would call into   question Israel’s ultimate commitment to a peaceful negotiated settlement with the Palestinians.”

   The new 2,500-unit project is contentious because it would complete a band of Jewish areas that separate Jerusalem from nearby Bethlehem. The United States has repeatedly criticized Israeli construction in East Jerusalem, casting it as damaging to efforts to secure an elusive peace accord with the Palestinians.

   The White House also condemned what it called the recent occupation of residential buildings in Silwan, an Arab neighborhood in East Jerusalem where several hundred hard-line Israeli settlers have moved in recent  years. Earnest called the occupation “provocative” and said it would “escalate tensions at a moment when those tensions have already been high.”

   Appearing before reporters earlier, Obama and Netanyahu betrayed little of the U.S. displeasure projected by the White House spokesman, as well as officials at the State Department. While the two leaders   have long had a tense relationship, each took a polite and cordial tone in their brief public remarks.

   Still, areas of discord were evident, most notably Obama’s frustration with Palestinian civilian deaths in during the summer war in Gaza and Israel’s wariness of U.S.-led nuclear negotiations with Iran.

   Sitting alongside Netanyahu, Obama said leaders must “find ways to change the status quo so that both Israel citizens are safe in their own homes, and schoolchildren in their schools, from the possibility   of rocket fire but also that we don’t have the tragedy of Palestinian children being killed as well.”

   More than 2,100 Palestinians — the vast majority of them civilians — and more than 70 Israelis were killed during the 50-day war in Gaza.

   Officials said much of Obama and Netanyahu’s private discussions centered on Iran. The U.S. and its negotiating partners — Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and China — have until Nov. 24 to reach a deal with Iran on its nuclear program, and all sides say significant gaps remain.

From: This World: The Values Network info@thisworld.us
Subject: No holds barred: Abbas the moderate

No holds barred: Abbas the moderate   By Rabbi Shmuley Boteach It took all of two sentences at the UN for the world to discover just what kind of moderate Mahmoud Abbas truly is. Just after saying, “Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen,”the Palestinian Authority president followed up with this: “In this year, proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly as the International Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, Israel has chosen to make it a year of a new war of genocide perpetrated against the Palestinian people.” Now if Abbas says that Israel is guilty of genocide he must be correct, right? He is, after all, an expert on the subject of genocide, having written a doctoral dissertation denying the Holocaust. All of which exposes the farce of those Jewish organizations and leaders who have embraced Abbas over the past few years as a moderate interested in peace. This is the man whose Fatah faction in 2011 named a town square after Dalal al-Mughrabi, the leader of a 1978 bus hijacking that murdered 35 Israelis. Had Netanyahu’s government unveiled a statue to Baruch Goldstein, would anyone claim it was interested in peace? Last week Abbas was given a warm welcome at Cooper Union’s Great Hall, packed with nearly 1,000 people, many of them students from New York University. A large number were Jewish students. Only two groups protested the appearance of the man who five days later would stand before the world and use the rostrum of the UN to propagate a modern blood libel against the Jews, accusing them of mass murder. One was a contingent of Jewish students from Rambam High School in New York. The other was five of my children, led by our son Mendy who is an undergraduate at NYU. Mendy was outraged that Abbas – who has created a unity government with Hamas, a genocidal organization whose stated intention is the annihilation of the Jewish people and Israel – was facing no protest. Abbas, who has robbed the Palestinian people of democracy by refusing to face an election for a decade, was being greeted as a hero at an American campus. The president of the PA, who advocates ethnic cleansing, declaring that in a future Palestinian state no Jews will be allowed, was being cheered at a liberal arts university. So he organized a protest. Unfortunately, few students and Jewish organizations on campus said they would participate. So Mendy went ahead with his protest anyway by calling his siblings – and it helped that he thank God has a few – to join his protest. And there it was. From my second eldest daughter who served in the IDF and is visiting from Israel for the Jewish festivals, down through my two daughters who attend Yeshiva University’s Stern College for women, to my teen daughter at high school, to my son who just had his bar mitzva, Mendy had his protest. He and his siblings organized brilliant, factual and colorful signs protesting Abbas’ intolerance and partnership with terror. A protest of five people. Did it make a difference? The media, spotting the protest, came to him in waves for interviews, in which he calmly, factually and resolutely explained the reason for his protest. A group of Palestinian students walked over to my daughter who served in the IDF and confronted her about her facts. She studies political science and Middle East history at an Israeli university. The media covered that exchange as well. So five people provided a counterpoint to Abbas’ propaganda about Israel rather than Hamas being the obstacle to peace, even as Abbas and his sons are accused by the Palestinian media itself of wide-ranging corruption and theft from the Palestinian people. My son later pointed out to me that President Paul Kagame of Rwanda, whom I hosted on a panel with Elie Wiesel last year at the very same hall at Cooper Union, attracted much more protest than Abbas, even though NYU has the single largest Jewish student population of any private university in America. But more important than the media covering the event, it encouraged other Jewish students to take a stand. The university campus is a place of intimidation for many Jewish students these days. I saw it when it began at Oxford in 1988 and it has gotten so much worse since. Every public act of support for Israel helps to bolster Jewish identity and rally support for the Middle East’s only democracy, where Arabs live with more freedom and rights than in any Arab nation. My purpose in this column is not express parental pride – although my kids have made me proud – but to convey a much more universal point. Like many Jews, I have tried to stand up for Israel. But of late my kids have witnessed as death threats have poured in over my public defense of Israel in the recent war in Gaza. They saw the video of a man publicly attacking me at my speech in Seoul Olympic Stadium in front of 100,000 people. They see the odious anti-Semitic hate speech I face on social media each day. And they also saw that I did not back down. Not because I am particularly courageous – I wrestle with irrational anxiety and fears every day of my life – but because, as the Mishnah says, “In a place where there are no men, stand up and be a man, and if not now, then when?” It’s 70 years after the Holocaust. The Jewish state is in a battle for its very survival. Surrounded by enemies on every side, they seek to delegitimize and make it impossible for the Jewish state to simply defend itself. Will we sit by and watch it slowly succumb to the forces of genocidal hate? Or will we learn from the Holocaust that we have no one to rely on us but ourselves. And when we fight to overcome fear and risk social ostracization to stand up for Israel, our children watch, copy, and slowly stand up themselves, giving us more pride as parents than we can ever imagine. It’s the Jewish new year. We need many qualities to see us through the coming times with so many threats surrounding us. We need hope, we need fortitude, we need vision, and we need charity. But above all else, we need courage. In the coming year may we must all learn to stand up straight. Our children are watching. http://thisworld.us/2014/10/01/no-holds-barred-abbas-the-moderate/ The author, “America’s rabbi,” is founder of This World: The Values Network, the foremost organization influencing politics, media and culture with Jewish values. The international best-selling author of 30 books, he has just published Kosher Lust: Love is Not the Answer. Follow him on Twitter @RabbiShmuley