Palestine - No Elections No Solution

[Published 18 November 2013]


The PLO negotiating team - headed by perennial negotiator Saeb Erekat - resigned this week in the middle of a nine month period set aside for intense and secret negotiations with Israel to achieve the creation of a second Arab state - in addition to Jordan - in former Mandatory Palestine.

PLO Chairman, head of Fatah, unconstitutional self-styled President of the defunct Palestinian Authority and unelected President of the “State of Palestine” - Mahmoud Abbas - was quick to point out on Egyptian TV:

“Either we can convince it to return, and we’re trying with them, or we form a new delegation.”.

Either way - it will be a waste of time.

The “two state solution” posited by these currently stalled negotiations is doomed to failure.

Ramzy Baroud - a Palestinian-American journalist, author and editor who taught Mass Communication at Australia’s Curtin University of Technology, and is Editor-in-Chief of the Palestine Chronicle - explains the futility of further negotiations with the PLO in his article “Why a winning Palestinian narrative is hard to find”:

“In an initially pointless exercise that lasted nearly an hour, I flipped between two Palestinian television channels, al-Aqsa TV of Hamas in Gaza and Palestine TV of Fatah in the West Bank. While both purported to represent Palestine and the Palestinians, each seemed to represent some other place and some other people. It was all very disappointing.

Hamas’ world is fixated on their hate of Fatah and other factional personal business. Fatah TV is stuck between several worlds of archaic language of phony revolutions, factional rivalry and unmatched self-adoration. The two narratives are growingly alien and will unlikely ever move beyond their immediate sense of self-gratification and utter absurdity.”

These irreconcilable differences between Fatah - the dominant faction in the PLO - and Hamas - not a member of the PLO - have remained unresolved since 2007.

In the absence of any unified representation for the Palestinian Arabs living in the West Bank and Gaza - how can any agreement between Israel and the PLO ever bring about a final end to the Arab-Jewish conflict that has raged unresolved for the last 130 years?

Mahmoud Al-Zahar, a Hamas official based in Gaza, told his movement’s daily newspaper - Al-Resalah - in August this year that Hamas should act to isolate Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and strip him of any representative capacity over his decision to negotiate with Israel.

“The PA has dealt the final blow to reconciliation talks, and Hamas will never accept the negotiation track and its result.”

CBN News confirmed Hamas’s stance on 30 September in its article “Hamas: No Agreement That Includes Israel’s Right to Exist”:

“We will not recognize any agreements at the expense of our land, rights and religious sites,” Asharq al-Awsat quoted Hamas officials on Sunday. “Palestine—the whole of Palestine from the [Mediterranean] sea to the [Jordan] river [i.e., Israel]—is the property Palestinian people and our nation, and no usurper has any right to a speck of dust of its territory.”

A spokesman for the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the so-called military wing of Hamas, promised to be “at the heart of the new intifada.”

And Islamic Jihad member Ahmed al-Mudallal said, “Resistance in Palestine is the spearhead in the confrontation with the Zionist project, which targets Jerusalem, al-Aksa [mosque on the Temple Mount] and the whole of Palestine.”

Hamas vowed never to accept any agreement that includes recognition of Israel’s right to exist.

“Negotiations and security coordination with the Zionist enemy form a cover for the continuation of the occupation’s crimes against our territory, our people and our religious sites,” the statement continued.

“We call upon all Palestinian forces and factions to reject the path of these wasteful negotiations, which have proved their failure to achieve our people’s dreams and only brought them more waste, loss and division in the face of the occupation’s crimes and plans.”

Hamas called on the Palestinian Authority’s Fatah faction “to end negotiations and security coordination with the enemy and to return to resistance, national reconciliation and Palestinian unity.”

Fatah responded by saying it “will remain committed to Palestinian unity and will continue to work for the unity of the people, territory and the Palestinian leadership, which is represented by the Palestine Liberation Organization,” Asharq al-Awsat reported.”

US Secretary of State - John Kerry - showed once again how little he understands about the Jewish-Arab conflict he is spending so much time trying to resolve - telling TV audiences in Israel and the West Bank:

“The alternative to getting back to the talks is the potential of chaos. I mean, does Israel want a third intifada?"

Kerry obviously fails to appreciate that it is Hamas and its backers that will instigate a third intifada - especially if Israel and the PLO look like miraculously agreeing on anything.

Kerry should be focusing on the common denominator that has virtually guaranteed the failure of negotiations during the last seven years - the refusal of both Hamas and the PLO to allow the Palestinian Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank to hold fair and transparent triennial elections to determine who should represent them in final status negotiations with Israel.

Elections will end the culture of political impotency which has proved an impenetrable barrier to the Palestinian Arabs claimed right to self determination.

Without such elections - no final and binding agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs is possible.

Palestine - Creative Compromises Can Conquer Conflict

[Published 4 January 2013]


t has taken less than a month for the euphoria generated by the United Nations General Assembly Resolution conferring non-member observer status on the “State of Palestine” to dissolve into a farcical denouement.

Mahmoud Abbas’s folly in unilaterally approaching the United Nations in breach of the Oslo Accords has been neatly summed up by CBS News foreign affairs analyst Pamela Falk in her article “Is Palestine now a State?”

“In the end, the Resolution does not change the Palestinians lives on the ground, and it does not “recognize” Palestine as a state.”

UN Special Rapporteur for the West Bank - Professor Richard Falk - offered his own prognosis on 2 January on his blog page:

” At this point, I do not believe that the two-state consensus can be implemented, nor is the one-state alternative politically feasible.”

Demise of the two-state solution is confirmed by the following recent developments:

Firstly - Jamal Muheisen, a member of the Fatah Central Council, has reportedly told the Jerusalem Post that Hamas is conducting secret negotiations in an Arab country to reach agreement with Israel over the establishment of a Palestinian state with temporary borders in the Gaza Strip and Sinai.

Muheisen has claimed that the negotiations were being held under the auspices of the US claiming that:

“Hamas is seeking to establish its own emirate while leaving the West Bank as cantons that are separated by settlements. Hamas’s goal is to foil the establishment of a Palestinian state on all the territories that were occupied in 1967.”

Secondly - The 2003 United States Roadmap proposing a two- state solution has disappeared off the radar with State Department Spokeswoman Victoria Nuland only being able to offer this vision:

“As we turn the calendar to 2013… now is the time for leaders on both sides to display real leadership, to focus on the work that’s necessary to return to direct negotiations,”

That option is unlikely to happen.

Israel and the Palestinian Authority have not held direct high level talks since September 2010 - at the tail end of a 10- month Israeli settlement freeze to which Abbas failed to respond until the freeze had nearly expired.

The Palestinian Authority still demands that settlement construction stop once again before they engage in talks - which they have said should pick up where they left off with Israel’s then Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in 2008.

These demands will certainly not be met by Israel in the aftermath of November’s General Assembly Resolution.

Abbas has now become firmly stuck on his high horse with no way to get down without considerable loss of face and prestige.

Thirdly - Attempting to salvage something from the wreck - Abbas has let it be known that he would be prepared to consider a confederation with Jordan once a Palestinian State was recognised in the territory lost by Jordan to Israel in the 1967 Six Day War.

If the creation of such a state has not reached first base after twenty years of tortuous negotiations - then it certainly will not do so after Abbas’s foray at the United Nations.

Creative compromises are now urgently needed to determine the allocation of sovereignty in the West Bank and Gaza that do not involve the creation of a State between Jordan, Israel and Egypt for the first time in recorded history.

Seeds for some such compromises appear to be sprouting from two different sources.

Firstly - Reports emanating from Gaza suggest that discussions are underway with Egypt to supply electricity and natural gas to Gaza to reduce its dependency on Israel.

Egypt has also been permitting freer access and egress to and from the Gaza Strip.

Such moves would materially assist in restoring the close relationship Egypt had with Gaza when it occupied and administered Gaza from 1948-1967.

If this relationship can be creatively nurtured to enable Egypt to provide a sphere of influence that persuades Gaza to look to Egypt for its salvation - rather than targeting Israel in continuing conflict - then the prospects for an improved relationship between Israel and Gaza could well be the end result.

Secondly - Reunification of the West Bank with Jordan as existed between 1950-1967 has now been raised as a possibility by the well respected and well connected Palestinian Arab commentator Daoud Kuttab in his article published in the Atlantic on 26 December - “Are the Palestinians ready to share a State with Jordan?”

Kuttab recalls his exclusive interview in 1993 with Israel’s then Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin - the first ever given to a reporter working for a leading Palestinian newspaper.

Kuttab writes:

“I asked Rabin for his vision as to the ultimate political status of the West Bank and Gaza in 15 or 20 years. Rabin, who at the time, we later discovered, had approved the Oslo back-channel, took a puff at a cigarette given to him by one of his aides, and answered that he envisions it being part of an entity with Jordan.”

Kuttab has also dismissed the confederation idea proposed by Abbas:

“Confederations are political systems that include two independent countries. For some time in the 1980s, this was the most talked-about term in the region. The late Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyyad), the former head of intelligence for the PLO, was quoted as saying that what Palestinians wanted was five minutes of independence and then they would happily agree to a confederation with Jordan. However, the issue became politically poisonous as soon as the late King Hussein of Jordan said publicly that he doesn’t want anyone to ever utter the term “confederation.” And so it has been for the past two decades.”

And so it will apparently continue - no matter what Abbas says.

Kuttab concludes:

“While it is unclear if Jordan will ever end up having any sovereign role in the West Bank, support for a greater role for Jordan in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict will no doubt increase in the coming months and years if the current decline of the PLO and the Palestinian Authority continues. The one determining factor in all of the discussions will have to come from the Israeli side, which has yet to decide whether it will relinquish sovereignty over the areas occupied in 1967 to any Arab party, whether it be Palestinian or Jordanian.”

Israel has already agreed to cede its claims to sovereignty in more than 90% of those areas in 2000 and 2008 and only needs a willing Arab partner to close the deal.

Jordan is rapidly readying itself to fill that role.

Creative compromises can indeed conquer conflict as a means of resolving even the most intractable and long running disputes.

Palestine - Semantic Skullduggery Sinks Solutions

[Published 21 June 2012]


The Palestinian Authority (PA) Ministry of Information has now issued a book instructing Palestinian Arabs on the words they should use to replace ”the Israeli and American dissemination of poisoned terms”.

Palestinian Arabs are encouraged to use terms that indicate that Israel is the result of “a racist, colonialist endeavor,” and the book instructs Palestinians never to use the name “Israel” alone but instead to use the term “Israeli colonialism” To use “Israel” by itself is damaging, according to the PA, because to do so “describes Israel as a natural state.”

Whilst most of the misleading and deceptive terms to be employed are not new - the book highlights official PA approval and acceptance of the use of such terms in the semantic war that has been ongoing for the last 130 years - alongside the actual conflict that has been played out between Jews and Arabs during that period.

For example - the use of the term “West Bank” was introduced by Jordan in 1950 to replace the biblical names “Judea and Samaria” - names that had been used throughout the centuries and were still being used by the British Mandate authorities in 1948. This change of name has been an effective propaganda tool in trying to erase any Jewish connection with and entitlement to these areas after they were occupied by Jordan in the 1948 War of Independence and subsequently lost by Jordan to Israel in the 1967 Six Day War.

Similarly the use of the term “freedom fighter” instead of the term “terrorist” has had an impact on the way the Jewish-Arab conflict has been perceived.

Describing the conflict as the “Arab-Israeli conflict” or the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” also suggests that the conflict only begun in 1948 and completely ignores the important legal and historical milestones that had taken place in the previous 30 years.

Encouraging the use of the words “racist and apartheid” in the same breath as the word “Israel” or the words “land theft” where “State lands or waste lands” are involved - conjure up poor and negative images of Israel that every day confounds the world with its scientific, agricultural, medical and intellectual discoveries.

These carefully chosen and continuously used terms have had remarkable success in aligning countries around the world to lend their support to the creation of a new exclusively Arab state between Israel and Jordan for the first time ever in recorded history. That is no mean feat.

Yet this kind of semantic war has been one of the major obstacles to resolving the conflict.

Whilst both sides are using different terms in talking about the conflict - any attempt to come to meaningful decisions in resolving the conflict is bound to fail - until both sides start talking about the conflict using the same language.

It is fair to say that in this kind of semantic tug of war - the People of the Book have been linguistically outsmarted by the successors to the authors of the One Thousand and One Nights.

But this brand of semantic war pales into insignificance when one considers the semantic war being waged when the parties are using the same terms - but applying different meanings to those terms.

Both sides have been engaging for the last 19 years in a dialogue under the Oslo Accords and the Bush Roadmap that has not been based on terms that have first been defined and agreed upon between them

The deliberate ambiguities and vague generalisations in the Oslo Accords and the Roadmap have led to innumerable differences and disagreements.

Any lawyer worth his salt will insist on terms being fully defined in agreements so that the parties will be in no doubt as to what the use of that term in the agreement means.

The simplest and most basic of these misunderstandings relates to the meaning of the term “Palestine“.

Does Palestine only include Israel, the West Bank and Gaza? Or does it also include Jordan - 78% of the territory called Palestine covered by the Mandate for Palestine conferred on Great Britain by the League of Nations in 1922 following the San Remo Conference and the signing of the Treaty of Sevres in 1920?

According to Article 2 of the the Palestine Liberation Organization Charter - Jordan is included:

“Palestine,with the boundaries it had during the British Mandate, is an indivisible territorial unit.”

So why is the PLO only demanding territorial concessions including land swaps by Israel - and not Jordan - in its push for statehood and independence?

Why should Jordan - the Arab country that invaded and occupied the West Bank for 19 years between 1948-1967 when an independent Palestinian Arab State could have been created in a Jew-free West Bank - be quarantined from being part of the solution - now that 350,000 Jews live there?

When the Hashemite rulers in Jordan proclaim that “Jordan is Jordan and Palestine is Palestine” - what do they mean? When these same rulers pronounce that “Jordan is Palestine and Palestine is Jordan” - what are they trying to convey?

Any territorial grant of land by Jordan to a putative Palestinan Arab state equal to the amount of territory retained by Israel in the West Bank would have no effect on Jordan’s security or territorial integrity. Yet it could have a real impact in bringing about a resolution to the long running conflict.

Jordan helped create the current problems in the West Bank. Why shouldn’t Jordan be part of the solution to ending those problems arising from its former occupation of the West Bank and the fact that it sits on 78% of “Palestine”?

All of these questions must now take on a new meaning following the declaration by PLO chairman - and Palestinian president - Mahmoud Abbas - that the negotiations between Israel and the PLO under the Oslo Accords and the Bush Roadmap are “clinically dead”

Here again is another new term introduced into the political lexicon - which now needs to be defined so that both Israel and the Palestinian Authority are in agreement as to its meaning as it inevitably becomes part of the international dialogue.

Anyone care to speculate that Israel and the Palestinian Authority will ever agree on what the terms “Palestine” and “clinically dead” mean?

Liberating the Palestine Liberation Organization

[Published December 2007]


For better or for worse Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) are the parties that will - for the next 12 months - be negotiating the resolution of sovereignty in the West Bank with a view to ultimately creating a new independent Arab State between Israel and Jordan. These identical parties have been negotiating on the same issue for the last 14 years without the slightest sign of success.

One major reason has been the inability of the PLO to seriously change its mindset and specifically revoke or amend the offending provisions of the PLO Covenant that call for the destruction of Israel and that prevent the creation of this new State as envisioned by Oslo, former President Bill Clinton, President George Bush and his Quartet partners - Russia, the European Union and the United Nations.

On 9 September 1993, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat had made that written commitment to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin as the quid pro quo for the Oslo negotiating process to commence between Israel and the PLO and for the historic handshake between them on the White House lawns just four days later.

A long and tortuous process by Israel and America then followed to ensure Arafat’s total compliance with that commitment. On 14 December 1998 President Clinton stated:

“I thank you for your rejection—fully, finally and forever—of the passages in the Palestinian Charter calling for the destruction of Israel. For they were the ideological underpinnings of a struggle renounced at Oslo. By revoking them once and for all, you have sent, I say again, a powerful message not to the government, but to the people of Israel. You will touch people on the street there. You will reach their hearts there.”

Yet despite this declaration not one article of the Covenant has been revised or revoked to this very day nor has that message touched the Palestinian Arabs or reached their hearts.

The Chairman of the Palestine National Council charged with making those changes - Salim Za’anoun - stated on 3 February 2001, in the official Palestinian Authority newspaper, that the Covenant remained unchanged and was still in force [Al-Hayat Al-Jadida as translated by MEMRI]

A look at just three of the thirty three Articles in the PLO Covenant shows why it is essential that every Article be reviewed and altered if any meaningful negotiations can possibly be undertaken post Annapolis.

Article 1

"Palestine is the homeland of the Arab Palestinian people: it is an indivisible part of the Arab homeland, and the Palestinian people are an integral part of the Arab nation.”

This article ignores any Jewish rights in Palestine. Why not amend it to read as follows:

“ Palestine is the homeland of the Arab Palestinian people and of the Jewish people,and the Arab Palestinian people are an integral part of the Arab nation.”

Article 2:

“Palestine with the boundaries it had during the British Mandate, is an indivisible territorial unit”

This article absolutely prohibits President Bush’s two state solution and could be changed as follows:

“Palestine comprises the land contained within the boundaries that existed during the British Mandate from 1920-1948 and has now ceased to comprise an indivisible territorial unit. For purposes of clarification Palestine includes the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan which comprised part of the British Mandate until 1946.”

Article 15:

“The Balfour Declaration, the Mandate for Palestine and everything that has been based on them, are deemed null and void. Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history and the true conception of what constitutes statehood. Judaism being a divine religion is not an independent nationality. Nor do Jews constitute a single nation with an identity of its own: they are citizens of the states to which they belong.”

This article ignores the binding effect of international law and is racist, discriminatory and offensive in the extreme. It needs to be redrawn to perhaps read as follows:

“The Balfour Declaration, the Mandate for Palestine, and everything that has been based upon them, are deemed legal and binding. Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are compatible with the facts of history and the true conception of what constitutes statehood. Judaism is both a divine religion and an independent nationality. Jews constitute a single nation with an identity of its own; they can like Palestinian Arabs be citizens of the states to which they otherwise belong”

How can successful negotiations be concluded whilst this current unclear and confusing mindset confronts the PLO and Israeli negotiators? How have these provisions been specifically rejected by the PLO ?

The PLO needs to immediately face these demons and excise them unequivocally and indisputably from its thinking if the ongoing negotiations are to have any prospect of success.

This is not a question of semantic pettiness or nit picking. It goes to the very bona fides of Israel’s negotiating partner and the sincerity and seriousness with which it intends to conduct these negotiations.

Perhaps the first indication of this troubling mindset - and the effect it can have on the negotiations - was the following remarkable statement recently made by the PLO chief negotiator Saeb Erekat :

"One of the more pressing problems is the Zionist regime's insistence on being recognized as a Jewish state... Israel could call itself whatever it wanted, but the PA would never acknowledge Israel's Jewish identity." [ Jerusalem Post, 14 November 2007]

Sweeping this - and similar recent statements by leading Arab spokesmen - under the carpet will only guarantee the failure of future negotiations. They will be difficult and complex enough - without such institutionalised mind blocks to reconciliation and recognition that had supposedly been dead and buried with President Clinton‘s declaration on 14 December 1998.

The PLO needs to liberate itself first before it can hope to liberate any land. Failure to do so over the last 14 years has seen its continuing decline in influence. It is now time to get serious and stop playing games.

Palestine, Israel and Condoleezza - The Crowd Pleaser

[Published August 2007]

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is at it again talking up the prospects of ending the 140 years old Arab-Jewish conflict by the adoption of a two state solution involving the creation of an Arab state between Jordan and Israel - the 23rd Arab State in the world should it ever eventuate.

This crowd pleasing prediction of peace has been made by Ms Rice despite four fruitless years of intense international diplomacy to achieve just that solution by America, Russia, the United Nations and the European Union - the Quartet - under their meticulously detailed and crafted Roadmap first published in 2003.

The United Nations News Service heralded the Roadmap at the time as a:

"performance-based and goal-driven roadmap, with clear phases, timelines, target dates, and benchmarks aiming at progress through reciprocal steps by the two parties in the political, security, economic, humanitarian, and institution-building fields, under the auspices of the Quartet. The destination is a final and comprehensive settlement of the Israel-Palestinian conflict by 2005, as presented in President Bush’s speech of 24 June, and welcomed by the EU, Russia and the UN in the 16 July and 17 September Quartet Ministerial statements.”

Not one of these goals has been remotely achieved - an abysmal failure by anyone’s standards -especially given the amount of political, financial and diplomatic clout vested in the Quartet"

Yet speaking at a joint media conference on 2 August with Mahmoud Abbas - the Palestinian Authority (PA) President and Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) Executive Chairman - Ms Rice was decidedly upbeat when she said:

“I want to note that we will have a discussion about the political discussions that you are having on a bilateral basis with [Israel’s] Prime Minister Olmert. The Prime Minister said to me that he looks forward to continued discussions with you and that he is ready to discuss the fundamental issues that will lead to negotiations soon for the creation of a Palestinian state. And I know that that is your desire too, and the United States wants to support that bilateral track.”

When asked by an inquiring reporter as to what those “fundamental issues” might be, Ms Rice gave this remarkable reply:

“ I believe that the word “fundamental” speaks for itself. And the desire to move toward a two- state solution seems to me to be there on both sides, and there are a lot of issues that are going to have to be discussed in order to get to a two-state solution.”

Sorry Ms Rice - every conceivable “fundamental issue” there is - and that you seem even too frightened to specifically identify - was discussed in detail in 2000 at Camp David and Taba in negotiations between President Bill Clinton, then PA and PLO leader Yasser Arafat and Israel’s then Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

Those negotiations led to the rejection of the two state solution offered by Israel in 90% of the West Bank and Gaza and effectively ended any prospect of the two state solution ever becoming a reality unless there was a total revolution in the thinking of the PA and the PLO.

One of the fundamental issues on which those negotiations foundered was the failure of Mr Arafat to recognise any political rights of the Jews to sovereignty in any part of the West Bank and Gaza - a policy that had been maintained by the PLO without change since 1964, by the PA since its formation in 1994 and by Mr Abbas as head of both organisations to this very day.

Those political rights were recognised by France and Great Britain in 1920, formalised by unanimous vote of all 51 members of the League of Nations in 1922, endorsed by a joint resolution of both Houses of the Congress of the United States in the same year, and preserved by the United Nations Charter in 1945.

The Quartet’s failure to insist on these international agreements being recognised and accepted by the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organisation remains one of the principal causes for the Quartet’s Roadmap collapsing into the total chaos it is today.

Statements such as Ms Rice’s are just diplomatic doublespeak, empty grandstanding and devoid of reality. They only serve to hold those making them open to ridicule and loss of credibility as the objective they so earnestly desire - the Quartet’s two state solution - continues to elude them.

It is surely time for Ms Rice to put the following questions to Mr Abbas to determine whether he is really sincere in his desire for a two state solution.

1. Does the Palestinian Authority accept and recognise the legality of

(i) Article 6 of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine giving the Jews the right to closely settle State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes in the West Bank?

(ii) Article 80 of the United Nations Charter which preserves the above right?

(iii) Security Council Resolution 242 - which does not require Israel to withdraw from all the territories occupied in the Six Day War and recognises Israel’s right to live in peace within secure and recognised boundaries?

2. Does the Palestine Liberation Organisation and the Palestinian Authority recognise the existence of the State of Israel and have they abandoned violence and armed struggle against Israel?

3. If the answer to 2 is “yes” - when will Mr Abbas call a meeting of the Palestinian National Council to revoke articles 2, 3, 6-10, 13-23 and 30 of the PLO Charter- all of which are in direct conflict with the principles laid out in question 2.

If Ms Rice can get a positive response from Mr Abbas to these crucial questions, she might well be able to make a meaningful statement on the future of the Quartet’s two state solution.

If she is too embarrassed to put these questions to Mr Abbas or is too afraid to hear the answers, then maybe she can get Mr Olmert to ask them during his “political discussions” with Mr Abbas.

If neither wants to take the plunge then maybe someone in the press corps might be emboldened or even induced to put these questions to Mr Abbas at one of his next media conferences. The answers will certainly create front page headlines no matter what response is evoked.

Until these questions are answered one thing is crystal clear - any hope of the Quartet’s two state solution ever eventuating is doomed to failure.

Israel's Illusion - Fatah Feted Is Hamas Hated

[Published July 2007]

Israel's unilateral decision to release 250 Fatah terrorists from Israeli jails continues the insane policy of appeasement adopted by successive Israeli Governments since the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993.

This latest decision coupled with unilateral withdrawals from Lebanon in 2000, Gaza in 2005 and the unilateral release of another 500 terrorists in February 2005 sends a clear message to its Arab enemies - that terrorism coupled with no compromise and no meaningful negotiations is bringing concrete and tangible benefits towards the ultimate goal of wiping Israel off the face of the earth.

The decision to release these 250 terrorists was taken in obscene haste since their names and the crimes they committed were not even known to the Israeli cabinet when it made its astounding decision.

Israel is no Guantanamo Bay - all those to be released have been tried sentenced and convicted by due legal process.

The Israeli Cabinet was only told that those to be released did not have "blood on their hands". That they had "blood on their minds" - and still no doubt harbour the same thoughts now - apparently was a matter of complete indifference to the Israeli Government.

Coupled with this release was the release and return of four terrorists "with blood on their hands" to Jordan - a state with whom Israel has diplomatic relations. They are to serve out in Jordan a ridiculously short period of only 18 more months of their life sentences for murder for which they were convicted by Israel.

As controversial and shocking as this decision was, at least it could be argued that Israel was releasing them in the national interest of forging better relations with an Arab State with whom it has a signed peace treaty.

But the rationale offered by Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert for the release of the 250 Fatah terrorists makes amazing reading:

"We want to make use of all means to strengthen moderate forces within the Palestinian Authority, and to encourage them to follow the path that we believe can create conditions for real talks" [Israelinsider - 8 July 2007]

The "moderate forces" are Fatah - an organisation committed to Israel's destruction in stages - as contrasted to the "extremist forces" namely Hamas - an organisation committed to Israel's destruction in one fell swoop.

Some option for Israel to choose - death by one blow or by a thousand cuts. Why choose either?

Does Mr Olmert not understand that contrary to strengthening Fatah, this decision will only encourage Hamas to keep undermining Fatah in an attempt to coerce Israel into releasing even more terrorists to continue propping up Fatah?

Are we now going to see an "unending cycle of terrorist releases" in response to an "unending undermining of the moderates"?

The path that Mr Olmert believes the moderates will now be encouraged to follow to create conditions for "real talks" was articulated by Mr Olmert at the meeting he held at Sharm El Sheikh with Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, Jordan's King Abdullah and Mahmoud Abbas on 25 June:

"We recognize the new government in the Palestinian Authority, which recognizes Israel's right to exist and a solution of two states for two peoples. It is ready to implement the agreements signed, renounces terror and violence as a means and a goal, and has no members of terrorist organizations. We will work together to implement the Roadmap and advance the goals set out therein."

The new Government in the Palestinian Authority recognises Israel's right to exist and renounces terror and violence as a goal? Has it taken any steps to revoke the Palestine Liberation Organisation Charter that calls for Israel's annihilation and armed struggle as the only way to liberate Palestine? Has it done anything to stop the virulent hatred of Jews endemic in its educational system, its newspapers and television programming?

The Palestinian Authority recognises the two state solution ? Well maybe - if that two state solution results in a Jew free state between Israel and Jordan and the entry into Israel of millions of Arabs. This recipe for Israel's suicide is one that even Mr. Olmert cannot accept and Mr Abbas can never compromise on. It is and always has been a non-starter since it was first proposed by Yasser Arafat 33 years ago.

The only real two state solution involves the division of the West Bank between Jordan and Israel - the two successor states in former Palestine. That's what "two states for two peoples" - the Jews and the Arabs - surely means.

Implementing the Road Map is surely fanciful from anyone's perspective. It has failed to get off the ground after four years of prodding and cajoling by its sponsors America, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations - surely the most powerful group of "enforcers" ever assembled. It has been rejected by the Arab League whose members are now urging negotiations based on their own five year old plan that would have even harsher consequences for, and has already been rejected by, Israel.

Mr Olmert said of his decision to release those 250 terrorists:

"I think that this gesture is a fitting one, and not a product of some illusion" [Israelinsider - 8 July2007]

"Fitting"? - the unconditional release of 250 convicted and sworn enemies of Israel and a brutal slap in the face for the Israeli Defence Forces, police and security services who risk their lives on a daily basis to protect ordinary Israeli civilians from these would be mass murderers?

"Not the product of some illusion"? - believing that any unilateral compromise ever has or ever will bring any meaningful concession from the Palestinian Authority?

Call it an illusion, a mirage, an aberration - Olmert's poor political judgement has once again caused serious harm to Israel's national interest and any prospect for a resolution of the Arab- Jewish conflict.