Partners For Peace
The first order of the day, eclipsing all other pre-requisites to clearing the way for two sides to sit together at a conference table to hammer out conditions acceptable to both sides, leading to a peace agreement, must be security. Security in the sense that one erstwhile adversary attends to a little homework in ensuring that its forces do not continue their ongoing efforts to destabilize the government of the other.In the process launching violent attacks against their perceived opponent's civilian public, attempting to maim and to murder at will. Just delivering a little message, thereby, of implacable hatred.
Can any reasonable entity accept that their adversary will continue the agenda of slander against the other, the fomenting of hatred, the encouragement of the hatefully disaffected to shoulder arms and aim directly at civilian targets, to launch rockets against the civil installations of settlements, towns, kibbutzim, factories, refineries, schools, and farms, and set aside the aggravation quotient, steadfastly focusing on a peace agreement?
That is precisely what occurs when Israel meets with the Palestinian Authority. The PA screams loud and long about the disintegration of potential peace opportunities because of Israeli intransigence in the continuance of settlement outposts in the West Bank, but remains complicit in ongoing attacks against Israel.
A PA court in Hevron has sentenced a 25-year-old Palestinian to death for his unconscionable act in alerting Israel to activities of four terrorists. Execution will be by a firing squad. Palestinians deliver their brand of justice swiftly and irrevocably.
When Israel sentences and incarcerates Palestinians engaged in terror acts against Israeli citizens, there is always the potential for future release of these men seeking to murder and maim, including those who are successful. No death penalty is exacted for their incalculable bloody crimes.
This is the same PA which has promised to halt attacks by terror militias against Israel in pursuance of a peace agreement. Yet Fatah Chairman Mahmoud Abbas has not been averse to giving official awards to Palestinians who murder Jews.
Moreover, Palestinians caught in violent acts against Israel and incarcerated in PA prisons seem somehow mysteriously able to procure "get out of jail free" cards on a regular basis. Three more terrorists managed to "escape" the PA prison in Jericho on Sunday; all members of the Fatah, Gaza-based Popular Resistance committees.
The prison chief shrugged off the event: "People escape from prisons all over the world. We are investigating."
It's a common enough occurrence that Palestinians who attempt to assist Israel face death for their unforgivable crime of turning against their own. Which means that Palestinians who loathe violence, who attempt to forestall acts of bloody mayhem against others, including Israelis, and who step forward to prevent such occurrences, do so on pain of a death sentence.
PA lynch mobs, as well as Fatah and Hamas terrorists have not been reticent about delivering death to any among them suspected of giving aid to Israel.
Israel's partner for peace, the moderate Mahmoud Abbas, has outright rejected any welcome of foreign leaders who have committed to visiting Israel this summer in honour of the country's 60th anniversary of Independence Day. The Palestinian Authority has its own plans to commemorate that event they name the "Nakba" (disaster), referring to the creation of the State of Israel.
For them it signifies a day of bleak mourning.
Visiting diplomats from abroad, the Palestinian Authority contends, should demonstrate a modicum of sensitivity "to the Palestinian people's feelings" in understanding that they do not celebrate the creation of the State of Israel, but mourn that dread event.
This is the accommodating, resigned, receptive-to-peace argument of the moderates among the Palestinians who sue for peace with Israel in pursuit of the establishment of a state of their own.
Labels: Israel, Political Realities, Societal Failures
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, April 30, 2008
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