By Ted Belman
The “peace process” is like an enormous ship traveling with great momentum to a predetermined destination. Nothing Israel can do will stop it or alter its course. While Israel continues to debate the details, the ship continues, inexorably.
Eight months after the US invasion of Iraq and the announcement of the Roadmap, Yossi Beilin, the Oslo architect, and Abed Rabbo, launched their peace proposal after two and one-half years of work. It was to be known as the Geneva Accords. It was sub-titled Draft Permanent Status Agreement
Haaretz reported
The plan, dubbed the Geneva Accord in tribute to the funding and support supplied by the Swiss Foreign Ministry, offers itself as a decisive solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, based on the plan drawn up by former U.S. president Bill Clinton after the breakdown in the July 2000 talks between former prime minister Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat.
Fifty-eight former presidents, prime ministers, foreign ministers and other global leaders, among them former presidents Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union and F.W. de Klerk of South Africa, issued a statement expressing “strong support” for the plan. Other world leaders who voiced their backing included King Hassan III of Morocco, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Clinton.
Bush reacted by saying it “is productive, so long as they adhere to the principles [to] fight off terror, that there must be security, and there must be the emergence of a Palestinian state that is democratic and free.” In other words, he stuck with the Roadmap. Others like Jimmy Carter, Colin Powel, Kofi Annan and the EU jumped right in.
Ministers, right-wing MKs lambaste colleagues for attending Geneva ceremony
MK Yuli Edelstein (Yisrael b’Aliyah) even submitted a complaint to the Knesset’s Ethics Committee against those MKs who attended the ceremony. According to Edelstein, legislators Haim Oron, Roman Bronfman, Avraham Burg, Yuli Tamir and Amram Mitzna all contravened Knesset regulations by attending the ceremony.
National Union lawmaker Uri Ariel said that the Geneva Accord is worse than the Oslo Accords for Israel. According to Ariel, the actions of the left-wing MKs could be seriously damaging for Israel and its citizens. He called on Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein to set up a commission of inquiry to look into their actions.
The head of the settler lobby group in the Knesset, MK Yehiel Hazan (Likud), said that those behind the Geneva Accord “should be stopped by all legal means, before their wicked plan to sell off the Land of Israel.” Hazan added that the agreement is “the piracy of people who are not living in reality.”
These Accords were fully analyzed by the JCSS. Its assessment is worth reading now. Essentially the Accords built on the Taba talks and attempted to bridge the gaps. One was Barak’s refusal to cede sovereignty of the Temple Mount. In the Geneva document Israel renounces the symbol of sovereignty over the Temple Mount. In addition, the Geneva document does not mention the right of return. This was so because after two and a half years the negotiators couldn’t agree on a compromise.
Opposition in Israel was so strong that the Accords disappeared from sight. The Accords are now being resurrected in the form of an agreed set of principles. No surprise there. Shimon Peres, who was behind both the Oslo Accords and the Geneva Accords is now President of Israel.
If you want to know what such principles will contain just read the Geneva Accords. In effect the Geneva Accords are now being elevated to government policy.
Already we are told that Israel intends to cede sovereignty over the Temple Mount.
You will recall that after Arafat walked out on Camp David and Barak’s overly generous offer, talks continued at Taba. The Intifadah, which Arafat launched, ended the process temporarily. But it was felt by the left and by the diplomats in general that the gaps preventing agreement could be bridged. So Beilin, under the auspices of the EU and Shimon Peres, continued discussions leading up to the Geneva Accords.
Back then, Charles Krauthammer called them the Geneva Sellout.
[..] The Israeli side, however, is led by Yossi Beilin, a man whose political standing in his own country is so low that he failed to make it into Parliament. After helping bring his Labor Party to ruin, Beilin abandoned it for the far-left Meretz Party, which then did so badly in the last election that Beilin is now a private citizen.
There is a reason why he is one of Israel’s most reviled and discredited politicians. He was the principal ideologue and architect behind the “peace” foisted on Israel in 1993. Those Oslo agreements have brought a decade of the worst terror in all Israeli history.
Now he is at it again. And Secretary of State Colin Powell has written a letter to Beilin and Rabbo expressing appreciation for their effort, and is now planning to meet with them.
This is scandalous. Israel is a democracy, and this agreement was negotiated in defiance of the democratically (and overwhelmingly) elected government of Israel. If a private U.S. citizen negotiated a treaty on his own, he could go to jail under the Logan Act. If an Israeli does it, he gets a pat on the back from the secretary of state.
Moreover, this “peace” is entirely hallucinatory. It is written as if Oslo never happened. The Palestinian side repeats solemn pledges to recognize Israel, renounce terror, end anti-Israel incitement, etc. – all promised in Oslo. These promises are today such a dead letter that the Palestinian side is openly bargaining these chits again, as if the Israelis have forgotten that in return for these pledges 10 years ago, Israel recognized the PLO, brought it out of Tunisian exile, established a Palestinian Authority, permitted it an army with 50,000 guns and invited the world to donate billions to this new Authority.
Arafat pocketed every Israeli concession, turned his territory into an armed camp and then launched a vicious terror war that has lasted more than three years and killed more than 1,000 Israelis. It is Lucy and the football all over again, and the same chorus of delusionals who so applauded Oslo – Jimmy Carter, Sandy Berger, Tom Friedman – is applauding again. This time, however, the Israeli surrender is so breathtaking it makes Oslo look rational.
A Palestinian state, of course. Evacuating every Jewish settlement in new Palestine, of course. Redividing Jerusalem, of course. But that is not enough. Beilin gives up the ultimate symbol of the Jewish connection and claim to the land, the center of the Jewish state for 1,000 years before the Roman destruction, the subject of Jewish longing in poetry and prayer for the 2,000 years since – the Temple Mount. And Beilin doesn’t just give it up to, say, some neutral international authority. He gives it to sovereign Palestine. Jews will visit at Arab sufferance.
Not satisfied with having given up Israel’s soul, Beilin gives up the body too. He not only returns Israel to its 1967 borders, arbitrary and indefensible, but he does so without any serious security safeguards.
Palestine promises to acquire and buy no more weapons than specified in some treaty annex. This is a joke. Oslo had similarly detailed limitations on Palestinian weaponry, and nobody even pretended to enforce them. Last year, a massive illegal boatload came in from Iran on the Karine A. What did the world do about it? Nothing.
Today, however, Israel still has control over Palestine’s borders. Under Beilin, this ends. Palestine will be free to acquire as much lethal weaponry as it wants.
And on the critical question that even the most dovish Israelis insist on – that the Palestinians not have the right to flood Israel with Arab refugees – the agreement is utterly ambiguous. Third parties (including among others the irredeemably hostile Syria and its puppet Lebanon) are to suggest exactly how many Palestinians are to return to Israel, and the basis for the number Israel will be required to accept will be the mathematical average!
This is not a peace treaty, this is a suicide note – by a private citizen on behalf of a country that has utterly rejected him politically. That it should get any encouragement from the United States or from its secretary of state is a disgrace.
Krauthammer was right then. He is even more right now.
In ’05, Ariel Sharon warned us of painful concessions to come. In my article, “Painful Concessions”, I warned,
[..] There is a progression of events here that cannot be ignored and such events are all related.
First Arafat rejected Barak’s offer at Camp David. At Taba additional concessions were offered but went nowhere. Behind the scene negotiations continued among the interested parties.
As a result of which the Saudi Plan was “released” through the NYT in the winter of ’02 and endorsed by the Arab League shortly thereafter. In July of ’02, Bush recognized the creation of Palestine for the first time. During the entire year, Israeli negotiators traveled to the US many times to negotiate details of the final plan and how to implement it.
This all culminated in the release of the Roadmap in the spring of 2003, just after the invasion of Iraq, which was not unrelated. One might argue that Israel would not agree to the Plan unless and until Iraq was neutered. So perhaps it is not fanciful to suggest, as Condi and others do, that Iraq was invaded to protect Israel. Finally, the Geneva Accords were signed in early ’03. They served to be a little more specific then the Saudi Plan.
The “peace process” is like an enormous ship traveling with great momentum to a predetermined destination. Nothing Israel can do will stop it or alter its course. While Israel continues to debate the details, the ship continues, inexorably.
So long as Israel travels the Roadmap it will not be able to avoid its destination. Nor can Israel get off the Roadmap. That is not to say that Israelis would not accept an end of conflict agreement along the lines of the Geneva Accords and the Saudi Plan when the time comes so long as it includes “normalization” and no return of refugees.
Then, all they will have to worry about is whether the Arabs can be trusted.
For me that’s a no-brainer.
