Palestinians Want Israel (and Rest of World) To Concede Everything Before it Will Talk Peace

Truthfully, the real reason there is no peace between Israel and the Palestinians is the Palestinians don't want peace. No other country in the world has made concessions the way Israel has. Since 1977, they given up areas of land three times the size of the State of Israel. The Oslo process began in 1993. Sixteen years have passed since then, and they are no closer to a permanent settlement.

The Palestinians don't want peace, after all its bad for buisness. It is the hatred of Israel that allows the PA to keep power. It deflects public anger from their own fraud, theft of public funds and incompetence, to that "evil Zionist entity." That's why the terrorists Arafat walked away from an almost done deal during the Clinton Administration and launched the "second intifada."

US President Barack Obama gave the Palestinians a new excuse to avoid peace. The President's demand for a settlement freeze was a gift to the Palestinians. They twisted his pressure for the freeze and made it a pre-condition for negotiations, giving the Palestinians an excuse to avoid negotiations and the other Arab nations an excuse to avoid making the "gestures" for which the President is looking.

Now that Netanyahu's 10 month freeze has blunted the President's clumsy settlement demands the Palestinians have a new way to delay peace talks.  Their new tactic is to demand that Israel concede all the major points before they will engage in talks.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas announced on Tuesday that the Palestinians won't resume peace talks with Israel unless the international community recognized the 1967 borders as the boundaries of a Palestinian state and unless Israel halted all construction work in the settlements, including eastern Jerusalem.

He made the announcement during a speech he delivered at two-day meeting of the PLO Central Council in Ramallah, which is being to approve the extension of Abbas's term in office until new elections are held in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Abbas's term in office expired earlier this year. However, Abbas decided to stay in power because Fatah and Hamas failed to reach agreement over holding new presidential and parliamentary elections.

[Israel'] Foreign Minister Avigdor rejected the PA president's, saying that Jerusalem would not accept any preconditions for peace talks.

"Israel will not accept any preconditions for resuming peace negotiations," the foreign minister said, adding that the government has agreed to hold direct contact without preconditions. "Anyone who sets such conditions is just trying to escape reality and avoid negotiations and a peaceful solution."

...Abbas's latest demand - that the world recognize a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders as a precondition for resuming peace talks with Israel -, was seen by some Palestinians here as a sign of his new tough approach toward the Middle East conflict.

Since Obama made his settlement demands, Abbas had conditioned his return to the negotiating table on a complete freeze of settlement construction. During the Bush administration there was no such demand from Abbas, the terrorist leader called a "moderate" by the appeasement oriented western world.

"We want the world to recognize the 1967 borders as the point of reference for the peace negotiations," Abbas said. "And when they do so, they must also recognize East Jerusalem as territory that was occupied in 1967."

Abbas said that the Palestinians and Arabs would seek a resolution from the United Nations Security Council that determines the borders of the Palestinian state within the territories occupied in 1967.

"Once there's an international recognition of the 1967 borders and settlement construction is stopped, we will go to the negotiations," he added.

Abbas dismissed the Israeli government's decision to freeze construction in West Bank settlements, saying it did not include some 3,000 housing units and public building in the West Bank and did not apply to eastern Jerusalem.

"As far as we are concerned, this is not a settlement freeze," he said. "[Prime Minister Binyamin] Netanyahu is responsible for the stalemate in the peace process."

Abbas told the conference that since the signing of the Oslo Accords, the Palestinians and Israelis have altogether negotiated for a few months only. "After Oslo we negotiated for a brief period of one or two years about the implementation of the accord before [former Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin was assassinated," he said. "When Netanyahu was in power from 1996-1999, there were no negotiations about final-status issues at all."

Abbas said that in the final days of former prime minister Ehud Barak's term in office, the Palestinians and Israelis held 16 days of negotiations at the Camp David resort in the US. He said that the two sides did not hold any negotiations since 2000 and until the Annapolis peace conference in November 2007. After the conference, the Palestinians and Israelis held another seven months of negotiations, but to no avail, he added.

What Abbas forgot to mention is during those 2000 negotiations Barak offered everything but the Kitchen sink and the Palestinians responded with terrorism.



But then, Abbas forgets a lot because he has no intention of making peace, unless of course that peace is in the aftermath of the destruction of Israel.