Barak: alienation with US over settlements not good for Israel [ WORLD BULLETIN- TURKEY NEWS, WORLD NEWS ]
In an interview with Army Radio he said in the future there would be a separate Palestinian state "whether you like it or not".
The interview comes as Israelis mark Memorial Day, commemorating Israeli soldiers killed in invasion.
Barak, a former top ranking soldier, leads the Labour Party which is part of the current government coalition.
"The world isn't willing to accept, and we won't change that in 2010, the expectation that Israel will rule another people for decades more," he said.
"There is no other way, whether you like it or not, than to let them rule themselves," he said, speaking about the idea of a separate Palestinian state.
"Alienation over settlement"
Barak saw growing rift with the United States over settlement insistence.
"The alienation that is developing with the United States is not good for Israel," said Barak.
Barak called for a "far-reaching Israeli diplomatic initiative" on peace, including talks with the Palestinians on core issues of the Middle East conflict.
"We have strong ties with the United States, a bond, long-term friendship and strategic partnership. We receive three billion dollars from them each year, we get the best planes in the world from them," he said.
"For all these reasons we must act to change things," Barak said, while voicing doubts Netanyahu would soon enjoy the same warm ties with the White House as his predecessors did when President George W. Bush was in office. ...
Netanyahu insists on East Jerusalem building, hope fades for two-state solution / The Christian Science Monitor - CSMonitor.com
Israeli Prime Minister insisted Thursday on continued settlement building in East Jerusalem. Israeli expansion in the contested city is one reason Palestinians are losing hope in the two-state solution.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted in private talks with US officials over the weekend that his country's settlement building in East Jerusalem will continue, the latest in a string of pronouncements that have driven down Palestinian support for the so-called "two-state" solution, which would involve the emergence of a sovereign Palestine living side by side with Israel.
US-Israel relations have cooled over Israel's commitment to continued construction, as shown by Mr. Netanyahu's recent a no-frills visit to the White House seen in Israel as intentionally humiliating – and Palestinian leaders are furious. The prospects for restarted peace talks with the Palestinians soon are dim.
The Prime Minister has repeatedly insisted that Jews have a right to build anywhere in East Jerusalem, even in the still largely Palestinian east of the city that Israel seized in 1967 but is not seen as sovereign Israeli territory by the UN or other world governments. He told ABC this week: "The Palestinian demand is that we prevent Jews from building in Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem. That is an unacceptable demand."
IN PICTURES: Israeli settlements
Perhaps so. But Palestinians want East Jerusalem for their future capital, and their negotiators say continued Israeli expansion in the area amounts to creating facts on the ground that will deprive them of what they view as rightfully theirs in any peace settlement. Now, Palestinian opinion is shifting towards support for the so-called "one-state" solution, in which a single country will exist between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean with a demographic balance that heavily favors their side.
The current crisis was touched off by Israel's March 9 announcement of plans to build 1,600 new housing units in Ramat Shlomo, a hilly patch of green that East Jerusalem resident Jamal Amori can see from his minimarket in the neighborhood of Shuafat.
Mr. Amori and other Palestinians – as well as the international community – see the planned homes as part of a steady spread of Israeli settlements in occupied territory. As a result, Ramat Shlomo has become the center of a standoff between Arabs and Jews over Jerusalem’s future – and the future of Israeli-Palestinian peace.
“They’ve been confiscating our land since the 1970s,” says Mr. Amori, whose family owns some of the land in question, according to the Mapping and Geographic Information Systems Department of the Arab Studies Society in Jerusalem. “Even if you do own land, it’s almost impossible to get a permit to build. It feels like a strategy to get us to move elsewhere.” ...
Defense Minister: Israel needs to recognize the occupation must end - Haaretz - Israel News
Israel must recognize that the world will not put up with decades more of Israeli rule over the Palestinian people, Defense Minister Ehud Barak said in unusually frank remarks Monday.
Barak's comments came against the backdrop of severe friction between the U.S. and Israel's hawkish government over an impasse in peacemaking.
"The world isn't willing to accept - and we won't change that in 2010 - the expectation that Israel will rule another people for decades more," he said. "It's something that doesn't exist anywhere else in the world."
"The alienation that is developing with the United States is not good for Israel," Barak said during a Memorial Day radio interview. "We have strong ties with the United States, a bond, long-term friendship and strategic partnership. We receive three billion dollars from them each year; we get the best planes in the world from them."
"For all these reasons we must act to change things," Barak said, while voicing doubt that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would soon enjoy the same warm ties with the White House as his predecessors did when President George W. Bush was in office. ...
Obama’s Ambiguous Call for Peace Not Heard by Israelis � SpeakEasy
During Obama’s news conference closing the nuclear summit, he was asked whether he “might rejuvenate some initiatives in trouble spots such as the Middle East and elsewhere.” According to Peter Baker of the New York Times, the president’s answer “seemed to signal a renewed determination to reinsert himself into the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. By describing the long-running conflict as a threat to American security, he effectively adopted the argument of Gen. David H. Petraeus, his Middle East commander, who recently warned that the region’s troubles created a dangerous environment for American troops stationed in nearby Iraq and elsewhere in the area.”
Baker quoted Obama: “It is a vital national security interest of the United States to reduce these conflicts because whether we like it or not, we remain a dominant military superpower. And when conflicts break out, one way or another, we get pulled into them. And that ends up costing us significantly in terms of both blood and treasure.”
But if that’s the way America’s most influential newspaper framed it, Israel’s equivalent, Ha’aretz, gave the same answer quite a different spin. There, U.S. correspondent Natasha Mozgovaya wrote that “Obama gave a surprisingly downbeat assessment of the chances for a U.S.-brokered peace settlement in the Middle East, saying that the United States cannot help if Israel and the Palestinians decide they cannot negotiate.”
She quoted only these words from the president’s response: “The two sides may say to themselves, ‘We are not prepared to resolve these issues no matter how much pressure the United States brings to bear,’” adding that “Obama reiterated that peace is a vital goal, but one that may be beyond reach even if we are applying all of our political capital.”
Both papers omitted Obama’s quote from former Secretary of State Jim Baker: We can’t want peace more than they do. So how much do Israelis care about the peace process?
If Ha’aretz, the most liberal of that nation’s major newspapers, left the peace issue to the end of its report, the more centrist Yediot Aharonot (at least on its English website) didn’t bother to mention Obama’s answer about peace process answer at all. The conservative Jerusalem Post headlined it, but with the same negative spin as Ha’aretz: “Obama: U.S. Cannot Impose Peace.” The lead sentence was: “US President Barack Obama acknowledged Tuesday that no matter how much pressure America applies to the parties in the Middle East conflict, peace may not be achieved.” ...
Daniel Levy: Why Netanyahu Canceled His DC Visit, and Why the GOP Is Applauding
Yesterday evening (late night Israel time), Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that he would not, after all, be attending next week's Nuclear Security Summit to be hosted by President Obama in Washington, DC.
Speaking to Republican party loyalists at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans, Liz Cheney in a manner that was not only very predictable but also as one imagines Netanyahu would have scripted her -- attacked the president of her own country for what she called his "shabby" and "disgraceful" treatment of Israel. The party faithful applauded.
The reasons cited by Israeli officials for their PM's Washington no-show were last-minute concerns that Israel's own nuclear program -- or in official lingua franca, non-NPT signatory status -- would be raised by certain summit attendees -- notably, Egypt and Turkey. It is an explanation that fails to meet even the lowest bar of plausibility -- unless Benjamin Netanyahu has been moonlighting as Sleeping Beauty for the last decade or more. It is a very long-standing tradition that at every possible international forum Egypt raises its concerns at Israel's nuclear program and non-NPT status, and it did so along with other Arab states and in Israel's presence when multilateral Arms Control and Regional Security talks took place throughout the 90's after the Madrid Conference.
Turkey too has been articulating its public support for a WMD-free Middle East for some time. So the concerns noted by the New York Times regarding Egypt and Turkey were hardly a new development necessitating any reassessment of a prime ministerial travel schedule. To be clear, Israel is not boycotting the summit and will in fact be represented by the most respected, talented, and all-together decent member of the government, Minister Dan Meridor. But that doesn't change the headline -- the Netanyahu no-show. ...
OpEdNews - Article: Defacto Unitary State - Israel/Palestine
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The first map - and I would expect that most readers are familiar with these maps - showed a small scattering of white dots representing the Jewish settlements mostly along the northern Mediterranean shores of the British Palestinian mandate. The next shows the demarcation lines as proposed by the UN, giving Israel 54% of the land. The third map is the familiar "green-line" map of the era before the 1967 war. The final map - and this is the one that keeps changing - shows what is left of actual Palestinian "controlled" territory. I use the word controlled, as the area is truly under the control of the IDF and its self-made military laws, supported by the "quisling government" [to quote Johann] of the Palestinian Authority.
What is left at the moment is a mere 12% of the original Palestinian territory, broken up into a gerrymandered arrangement of non-contiguous cantonments. These areas represent both refugee settlements from the 1947-48 and 1967 wars and indigenous settlements that have survived in one fashion or another the occupation of surrounding lands.
The 12% solution - not possible
While I have seen the latter map many times before, the green dots this time appeared to be incongruously small and divided: a two state solution - at least from the appearances on the map - is no longer possible. Twelve per cent? Five million people? Scattered villages, refugee camps, water resources confiscated by Israel, farmlands being confiscated directly as military areas or through the archaic three year vacancy rule? Off limit roads bisecting communities? A huge wall snaking its way around, through and between areas of Palestinian land, creating barriers to all walks of life?
No, this scattered confined remnant could never be considered a state except in the fantasies of the upper netherworlds of politicians and religious fanatics. What is actually on the map is one state, the state of Israel, that has incorporated a series of cantonments into the fabric of its existence. These are not benign cantonments, but are harmful to both populations, assuredly much more harmful to the Palestinian population within the cantonments. It is full blown apartheid, except for the regular intrusions of the IDF.
