U.S. post-mortem on peace talks: Israel killed them

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

http://972mag.com/u-s-post-mortem-on-peace-talks-israel-killed-them/90371/

Americans involved in Kerry initiative give interview indicting Netanyahu government and exonerating Palestinian leader Abbas.

Yedioth Ahronoth’s Nahum Barnea, Israel’s No. 1 print journalist, has a long interview on Friday with unnamed U.S. officials involved in the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, giving their view of why they failed. The interview is quite a bombshell, as well as a historic document. (Hours after this post went online, Yediot translated the interview and put it up on its English-language website.)
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Afterward Barnea suggested that the interviewees seemed to be wishing for an intifada, and they responded, “The opposite is the truth. It would be a tragedy.” The point they make is that unfortunately, recent history shows that Israeli-Arab peace only happens after war makes it urgent.

But the real importance of the American officials’ reading of the Kerry peace talks, which Barnea describes as being “as close as can be to an official U.S. position,” is that they place virtually all of the blame for the failure on the Israeli side. They especially blame the announcements of a combined 14,000 new settlement housing tenders, adding that they just learned about a massive expropriation of West Bank land for settlement construction, which sounds like a reference to a recent Haaretz report. “This doesn’t go together with an agreement,” the officials say.

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

1. "we didn't understand."

We didn’t understand that Netanyahu uses these announcements of settlement construction plans to ensure the survival of his government. We didn’t understand that the continuation of settlement construction allows his cabinet ministers to very effectively sabotage the negotiations. There are a lot of other reasons for the failure of the effort, but people in Israel must not avoid seeing the bitter truth – the biggest land mine was the settlements. The Palestinians don’t believe that Israel genuinely intends to let them create a state when it is building settlements on the land earmarked for that state.”

It seems that Israel has played the SoS and his staff, the POTUS for that matter and the American people.


And the USA considers Israel an ally?