As usual, Caroline Glick cuts through the popular naivety, and with the dry cloth of reality wipes Governmental blind hope off the dusty brow of ignorance.
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Why George Mitchell Is The Wrong Solution For Middle East Peace
-Caroline Glick
“…
Given this, it is hard to believe that with the advent of the Obama administration, we are seeing history repeat itself with nearly unheard of exactness. US President Barack Obama’s appointment of former Sen. George Mitchell as his envoy for the so-called Palestinian-Israeli “peace process” will provide us with a spectacle of an unvarnished repeat of history.
In December 2000, outgoing president Bill Clinton appointed Mitchell to advise him on how to reignite the “peace process” after the Palestinians rejected statehood and launched their terror war against Israel in September 2000. Mitchell presented his findings to Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, in April 2001.
Mitchell asserted that Israel and the Palestinians were equally to blame for the Palestinian terror war against Israelis. He recommended that Israel end all Jewish construction outside the 1949 armistice lines, and stop fighting Palestinian terrorists.
As for the Palestinians, Mitchell said they had to make a “100 percent effort” to prevent the terror that they themselves were carrying out. This basic demand was nothing new. It formed the basis of the Clinton administration’s nod-nod-wink-wink treatment of Palestinian terrorism since the Palestinian Authority was established in 1994.
By insisting that the PLO make a “100 percent effort,” to quell the terror it was enabling, the Clinton administration gave the Palestinians built-in immunity from responsibility. Every time that his terrorists struck, Yasser Arafat claimed that their attacks had nothing to do with him. He was making a “100 percent effort” to stop the attacks, after all.
After getting Arafat off the hook, the Clinton administration proceeded to blame Israel. If Israel had just given up more land, or forced Jews from their homes, or given the PLO more money, Arafat could have saved the lives of his victims.
Mitchell’s plan, although supported by then-secretary of state Colin Powell, was never adopted by Bush because at the time, terrorists were massacring Israelis every day. It would have been politically unwise for Bush to accept a plan that asserted moral equivalence between Israel and the PLO when rescue workers were scraping the body parts of Israeli children off the walls of bombed out pizzerias and bar mitzva parties.
But while his eponymous plan was rejected, its substance, which was based on the Clinton Plan, formed the basis of the Tenet Plan, the road map plan and the Annapolis Plan. And now, Mitchell is about to return to Israel, at the start of yet another presidential administration to offer us his plan again.
MITCHELL, OF COURSE, is not the only one repeating the past. His boss, Barack Obama, is about to repeat the failures his immediate predecessors. Like Clinton and Bush, Obama is making the establishment of a Palestinian state the centerpiece of his foreign policy agenda.”
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After numerous attempts, I realized that I couldn’t couldn’t add anything to her article that would do it justice. The entire article is a *must read*.
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