Behind the Headline

Whoops, there gopes another "peace proposal", the Arab League one.

New York Times reports:-

Arab leaders will threaten to rescind their offer of full relations with Israel in exchange for a complete Israeli withdrawal from occupied lands unless Israel gives a positive response to their initiative, indicating the Arab states’ growing disillusionment with the prospects of a two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

At an Arab League meeting next month in Syria, the leaders are planning to reiterate support for their initiative, first issued in 2002. The initiative promised Israel normalization with the league’s 22 members in return for the creation of a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as the capital, and a resolution of the issue of Palestinian refugees.

and the Chinese news service has it this way:-

Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa said here Thursday that all negotiations at the Annapolis conference to restart the Mideast peace process had failed to bear fruit. Moussa, who was attending a two-day meeting of foreign ministers of South American and Arab countries in the Argentine capital, warned that the Mideast peace deal brokered at the U.S.-sponsored Annapolis conference last year has not achieved any progress due to Israel's adherence to its original policies.

Israel refused to negotiate on the Jerusalem issue or acknowledge the Palestinians' right to establish a state, said Moussa, adding that the Israeli government had adopted wrong policies against the Palestinians and refused to correct them, creating a major obstacle to any peace initiatives.

The text (here) is really cute, in an Arab way.

First point is that it "Requests Israel to reconsider its policies and declare that a just peace is its strategic option as well". In other words, non-peace is all our fault. We've never made peace overtures, not even in our declaration of statehood?

Here, May 14, 1948:-

We appeal - in the very midst of the onslaught launched against us now for months - to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.

We extend our hand to all neighbouring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighbourliness, and appeal to them to establish bonds of cooperation and mutual help with the sovereign Jewish people settled in its own land. The State of Israel is prepared to do its share in a common effort for the advancement of the entire Middle East.

Can any Arab state, league, organization or terror group match that magnamity?


The Arab League's plan's main operative section reads:-

I- Full Israeli withdrawal from all the territories occupied since 1967, including the Syrian Golan Heights, to the June 4, 1967 lines as well as the remaining occupied Lebanese territories in the south of Lebanon.

II- Achievement of a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem to be agreed upon in accordance with U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194.

III- The acceptance of the establishment of a sovereign independent Palestinian state on the Palestinian territories occupied since June 4, 1967 in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital.

Those are unacceptable. They deny the history of the conflict, ignore Arab agression, rewards Arab terror, inadequately provides for Israel's future security and existence and Jewish character.

This is enough for me but for those wanting more, Mitch Bard does a nice summary of this "peace plan" and its faultiness.