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Peace Process

Olmert offers Arabs more ‘sweeping, painful’ concessions


By Stan Goodenough
March 22, 2007

Just how far he is prepared to go to keep his word is unclear, but a domestically increasingly unpopular Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert Thursday messaged the Israel-hating Palestinian Arabs that he is ready to make “sweeping, painful and tough” concessions to persuade them that Israel serious seeks peace.

Olmert, who according to nationwide surveys only has the support of two or three percent of the Israeli electorate, appeared to be pinning his hopes of leaving a legacy on the “Palestinians” snapping at, and swallowing, his bait.

The concessions he is believed to be contemplating include the surrender of more Jewish lands to the Arabs and a severing for all time of any Jewish claim to great swathes of Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount.

This would be in line with US expectations and international demands on Israel.

The world rejects the Jews’ right to any of their biblical heartland including their holiest site.

Instead, it has become universally supportive of the Arab claim that these lands are rightfully their’s.

Where left-wing Israeli politicians once dismissed as unthinkable any notion of establishing a Palestinian state* in the Land of Israel, international pressure has successfully eroded that position so that today all the political parties except for those on the extreme right endorse this idea.

This despite the fact that there has historically never been a Palestinian state nor a Palestinian nation.

*Labor Party leader and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin wrote “Palestine will arise on the ruins of Israel.”

And in his 1978 book, “And now tomorrow,” veteran leftist politician Shimon Peres rejected a Palestinian state and wrote:

"During a war, the borders of the Palestinian state will serve as an ideal springboard for mobile forces to immediately breach Israeli defenses towards the infrastructure vital to Israel's existence, to limit the freedom of action of the Israeli Air Force in Israeli skies, and to shed the population's blood through "masses of artillery positions" proximate to the border. In the absence of defensible borders, Israel will be annihilated in a war."

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