You may view the 5 minute update this week via audio:
In this week’s 5 minute update, we focused on:
1) The current status of the Israel / PLO peace process
A group of former top European officials called on the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, not to ease or delay the implementation of guidelines that would bar the organization from funding Israeli institutions located in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The group consists of senior officials from various EU countries, including former NATO secretary-general Javier Solana; former French foreign minister Hubert Védrine; former German state secretary Wolfgang Ischinger; and Benita Ferrero-Waldner, a former Austrian foreign minister and European Commissioner. Published in July, the EU guidelines mandate a denial of European funding to, and cooperation with, Israeli institutions based or operating in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and a requirement that all future agreements between Israel and the EU include a clause in which Israel accepts the position that none of the territory in the West Bank and East Jerusalem belongs to Israel.
“With great concern we have taken note of recent calls to delay, modify or even suspend the European Commission guidelines on funding of Israeli entities in the territories occupied by Israel since June 1967,” read a letter sent to Catherine Ashton by a lineup of 15 so-called European Eminent Persons. “We urge you to uphold this commitment by supporting the guidelines and their full application by EU institutions, notably in regard to the ongoing negotiations about Israel’s participation in Horizon 2020,” the letter stated. “Their strict application serves to reiterate that the EU does not recognize and will not support settlements and other illegal facts on the ground…. It is these facts on the ground, not the guidelines, which threaten to make a negotiated solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict impossible.” In a speech at the United Nations in late September, Palestinian President Mahmood Abbas endorsed European restrictions on assistance to Israeli organizations located in the West Bank and East Jerusalem saying in a United Nations address that the European Union approach is a model for others to follow. Israel fiercely rejected the directive, saying it refuses to sign any further agreements with the EU that include such clauses.
The authors of the letter warned that a possible deferment of the guidelines, which are set to take effect in January 2014, could harm the ongoing peace process. “If the EU were to delay or suspend the guidelines, or not fully apply them to the agreement with Israel on Horizon 2020 [a scientific cooperation program], this could further undermine the Palestinians’ trust in the negotiation process and their ability to continue the talks,” the letter stated. “In other words, delaying or suspending the guidelines is likely to undermine negotiations, not help them.”
Israel and the Palestinians have had 8 rounds of peace talks since they started in July. The US-brokered peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority have reached an impasse due over the issues of borders of a Palestinian state and Israel’s security. The sources claimed that Israel has insisted over the past two months on talking only about security-related issues. “But in the face of Palestinian insistence, some meetings dealt with the border,” the sources said, referring to the secret talks held in Jerusalem and Jericho. According to an unnamed, senior foreign diplomat with knowledge of the discussions, during the latest round of talks, the Israeli team of Justice Minister Tzipi Livni and Netanyahu adviser Yitzhak Molcho made it clear to the Palestinians that Israel intends to retain some of the settlement blocs as part of a final agreement but refused to name which areas or discuss possible compensation to the Palestinians for the territory to be annexed. The Israeli team also reportedly “refused in principle” the idea of a land-swap deal with a 1:1 ratio. According to this idea, Israel would transfer to the Palestinians land adjacent to the West Bank, equivalent in size to the settlements that will become part of Israel in a final status agreement. According to the source, the talks will falter unless a face-to-face meeting by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and PA President Mahmoud Abbas is brokered by the US administration. “The prospects of achieving progress in the current talks are zero,” the report quoted Palestinian sources as saying. The Palestinians fear that Israel may use the meetings between Netanyahu and Abbas to “promote an imaginary peace process and avoid international pressure, the sources said. An anonymous senior Palestinian official said that the talks were in a state of “quiet crisis,” and were liable to explode if Israel didn’t modify its positions.
As a result, the Palestinians are seriously considering declaring the failure of the peace talks with Israel, a senior PLO official said. Hanna Amireh, a member of the PLO Executive Committee, said that this was one of the scenarios that were discussed during the last meeting of the Palestinian leadership. Amireh accused Israel of seeking to “win time” and blame the Palestinians for the failure of the US-sponsored talks. “All the previous sessions of negotiations have not produced anything,” he said. “We are now seriously discussing the nature of our steps in the aftermath of the collapse of the negotiations.” Amireh pointed out that one of the options facing the Palestinians calls for seeking full membership of the United Nations and its agencies.
The Palestinians want the United States to take a more active role in the peace talks. In a meeting with Abbas in London last month, Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad al-Malki said that Abbas received assurances on this matter from US Secretary of State, John Kerry that the United States would take a more active role in the peace talks if they showed signs of failure. Later, an Israeli official said that this was so. “We’ve agreed now to intensify these talks, and we’ve agreed that the American participation should be increased somewhat in order to try to help facilitate them,” Kerry said. Speaking at a high-level meeting of the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee meeting on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in late September, Kerry said the idea up until now was “to have the Palestinians and Israelis meet together, work this through, build trust, build relationship. But at the same time, we are there to facilitate, to help if there needs to be a bridging proposal to work on the way forward.”
Kerry said the talks were taking place on two separate tracks. The first, formal track was the meetings between Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s special envoy, Yitzhak Molcho, and Justice Minister Tzipi Livni with Palestinian negotiators Saeb Erekat and Muhammad Shtayyeh. According to Kerry, that track was working at “discerning the gaps” and defining the issues and “the parameters that they need to work through.” He said there was a second track that included Netanyahu, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and US President Barack Obama. “And as needed, as we think appropriate, as we need to move the process, we will be consulting among each other and working to move this process forward.” Kerry said that all the final-status issues were on the table: territory, security, refugees and Jerusalem. And, he stressed, the sides were not seeking an interim agreement but rather a final-status accord.
In an interview with Eitan Haber, a close aid to Israel former Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin who signed the 1993 Oslo Accords which started the negotiations for a final status peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, he was asked the following if there is an opportunity for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. He said: I think Kerry understands today, better than any of us, that if it will be dependent on the Israelis, nothing is going to happen, and if it is dependent on the Palestinians, nothing will happen. And so, in my opinion, I believe that in the next few months, US Secretary of State John Kerry will say the following: ‘Gentlemen, we, the Americans, say this and that and the other.’ He will set out what he thinks needs to be done, ‘take it or leave it’ … and that if Kerry does so, both sides would be “better off taking it and not leaving it.”
Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the root of the Israel / Palestinian conflict is not the “so-called territories” or West Bank settlements. Since the first Arab attack on a home housing Jewish immigrants in Jaffa in 1921, the root of the conflict has not been the “occupation,” the “territories” or the settlements, but rather an Arab refusal to recognize the Jews’ right to a sovereign state in their historic homeland, he said. Palestinian Arabs attacked Jews in Jaffa in 1921 and massacred Jews in Hebron, destroying an ancient community. It wasn’t a territorial conflict then; Jews didn’t have any territory. Then the prime minister hammered the point home, by noting that the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini was a partner and consultant to Hitler and Eichmann; the latter even called the leader of Arabs in Mandatory Palestine a friend. The mufti offered up Muslims as SS soldiers and broadcast Nazi propaganda. Jews still didn’t have a state then. There were no West Bank settlements.
Therefore, the root of the conflict, Netanyahu clarified, is that the Palestinians don’t want Jews to be in Israel. The Palestinian Authority says it recognizes Israel, but that isn’t enough. They need to recognize Israel as the Jewish state and homeland of the Jewish people, and until that happens, there cannot be peace. Netanyahu said: “A necessary condition to getting a true solution [to the Israeli-Palestinian] conflict was and remains clear as the sun: ending the refusal to recognize the right of the Jews to a homeland of their own in the land of their fathers,” he said. “That is the most important key to solving the conflict.” Furthermore, Netanyahu said that the Palestinians need to give up their claim to the right of return. Recognizing a Jewish state but wanting to flood it with Palestinians is disingenuous and contradictory, and cannot be part of any peace agreement Israel signs with the Palestinians.
The political faction of the PLO headed by Palestinian President Mahmood Abbas, Fatah, has rejected the position of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who linked the possibility of making peace to Fatah’s recognition of Israel as a state for the Jewish people. Fatah repeated that it refuses to recognize Israel as a Jewish homeland. “This is the language of acquiescence and we won’t recognize Israel as a Jewish state,” said Fatah spokesman Ahmed Assaf. “Let Israel go to the United Nations and demand changing its name into the Jewish state.” If the objective behind Netanyahu’s speech is to ask the Palestinians to give up their rights, he added, “then we all refuse to give up our rights.”
A senior Likud lawmaker Tzachi Hanegbi who is a member of Netanyahu’s political party said that Israel will accept a peace agreement that includes handing over Arab parts of Jerusalem. He said: “I think we will be able to give a good answer, a win-win answer, to almost every issue including the Jerusalem issue, including the settlement issue, every issue has a compromise that can be relevant to both sides.” In comments at a news conference following the panel discussion, Hanegbi described how he could convince more conservative members of his party that a two-state solution would be acceptable. He would argue the following: “Look, you’re afraid that Jerusalem will be divided? No, it’s going to be some creative idea that will allow them to have their own sovereignty in their neighborhoods and to declare whatever they want to declare about it, and we will have sovereignty over other parts,” Hanegbi, who is considered a confidant of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told reporters. “All these things will be worked out,” Hanegbi concluded. “The devil is, as you know, in the details.”
Regarding the details of a peace agreement, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said that the future border between a Palestinian state and Jordan will extend from the Dead Sea through the Jordan Valley and all the way up to Beit She’an. “This is a Palestinian-Jordanian border, and that’s how it will remain,” he said. “Frankly Israel won’t be present between us and Jordan.” However, Abbas did not rule out the possibility that international troops would be deployed to supervise any agreement with Israel in a final deal.
According to a senior Palestinian negotiator, the Obama administration is pressing hard for Israel to give up the strategic Jordan Valley in a deal with the Palestinians. The Jordan Valley cuts through the heart of Israel. It runs from the Tiberias River in the north to the Dead Sea in the center to the city of Aqaba at the south of the country, stretching through the biblical Arabah desert. Obama’s proposal calls for international forces to maintain security control along with unarmed Palestinian police forces, the PA negotiator said. Israel will retain security posts in some strategic areas of the Jordan Valley, according to the U.S. plan. When it comes to the West Bank, which borders Jerusalem and is within rocket range of Israel’s main population centers, Israel is expected to evacuate about 90 percent of its Jewish communities currently located in the territory, as outlined in Kerry’s plan. Meanwhile, regarding Jerusalem, Kerry’s plan is to rehash what is known as the Clinton parameters. The formula, pushed by President Bill Clinton during the Camp David talks in 2000, called for Jewish areas of Jerusalem to remain Israeli while the Palestinians would get sovereignty over neighborhoods that are largely Arab. Most Arab sections are located in eastern Jerusalem. Regarding the Temple Mount, the Obama administration plan calls for the Palestinian Authority and Jordan to receive sovereignty over the Temple Mount while Israel will retain the land below the Western Wall. The plan remains in effect as the basis for negotiations. Israel has not agreed to the U.S. plan for the Temple Mount, with details still open for discussion, stated the PA negotiator. The PA negotiator further said Israel rejected a Palestinian request that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agree not to place the final peace plan up for referendum in the Knesset.
Palestinian representatives said Israel wants its army to retain a presence along the Jordan River for many years while the Palestinians insist that no Israeli soldiers can be allowed to remain on the Palestinian-Jordanian border. One Israeli government official, who refused to go into the content of the negotiations, responded to Abbas’s comments about the Jordan Valley by saying that “if there is going to be a peace agreement, the Palestinians will have to engage seriously on Israel’s security concerns.” According to the official, “the whole idea that Israel will pull out and hope for the best is not a serious option. If the Palestinians want to see an independent state, they have to be able to deal seriously with Israel’s security concerns. If they run away from this issue, they will be pushing away the chance of the deal and the creation of an independent Palestinian state.” Israel Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, who heads the Israeli negotiating team with the Palestinian Authority, is willing to pull out the Israeli army from the Jordan Valley which guards Israel’s long eastern border, and let an international force take its place. Netanyahu vigorously opposes this, citing the region’s crucial strategic importance. In addition, Livni has agreed to divide Jerusalem between Israel and a future state of “Palestine” in Judea and Samaria, as well as a large scale eviction of Jews from communities in Judea and Samaria – whereas Netanyahu believes that communities need to remain under Palestinian sovereignty, with proper security arrangements.
Fearing a peace agreement with the Palestinians, Knesset members from Netanyahu’s own party, Likud, as well as the “Religious Zionist” party, Jewish Home, who oppose a Palestinian state are pressuring Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to minimize the concessions he authorizes in the diplomatic negotiations with the Palestinian Authority. As a result, a total of 17 Knesset members wrote a letter to him saying, “Twenty years after the wretched Oslo Accords, we call on the prime minister to present our clear position to the US secretary of state: Israel will not return to the Oslo outline, and will not hand further parts of the homeland to the Palestinian Authority.”
Israel’s deputy ministry of defense, Danny Danon, said he and his co-signers were not afraid that the current peace talks would actually lead to a final-status agreement and the creation of a Palestinian state, “but we want to make sure we won’t be surprised. We know the positions of Minister Livni and of Erekat and Martin Indyk [a former US diplomat tasked with facilitating the talks] — so we want to make sure that our ideas too are being heard and represented during these negotiations.”
Finally, Israel Knesset member Moshe Feiglin, a long-time Temple Mount prayer rights advocate, sent a letter to the Israel Police asking for clarifications regarding the legal authority of the Arabs to control the Temple Mount challenging the reply of an Israeli government decision taken after the Six-Day War of 1967 authorized Arab authorities to control the Temple Mount. He then quoted the comments of then Justice Minister Yaakov Shimshon Shapira from a committee meeting in June 1968 as saying “We never announced that the entirety of the Temple Mount belongs to the Arabs. We never announced that it is forbidden for Jews to pray there, we never announced that it is forbidden for Jews to establish a synagogue there.” Feiglin wrote that in the absence of such a decision, “all directives which discriminate between Muslims and non-Muslims regarding entrance to the [Temple] Mount should be immediately rescinded, and free entrance from all gates to the Mount be enabled, in accordance with the law.”
An agreement to divide Jerusalem and establish a PLO state is a tribulation event.
The link to these articles are as follows:
1) Israel, Palestine to start new round of talks
2) Former European leaders call on EU to enact settlement ban
3) At U.N., Palestinian leader Abbas criticizes Israel, but pledges good faith in peace talks
4) Israeli-Palestinian talks said to be stuck over land swaps
5) Report: Israel has caused peace talks to reach a dead-end
6) PLO official: Palestinians ‘seriously considering’ to declare failure of peace talks
7) Netanyahu lowers expectations for Israeli-Palestinian peace
8.) Netanyahu: For peace, Palestinians must recognize Jewish homeland
9) Fatah repeats that it does not recognise Israel as a Jewish state
10) Palestine seeks more US role in peace talks
11) Kerry promises Abbas more active U.S. role if peace talks continue to stall
12) Kerry says Israel, Palestinian talks to intensify with increased US role
13) Kerry: Israelis, Palestinians to intensify talks toward final agreement
14) Obama said to urge Netanyahu to accelerate talks with PA
15) ‘When they become PM, they realize how utterly dependent Israel is on the US’
16) Jerusalem negotiable, Palestinian right of return not, Likud MK tells J Street
17.) PA President Abbas: Israel won’t be present between us and Jordan
18) Obama pushing Israel to vacate Jordan Valley
19) Livni ‘Willing to Cede Control of Jordan Valley’
20) Livni vows to end Mideast conflict with final-status accord
21) Right-wing MKs begin pressuring Netanyahu against giving up land to Palestinians
22) 17 coalition MKs warn PM: We oppose a Palestinian state
23) Likud officials pledge to prevent Israeli-Palestinian agreements
24) Feiglin to question legal authority, legitimacy of Temple Mount Waqf
From a Biblical prophetic perspective, the reason why the God of Israel would allow these events to happen is because it will result in the end of the exile of the house of Jacob and the reunification of the 12 tribes of Israel (Ephraim and Judah).
We will to be “watchmen on the walls of Jerusalem” and we will not rest until the God of Israel makes Jerusalem a praise in the earth (Isaiah 62).
Shalom in Yeshua the Messiah,
Eddie Chumney
Hebraic Heritage Ministries Int’l