Reader Post: More One-Sidedness – Blaming Israel for Humiliations During Talks

netanyahu abbasI seem to be reading over and over that Israel took actions that “humiliated” Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas over the course of the recently collapsed peace talks.

At a speech to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy on May 8, Martin Indyk blamed Israel for humiliating Abbas by claiming that he had agreed to increased settlement activity. Washington Post columnist David Ignatius makes a similar claim in his May 15 Op-Ed, when he stated that Israeli building in a Jerusalem suburb “humiliated” Abbas.

If diplomatic humiliation is a sufficient reason to end the talks, however, then by all rights, Israel should have walked away long ago.  Was Prime Minister Netanyahu not humiliated when he was forced to release 26 murderers of Jews from Israeli prisons in July of last year just to start the talks? Was he not further humiliated by the heroes’ welcome they received from Abbas? Were Israel and its Prime Minister not humiliated when these events repeated themselves two more times in October and December of 2013, with each prisoner being rewarded by the Palestinian Authority with cash payments?

A whole new source of humiliation came from the US itself, when US President Obama effectively threatened Netanyahu in an interview with Jeff Goldberg, telling him that the US would stop defending Israel from the onslaught of OIC-inspired condemnations at the UN.

Each of these events was its own diplomatic humiliation, of course.  Netanyahu responded to these humiliations, however, with relative indifference.  He even stated in December, after the third prisoner release, that “leadership is tested by making the difficult decisions.  We were not elected to lead Israel by making the easy decisions.”  He continued to move forward until it became clear that no progress was being made.

Israel’s supposed humiliations of Abbas, therefore, are simply no excuse for Abbas’s behavior.

3 thoughts on “Reader Post: More One-Sidedness – Blaming Israel for Humiliations During Talks”

  1. The Arabs can as well recall how they were humiliated in 1948, in 1967 and in 1973 and blame the Jooos.

  2. Norman_In_New_York

    Abbas’s worst humiliation occurred in 2007 when Hamas celebrated its election victory in Gaza by throwing Fatah men off roofs and even trashed Arafat’s Nobel Peace Prize. As for alleged current humiliations, Abbas is crying all the way to the bank.

  3. telling him that the US would stop defending Israel from the onslaught of OIC-inspired condemnations at the UN.

    How brutal.

    What’s important is joint action to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities back to the Stone Age.

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