Calling for an international peace conference to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayault announced France would host a ministerial meeting May 30 before a peace conference. “The best way to resolve the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is direct bilateral negotiations,” said Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, throwing cold water on French plans to resolve the dispute. Netanyahu has no answer for how direct bilateral talks between Israelis and Palestinians would resolve anything, since it hasn’t worked before. When Secretary of State John Kerry ended his shuttle diplomacy April, 29, 2014 to resolve the Israeli-Palestinia conflict, it didn’t take long for Gaza-based Hamas to start firing rockets at Israel [July 8, 2014-Aug. 26, 2014]. When the Gaza War ended Aug. 26, 2014, 2,310 Palestinians were dead with billions in property damage.
Whatever the issues between combatants, the French want to avoid another costly war that still finds Gaza in ruins. Who’s at fault take a backseat to the lives lost and billions in property damage leaving Gaza a reconstruction nightmare. Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders criticized Netanyahu April 13 for a “disproportionate” response in the 2014 Gaza War. Hamas’s Gaza rulers, led by 53-year-old Ismail Haniyeh, refused to stop firing rockets in Israel for six weeks, assuring that Gaza’s ’s destruction was extensive. When the dust settled, Haniyeh asked for a Gulf States donor conference designed to re-supply Gaza with the cash needed to rebuild the Mediterranean costal strip. Two months later, a Gulf State donors’ conference pledged $5.4 billion Oct. 12 to rebuild Gaza. Nearly two years after the Gaza War, Hamas conceded they’ve run out of funds.
Netanyahu claims that much of Gaza’s rebuilding funds have gone to reconstructing tunnels designed to infiltrate Israel or smuggle in arms and rocket components. Gaza officials complained March 12 that they haven’t received all of the pledges from the Oct. 12, 2014 donors’ conference to rebuild some 17,000 civilian hopes lost in the 2014 Gaza War. Israel contends that Gaza’s Hamas rulers used the donor money to rebuild the elaborate tunnel system used for smuggling and military attacks in Israel. French officials want a peace conference but they don’t want to accept that Gaza’s Hamas and West Bank’s PLO joined forces April 23, 2014, right before Kerry’s peace talks failed, starting the Gaza War July 8, 2014. While there’s nothing wrong calling for a peace conference, Palestinians must unequivocally stop their efforts to destroy the Jewish State.
Only yesterday, the U.S. rejected Netanyahu’s claims to the Golan Heights, the strategic Syrian territory captured during the 1967 Six Day War. When Egypt, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon attacked Israel June 5, 1967, with backing from eight other Arab states, including the PLO, Israel defeated all combatants, seizing Egypt’s Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula, Jordan’s West Bank and East Jerusalem and Syria’s Golan Heights. No U.N. state recognized Israel’s spoils, despite the most current version of the Geneva Convention affording spoils of war to the victor in 2005 Protocol III. While Israel recognizes its spoils from the 1967 War, no other country, including the U.S., does. Israel returned Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula in 1977, returning the Gaza Strip in 2005. In both cases, terrorists filled the void, turning Gaza and the Sinai into ungovernable terrorist-invested nests.
French peace proposals must take into account that the current Palestinian leadership remains at war with Israel. Expecting Israel to make land-for-peace concessions during today’s Mideast anarchy runs counter to Israel’s national security. Given Mideast terrorism washing up on U.S. soil, the U.S. can’t support any peace deal that compromises Israeli national security. Closely attached in the war on terror, the U.S. can’t go along with the U.N.’s customary anti-Israeli U.N. bias. “We call upon the French government and the rest of the international community to take immediate steps in order to give peace a chance,” said Chief Palestinian peace negotiator Saeb Erekat, a former personal aid to the late PLO founder Yasser Arafat. To make peace efforts credible, Erekat needs to declare in writing for record that the combined Hamas-PLO entity is no longer at war with Israel.
French officials can’t convene a foreign ministers’ or peace conference until warring parties declare unconditional peace. No peace conference can work unless all parties cease-and-desist hostilities, including the recent Palestinian insurgency stabbing, car-ramming and suicide bombing attacks on Israel civilians. With Hamas rebuilding smuggling tunnels, smuggling rockets and war materiel into Gaza, it’s unrealistic to convene peace talks without some major changes. Neither Israel nor the U.S. can talk of concessions to Palestinians while they actively prepare for the next war. Whatever dog one has in the fight, there must be credible peace partners willing to make the sacrifices needed for a two-state solution. As long as Hamas prepares for war, Israel can’t be expected to make concessions for peace, regardless of all the international pressure for a two-state solution.
