Take a Hike

The second trimester doesn’t show any signs of easing up. Termination of talks seems the only direction to take.

Perhaps, mercifully, the onus for the end of the talks will fall upon the Palestinian leadership, saving Israel from the chorus of international recriminations. Last Thursday, Palestinian officials clamored for a cessation of the peace talks with Israel due to Israel’s continued construction beyond the Green Line and Israel Defense Forces “raids and assassinations” in Palestinian villages Yehudah and Shomron.

Also on Thursday, doubling down on dissatisfaction, came the resignation of Saeb Erekat, the head of the Palestinian Authority’s negotiating team.

He submitted his resignation to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, according to reports from the Palestinian news agency Ma’an, due to Israel’s “lack of commitment” to the peace process and Israel’s continued construction beyond the Green Line. One gets the feeling that the letter was not some spontaneous response to Israeli actions but rather was written early last August prior to the present iteration of peace talks and filed away in a drawer waiting to be presented to full dramatic effect. Like now, for example, immediately after the confetti has been swept up in Ramallah, site of the major “Welcome Home Terrorist” celebration, and just before Secretary of State John Kerry returns to try once again to create order in a region his boss has catalyzed from bad to worse.

It is a tried and true Palestinian/Arab trick to posture by submitting a letter of resignation or leaving the table. It is a juvenile and passive/aggressive trick they have used masterfully over the years. Countless times, current PA President Abbas has tendered his resignation and more recently his Prime Minister, Rami Hamdallah, resigned within one month of taking the job. Typifying Palestinian and Arab resignations, Hamdallah didn’t bother cleaning out his desk and was back to work in a couple of days.

The most famous case of the Palestinians “leaving” the table quickly enough to appear serious yet slowly enough to be stopped — no easy trick but practice makes perfect — was Yasser Arafat bolting Paris peace talks in October 2000 with then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright chasing after him yelling, “Shut the gates, shut the gates,” thus successfully barring Arafat from leaving the grounds and forcing him to return to the table.

Like the boy who cried “wolf,” our putative peace partners from the Palestinian Authority constantly threaten leaving the negotiating table in order to get more attention leveraging these artificial dramas into support from the world and concessions from Israel.

Unfortunately, unlike the boy who meets his fate by abusing the trust of others one time too many with false representations, the world comes clamoring each and every time to placate the Palestinians.

Will history revisit this unseemly image of the Secretary of State of the United States chasing after Abbas or Erekat or whomever the Palestinian Authority State chooses as its runner when Secretary of State Kerry comes to Israel this week? Smart money would say this is a plausible scenario. Wouldn’t it be great if the long shot came in, just this once, and Secretary of State Kerry and the world called the Palestinian bluff and told the Palestinian Authority to just take a hike?

This article appeared in print on page 42 of the November 7th, 2013 edition of Hamodia.