Israel Downgrades Contacts With Palestinians

Israel announced on Wednesday a partial freeze in high-level contacts with the Palestinians in retaliation for their violation of agreements by unilaterally seeking U.N. recognition.

Israeli government officials said Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu had ordered cabinet members, directors-general of government ministries and other senior officials not to meet their counterparts in the Palestinian Authority.

The order does not apply to Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, Israel’s chief peace negotiator, or
to defense and security officials, they said, making clear that peace negotiations and cooperative security arrangements could continue.

The banning of ministerial contacts was imposed just hours after Secretary of State John Kerry suggested that Israel’s announcement on April 1 of plans to build 700 housing units in east Yerushalayim was the immediate cause of talks plunging into crisis.

The reaction in Yerushalayim was furious, according to a senior source within the prime minister’s office quoted by The New York Times.

Israel, he said, is “deeply disappointed” by Kerry’s comments putting most of the blame for the crisis in the peace talks on Israel.

Kerry’s comments “will both hurt the negotiations and harden Palestinian positions,” he said, and insisted the reality was quite different. “Secretary Kerry knows that it was the Palestinians who said ‘no’ to continued direct talks with Israel in November; who said ‘no’ to his proposed framework for final status talks; who said ‘no’ to even discussing recognition of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people; who said ‘no’ to a meeting with Kerry himself; and who said ‘no’ to an extension of the talks,” the official said.

“At the same time, in the understandings reached prior to the talks, Israel did not commit to any limitation on construction. Therefore, the Palestinian claim that building in Israel’s capital was a violation of the understandings is contrary to the facts. Both the American negotiating team and the Palestinians know full well that Israel made no such commitment.”

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki attempted to play down what is already being called the “poof speech,” referring to Kerry’s remark that right after Israel’s announcement of new housing in east Yerushalayim, the peace talks went “poof.”

Psaki claimed it “was crystal clear that both sides have taken unhelpful steps and at no point has he [Kerry] engaged in a blame game.”

Nevertheless, many in Israel and elsewhere interpreted Kerry’s comments as being unfairly critical of Israel.

“To accuse us of causing this? I think he’s wrong,” Internal Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch told Israel Radio.

Journalist Jonathan S. Tobin wrote a scathing piece in Commentary magazine repudiating Kerry’s version of events. Tobin argued that “to blame the collapse on the decision to build apartments in Gilo — a 40-year-old Jewish neighborhood in Yerushalayim that would not change hands even in the event a peace treaty were ever signed and where Israel has never promised to stop building — is, to put it mildly, a mendacious effort to shift blame away from the side that seized the first pretext to flee talks onto the one that has made concessions in order to get the Palestinians to sit at the table.”

Tobin suggested that Kerry did so because he didn’t want to blame the Palestinians for walking out … a tacit admission that his critics were right when they suggested last year that he was embarking on a fool’s errand,” that Abbas would never agree to a deal “that would recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders were drawn…

“Since Kerry hopes to entice the Palestinians back to the talks at some point, blaming Israel also gives him leverage to demand more concessions from the Jewish state to bribe Abbas to negotiate.”

An Israeli official said Netanyahu had issued the partial contact freeze order in response to “the Palestinians’ grave violation of their commitments in the framework of the peace talks” — a reference to the signing of 15 international agreements last week.

Netanyahu’s decision will have relatively little actual impact on day-to-day operations, since Israeli and Palestinian officials cooperate on civilian issues such as the environment, water and energy, usually without face-to-face meetings.

Palestinian government spokesman Ihab Bsaiso said “this won’t affect our daily life or government business.”

The real concern is a possible withholding of tax money earmarked for the PA in the amount of about $100 million a month. PA President Mahmoud Abbas is turning to the Arab League to offset that, if it comes.

Israel is considering subtracting from the monthly tax revenue it transfers to the Palestinian Authority the amount the PA pays terrorists and their families, The Jerusalem Post quoted a government official as saying on Wednesday night.

According to a document released by the Prime Minister’s Office, the PA transferred $153.5 million in 2012 to terrorists in Israeli prisons and their families, as well as families of deceased terrorists, including suicide bombers. This amounts to nearly 16% of all foreign aid to the PA.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian U.N. envoy urged the world on Tuesday to boycott products from Yehudah and Shomron as part of a stepped up campaign to help Palestine become independent, The Associated Press reported.

This article appeared in print on page 1 of the April 10th, 2014 edition of Hamodia.