The Peace Plan Israel Needs

By Elliot Jager

Ya'alon, Netanyahu.

Earthquakes, tsunamis, and a nuclear meltdown in Japan have pushed aside news of Muammar Qaddafi's mad rampage, the domestic upheaval throughout the Muslim Middle East, and the butchery by Palestinian Arabs of five members of a sleeping Jewish family in Itamar. Meanwhile, unfazed by such global realities, the United Nations General Assembly has turned its great hall into a theater for the March 14 premiere of an anti-Israel film, and Israel's wobbly friends in Europe and the U.S. are renewing their pressure on Jerusalem to "do something" about the "unsustainable" stalemate in the "peace process." As German Chancellor Angela Merkel scolded Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: "You haven't made a single step to advance peace."

Not a single step? Not Netanyahu's dramatic 2009 appeal to the Palestinians and the Arab nations to begin negotiating a two-state solution with no prior conditions? Not the lifting of 400 security checkpoints up and down the West Bank (including near Itamar), the ten-month moratorium on most settlement building, the willingness to extend the freeze another three months? None of these, to be sure, has had much of a diplomatic shelf-life, having failed to move Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian faction an inch away from their refusal to end their two-year boycott of negotiations. But, in the topsy-turvy world of Middle East peacemaking, not they but Israel is blamed for the impasse.

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