The Israelis should not be expected to make a commitment of withdrawal from lands which, like Gaza, could, probably would become bases for missiles and rockets and gunmen and bombers aiming at them. That is, no one-way concessions without some concessions from the other side.Here's another way of stating this principle: I steal five dollars from you. I later realize that I was wrong, so I ponder giving the money back. A good friend insists that I give it back, but then I say that I'm worried that you will use that money to buy a knife to hurt me for stealing your money, and thus decline to give the money back. And Peretz tosses in the perpetual neocon canard about "bases"--he knows better than that. Hamas controls much of the West Bank--there's a reason that Mahmoud Abbas is often derided as the "Mayor of Ramallah" and it's not because of his micromanagement of city government. If Hamas really wants "bases" it's not as though the settlement areas are any better or worse than the rest of the West Bank.
After some sanctimony about tossing infants onto the streets, Peretz comes to an interesting point:
The most distressing aspect of the Obama diplomacy is that it, as a virtually [sic] principle, is repudiating salient elements of the Bush administration's pledges to Israel and may not be bound to others.Peretz is referring to the Bushies' alleged "secret" agreements with the Olmert government. But these were, axiomatically, never actually formalized or made public, and my feeling is that they should be treated just as one would assume: as informal compacts that, since they are not public, are simply not binding for future administrations. As for the formal foreign policy of the United States, the presumption has always been that presidents have a free hand to implement their own policies. In fact, Obama defeated Clinton in large part because Clinton promised less of a break from the national security ideology of Bush, and while I'll admit that Obama hasn't been a total angel in this area he's done more than I expected--taking on Israel on the settlements question strikes me as stepping on a third rail of some sort, and it shows that he's serious about moving this process forward, even more so than that hack, Netanyahu.
Ideologues like Peretz simply can't face up to the injustice of the settlement policy, and it ought to be ended as soon as possible, independent of any negotiation. However, while I do disagree with the numbers he assigns I do agree with him that Israel's positions are more correct than the Palestinians': I tend to think that the Palestinian goals on Jerusalem are misguided, and the right of return is a crusade that should never have been fought--Yasir Arafat's decision to walk away from the 2000 Camp David talks over the right of return (while getting everything else, including co-rule of Jerusalem) strikes me as the worst decision ever made by a head of state since WWI. So I'm hardly a reflexive pro-Palestinian. I just think that there are some issues that don't really have two sides of seeing them.
