With the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” currently mired in the worst impasse of the last 18 years, one might think Western diplomats would reconsider their approach rather than mindlessly adhering to the same failed tactics. But one would be wrong, as Germany’s response to Israel’s latest announcement of new construction makes clear: Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman said the announcement sent “a devastating message with regard to the current efforts to resume peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians” and urged Israel not to issue the tenders.

Merkel evidently didn’t consider what message she sent via that statement, but in fact, it’s a message far more devastating to “efforts to resume negotiations” than the new housing is. What she effectively said is Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas should be rewarded for steadfastly refusing to negotiate with Israel by being granted the very construction freeze even he demanded only as a quid pro quo for agreeing to negotiate.

But if refusing to talk leads the West to demand more Israeli concessions in an effort to lure him back to the table, then Abbas has no incentive ever to negotiate. After all, in negotiations, both sides usually have to give something. If by refusing to negotiate, he can instead get the world to extract unilateral concessions from Israel, that is obviously his best move.

Perhaps even more disturbing, however, is that all the new construction is planned for existing Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem or major Jerusalem-area settlements that virtually every peace plan ever proposed has Israel retaining. By treating Israeli construction in these areas as no less problematic than construction in isolated settlements that everyone agrees would be dismantled under any agreement, Merkel feeds the Palestinian fantasy that it really is possible to turn back the clock, because the world will support Palestinian demands for a full Israeli retreat to the 1949 armistice lines.

This is crucial, because contrary to the accepted wisdom that borders are an “easy” issue to resolve, they have proven a major sticking point in every previous round of talks. The most generous Israeli offer to date, in 2008, had Israel keeping about 7 percent of the West Bank in exchange for land swaps. But Palestinians have repeatedly insisted that Israel keep no more than 2 percent of the territory, even with 1:1 territorial swaps. According to leaked negotiating documents known as the Palestine Papers, for instance, they demanded that Israel cede both the Jerusalem neighborhood of Har Homa and the Jerusalem-area settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim, with populations of about 20,000 and 36,000, respectively. In short, they insist on throwing tens of thousands of additional Israelis out of their homes, thereby making it much harder for any Israeli leader to sign a deal.

Thus, if Western leaders really wanted to advance the peace process, they should instead be striving to get Abbas to accept that these areas are never going to
be Palestinian. And supporting continued Israeli construction there would be one of the best ways to do so.

But if the West still hasn’t figured that out after 18 years, I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Last week, I wrote about a Palestinian author who refused to participate in a panel discussion with an Israeli at a French literary conference. But it turns out this wasn’t the author’s private initiative: Boycotting all Israelis, even those most opposed to the Netanyahu government, is now official Palestinian Authority policy – even as the PA tells the world its problem isn’t with Israel, but only with Benjamin Netanyahu’s “right-wing” policies.

The new policy was announced this weekend by Hatem Abdel Kader, a senior official in PA President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party. “We will try to thwart any Palestinian-Israeli meeting,” he said. “In Fatah we have officially decided to ban such gatherings.” And it’s already being implemented in practice, as The Jerusalem Post reported: Organized mobs of Palestinian protesters recently forced the cancellation of two Israeli-Palestinian conferences sponsored by a civil-society group. And Sari Nusseibeh, who was supposed to speak at one, didn’t even show up due to threats from the anti-normalization thugs.

I can’t dispute Abdel Kader’s assertion that most such conferences are a waste of time, because participants usually represent neither the Israeli nor the Palestinian mainstream. But that’s a far cry from banning them – especially if the PA were being truthful when it claims its only problem is the Netanyahu government. After all, the Israelis who attend such conferences are generally Netanyahu’s most vociferous critics, and vocal advocates of greater Israeli concessions to the Palestinians. If the PA isn’t even willing to countenance dialogue with them, which Israelis would it be willing to talk to?

Moreover, how is such a boycott supposed to persuade mainstream Israelis to favor the concessions the PA claims to want? Granted, Israeli activists’ enthusiastic reports of Palestinian “moderation” at such meetings have thus far had little impact; to most Israelis, Palestinian actions – from the rampant terror that followed Israeli withdrawals in the West Bank and Gaza to the PA’s serial rejection of statehood offers – speak louder than words. But is a refusal to talk to any Israeli at all a more convincing demonstration of Palestinian moderation?

Finally, the official reason given for the ban is bizarre: Fatah reportedly “fears that the Israeli government would exploit such meetings to tell the world that there is some kind of dialogue going on between Israelis and Palestinians and that the only problem is with the PA leadership, which is refusing to return to the negotiating table.” Given that the entire world has publicly blamed Israel for the impasse, why would Fatah fear any such thing?

One can only conclude that Fatah, unlike the rest of the world, knows the truth: The PA is the one that has steadfastly refused to negotiate, first imposing new conditions like a settlement freeze and then refusing to talk even if Israel accedes, as it did by declaring an unprecedented 10-month construction moratorium. And Fatah is desperately afraid Westerners will finally catch on.

So far, they haven’t. But they should. Because a Palestinian government that bans dialogue even with Israel’s far left is patently unready to make peace with Israel.

Hamas celebrated its 24^th anniversary this week, and like any organization, it used the occasion to issue a press release detailing its achievements. So here, according to its own press release, are what Hamas considers its most notable achievements: It has killed 1,365 Israelis and wounded 6,411 since 1987. It has carried out 1,117 attacks on Israel, including 87 suicide bombings, and fired 11,093 rockets at Israel. And it has lost 1,848 of its own members to this noble cause.

Then, lest anyone fail to get the message, Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh made it explicit at a mass rally to mark the anniversary. “Resistance is the way and it is the strategic choice to liberate Palestine from the (Jordan) river to the (Mediterranean) sea and to remove the invaders from the blessed land of Palestine,” Haniyeh said, making it clear there’s no room in his vision for a Jewish state in any borders. “Hamas … will lead the people towards uprising after uprising until all of Palestine is liberated.” And the crowd replied by chantingm “We will never recognize Israel.”

Hamas’ boasts are almost certainly exaggerated: It claims “credit” for more than 80 percent of all Israeli casualties since 1987, whereas Israeli data shows a much more equal distribution between Hamas and its rival, Fatah, aka Israel’s “peace partner.” But its eagerness to claim responsibility for more than its fair share of murders merely underscores the point that, far from being moderated by the responsibilities of governance, Hamas’ years in control of Gaza haven’t slaked its thirst for Israeli blood one whit.

There are several reasons why this ought to give pause to all those, from Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to the New York Times, who routinely blame Israel for the impasse in the peace process. First, as Elliott Abrams noted, there’s little point in negotiating a peace agreement with half the Palestinian polity while the other half remains committed to Israel’s eradication, as that makes it unlikely a Palestinian state could actually deliver the promised peace.

More importantly, it’s hard to see how peace is possible when a sizable portion of the Palestinian public shares Hamas’ genocidal goals. About one-third of Palestinians (excluding the undecided) say they plan to vote Hamas in the next election. Even taken at face value, that’s a minority far too large to ignore, and in reality, the figure is probably larger: Polls also predicted a Fatah victory before the last election, which Hamas won handily.

Then there’s the fact that Israel’s “peace partner” feels it has enough in common with this genocidal organization to decide to form a unit government with it. That ought to cast doubt on Fatah‘s commitment to peace even among those untroubled by other evidence.

Finally, there’s what it says about the broader land-for-peace paradigm. Abrams argued that how newly-elected Islamist parties in other Arab countries respond to Hamas’s genocidal goals will be a good test of their intentions. But in one case, we already know the answer: Hamas announced last week that it was formally joining the Muslim Brotherhood, which, shortly after winning Egypt’s elections, has already announced plans to reconsider Egypt’s own peace with Israel. In other words, the change in government in Egypt is making that peace treaty look decidedly shaky; would a treaty signed with Fatah to create a state where Hamas could someday win power be more stable?

One can understand why many Westerners prefer to avert their eyes from these facts; Hamas’ naked bloodlust isn’t pretty. But if you really want to understand why the “peace process” has failed, you won’t find a more concise explanation than Hamas’ own press release.

Writing in Israel Hayom yesterday, Yoram Ettinger supported Newt Gingrich’s statement that Palestinians are an “invented” people by offering statistics to show that far from having lived in the Holy Land for millennia, most Palestinians descend from immigrants who came from throughout the Muslim world between 1845 and 1947. Simon Sebag Montefiore provides similar data in his new book, Jerusalem: The Biography, as a New York Times reviewer noted: From 1919-38, for instance, 343,000 Jews and 419,000 Arabs immigrated to the area, meaning Arab Johnny-come-latelies significantly outnumbered the Jewish ones.

One might ask why this should matter: Regardless of when either Jews or Palestinians arrived, millions of both live east of the Jordan River today, and that’s the reality policymakers must deal with. But in truth, it matters greatly – because Western support for Palestinian negotiating positions stems largely from the widespread view that Palestinians are an indigenous people whose land was stolen by Western (Jewish) interlopers.

Current demographic realities would probably suffice to convince most Westerners that a Palestinian state should exist. But the same can’t be said of Western insistence that its border must be the 1967 lines, with adjustments possible only via one-to-one territorial swaps and only if the Palestinians consent. Indeed, just 44 years ago, UN Resolution 242 was carefully crafted to reflect a Western consensus that the 1967 lines shouldn’t be the permanent border. So what changed?

The answer lies in the phrase routinely used to describe the West Bank and Gaza today, but which almost nobody used back in 1967, when Israel captured these areas from Jordan and Egypt, respectively: “occupied Palestinian territory.” This phrase implies that the land belongs to the Palestinians and always has. And if so, why shouldn’t Israel be required to give back every last inch?

But if the land hasn’t belonged to the Palestinians “from time immemorial” – if instead, both Palestinians and Jews comprise small indigenous populations augmented by massive immigration in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, with the West Bank and Gaza becoming fully Judenrein only after Jordan and Egypt occupied them in 1948 – then there’s no inherent reason why the border must necessarily be in one place rather than another. To create two states, a border must be drawn somewhere, but that “somewhere” should depend only on the parties’ current needs – just as the drafters of Resolution 242 envisioned. Indeed, that resolution explicitly called for “secure” boundaries precisely because the 1967 lines were “notably insecure,” to quote then U.S. Ambassador to the UN Arthur Goldberg, and Western statesmen believed the permanent border must be relocated to make it defensible.

Moreover, if Palestinians aren’t the land’s indigenous owners, it becomes possible to implement another important principle: that 64 years of refusing repeated Jewish offers of statehood should entail a territorial price. For if decades of making war rather than peace doesn’t entail a territorial price, that encourages aggressors to keep trying to gain the whole loaf through military action, secure in the knowledge that half a loaf will always still be available if they ever decide otherwise.

On immigration, as in so many other aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it turns out that history matters, and by ignoring it, Israel and its supporters have badly undermined their own cause. Reversing direction at this late date won’t be easy. But if the conflict is ever to be resolved, correcting the historical record is vital.

As Jonathan correctly noted yesterday, it’s ridiculous to assert that Israeli-Palestinian peace is threatened by plans to build 40 new homes inside a settlement that everyone knows will remain Israeli under any agreement. But if UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon would like to see a genuine obstacle to peace, I suggest he study what happened at a conference of Mediterranean writers in Marseille last week: An Israeli author was kicked off a panel discussion because a Palestinian writer refused to sit at the same table with him.

Organizer Pierre Assouline told Haaretz that in the previous two years, Palestinian writers refused to attend the conference at all because Israelis were present. This year, poet Najwan Darwish agreed to show up, but only if he didn’t have to participate on the same panels as any Israeli authors. When he discovered that he was in fact listed as speaking on one panel together with Israeli Moshe Sakal, he told Assouline he would boycott the discussion unless Sakal was ousted. And Assouline, deciding that Sakal in any case wasn’t important to the issue at hand (the Arab Spring), acquiesced.

It is, of course, problematic that Palestinian authors refuse to even sit in the same room with Israeli authors, who as a group (and Sakal is no exception) are overwhelmingly critical of Israeli government policy and consistently advocate greater concessions to the Palestinians. If Palestinian intellectuals won’t deign to talk even with the Israelis most supportive of their cause, it’s hard to see how a lasting Israeli-Palestinian peace could ever emerge.

Far more problematic, however, was the response of Darwish’s Western enablers: Instead of telling him that such boycotts won’t be tolerated, the conference organizers cravenly capitulated to his demands. Moreover, this decision was supported by many of the conference-goers: While half the audience was angry, Assouline related, “the other half was thrilled.”

This is the problem of the entire peace process in a nutshell: Much of the Western political, cultural, and intellectual elite cravenly acquiesces in Palestinian rejectionism, and thereby encourages its continuance. What Assouline did was essentially no different from what Ban Ki-moon does when he condemns plans to build 40 houses in Efrat but never utters a peep about the real obstacles to peace – like Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s refusal to recognize a Jewish state in any borders, or his refusal to negotiate with Israel’s prime minister even during the 10 months when Israel acceded to his demand for a freeze on settlement construction. Just as Assouline and his colleagues effectively agreed that Sakal’s presence, rather than Darwish’s boycott, was the problem, Western leaders who routinely condemn construction in Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem or major settlement blocs while remaining silent on such issues as Palestinian refusal to recognize a Jewish state are effectively agreeing that the problem is Israel’s very existence – even in areas that everyone knows will be part of Israel under any deal – rather than Palestinian opposition to this existence.

And as long as such Palestinian rejectionism continues to receive Western support, Palestinians will have no incentive whatsoever to abandon it.

The media chatter that erupted in October about the possibility of Israel attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities sparked an immediate reaction: Both in Israel and abroad, opponents argued against such a strike, warning of various dire consequences.

Certainly, Israel would prefer not to attack Iran: It would rather see Tehran’s nuclear program halted by crippling sanctions, regime change or covert action, and if all these fail, it would prefer military action by an American-led coalition. Nevertheless, if Israel concluded that all other efforts had failed, and that international military action wasn’t in the cards, none of the arguments opponents have raised against an Israeli strike are likely to deter it.

The first argument is that a strike would be pointless, because it would only delay Iran’s nuclear program by “one or two years at most,” as Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said. But while it’s true that military action would only buy time, buying time for more permanent change to occur is far from pointless when the alternative is the certainty of a nuclear Iran, which Israel considers an existential threat.

The paradigm, from Israel’s perspective, is its 1981 attack on Iraq’s nuclear reactor. That, too, failed to halt Saddam Hussein’s drive toward nukes; he quickly began rebuilding his nuclear program. But it bought just enough time for Saddam to make one fatal error: his 1990 invasion of Kuwait, which resulted in an international coalition invading Iraq and imposing a strict inspection regime that uncovered and dismantled the reconstituted program.

In Iran’s case, buying time offers even better prospects, because the combination of the Arab Spring and the 2009 uprising by Iran’s own Green Movement makes regime change seem far more feasible than it did in Saddam’s Iraq. Alternatively, Iran might overreact to a strike – say, by blockading oil shipments from the Gulf – in a way that necessitates international military action, or a new constellation of world leaders might impose stronger sanctions, or some completely unforeseen development, like Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, might radically alter the situation.

There’s obviously no guarantee that any of this would happen. But buying time at least keeps open the chance of eventually halting Iran’s nuclear program. Doing nothing offers no chance at all.

Another argument is that an attack would provoke harsh Iranian retaliation against Israel. That’s not a certainty; neither Iraq nor Syria retaliated when Israel bombed their nuclear facilities. But assuming retaliation would follow, the fact remains that having had to fight for survival ever since their country was founded, Israelis are willing to endure some pain if they consider the cause worthwhile.

The Second Lebanon War of 2006, for instance, shuttered northern Israel for a month. Yet through most of that period, polls showed strong support for the war among the bombarded northerners; they were willing to sit in shelters for the sake of defeating a dangerous enemy, Hezbollah. Only after realizing that the government’s misconceived war plan would leave Hezbollah largely intact did Israelis turn against the war.

Most Israelis do consider a nuclear Iran an existential threat, and would thus be prepared to tolerate some pain to prevent it. As former Mossad chief Danny Yatom succinctly put it last month, whatever price Iran exacts, “this is still not as bad as the threat of an Iranian nuclear bomb.”

A third argument is that given Washington’s vehement opposition, military action would undermine Israel’s relationship with its chief ally, and this would endanger Israel more than a nuclear Iran would. But despite the closeness of the alliance, Israel has never allowed America to veto moves it deems essential to its security, and there’s no reason to believe it would start now.

Moreover, there’s no reason to believe that independent Israeli action would undermine the alliance, any more than it has in the past. For instance, Israel bombed the Iraqi reactor despite Ronald Reagan’s opposition, and it continued Operation Defensive Shield (its 2002 counterterror offensive in the West Bank) despite George W. Bush’s public demand that it withdraw its forces immediately. Sometimes, temporary chills ensued: Reagan, for instance, backed a UN Security Council condemnation of the Iraqi raid and suspended delivery of F-16 fighters to Israel.

But the ruptures were never permanent, because the American-Israeli alliance has always rested primarily not on the warmth of a particular President, but on the American public’s support for Israel. And precisely because most Americans would never allow another country to veto military action vital to America’s security, they have always understood Israel’s refusal to grant such a veto to anyone, even its best friend.

A final argument is that Israel shouldn’t undertake military actions that its own top defense professionals are known to oppose. This argument would be decisive had these officials claimed Israel lacked the requisite military capabilities, but they haven’t. Rather, they argue that the costs of a strike would outweigh the benefits, largely for the reasons cited above.

But such cost-benefit decisions are properly the province of the elected government, not the defense establishment – not only because that’s how democracies work, but also because military officials have no special advantage over politicians in weighing the various pros and cons. Nothing demonstrates this better than the strike on Iraq’s nuclear reactor, which was opposed by numerous senior Israeli defense officials, including the heads of the Mossad, Military Intelligence and the Atomic Energy Commission, as well as two of the government’s leading defense experts: Deputy Prime Minister Yigael Yadin, a former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, and Ezer Weizman, a former air force chief of staff (who resigned as defense minister before the final decision was made, but opposed it until then).

Ultimately, however, the politicians proved wiser: The bombing was a success, buying just enough time for Iraq’s nuclear program to later be permanently dismantled.

Israelis still hope Iran’s drive for nuclear weapons can be halted without military action. But if the government eventually concludes that the only alternatives are military action or a nuclear Iran, the arguments listed above are unlikely to deter it.

Israel’s government predictably capitulated to international pressure yesterday and resumed tax transfers to the Palestinian Authority. But American funding for the PA remains under attack, with the latest salvo coming from two congressmen who asked Comptroller General Gene Dodaro to investigate PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s various plans to give cash to terrorists.

There’s another question Congress ought to be asking, however: Why is the U.S. subsidizing Hamas – which, if one believes the data supplied by no less a personage than Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Store, chairman of the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee for international assistance to the PA, is de facto what international aid is doing?

In their letter to Dodaro last week, Congressmen Ted Deutch (D-FL) and Steve Israel (D-NY) voiced concern over Abbas’s recently announced plans to build new homes for each of the 1,027 terrorists freed in exchange for kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit and to give them $5,000 cash grants. As the letter correctly noted, many of those freed were convicted of attacks that collectively killed hundreds of Israeli civilians, and paying terrorists is an inappropriate use of U.S. funds.

Nor are the sums involved chump change. The cash grants alone would cost $5.1 million, and the housing would cost much more: If we assume a price of some $40,300 per house (based on the average Palestinian monthly rent of $210 multiplied by Moody’s long-term average ratio of sale prices to annual rent), it would total $41 million.

Moreover, the congressmen neglected to mention Abbas’s third cash-for-terrorists program: monthly salaries for convicted terrorists still in prison, ranging from roughly $400 to $3,450 depending on the length of the sentence (the longer the sentence -meaning the more heinous the crime – the higher the salary). Multiplying the midpoint of this sliding scale ($1,925) by some 4,200 prisoners (B’Tselem’s figure from the end of August minus those included in the Shalit deal), this comes to $8.1 million a month, or $97 million a year – without including the program’s additional costly benefits, such as free health insurance and university tuition for released prisoners who served at least five years (three for women). Altogether, therefore, Abbas plans to lavish hundreds of millions of dollars in aid money on terrorists.

But all this, outrageous though it is, isn’t where the real money lies. The real money, according to Store’s data, is what the PA spends on subsidizing Hamas. Specifically, the PA has spent more than $4 billion since 2008 – over half the international aid it received – to pay salaries for government employees in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip and cover Gaza’s water and electricity bills.

Of course, paying teachers and doctors and providing water and electricity are worthy humanitarian goals. But money is fungible. Thus, by relieving the Hamas government of any need to provide such services itself, this international aid enables it to use the tax revenues it collects for less benign purposes, like acquiring the latest high-tech weapons looted from Libya.

In short, U.S. aid to the PA is effectively subsidizing Hamas, a designated terrorist organization. Is that really how Americans want to spend their hard-earned cash?