Yes. This.

Why not an article at least *mentioning* Israel's intransigence and lack of commitment to the peace process, with its refusal to negotiate in good faith by halting any illegal settlements?

Please.

Since when do we demand and expect for the victor of a war to return the land it won to its former enemy. Something is wrong here. I am a minority male and for 30 plus years, from the time I was in college I had been "rabidly" pro palestinian but now I beginning to feel, or intuit, something wrong about the palenstinians.
My advice to the palestinians, who I use to identify with, is to accept the fact that they lost that land in a war, by the way started by them and their allies. I was in college when it happened. The whole idea of negotiations is to be able to talk about those things, the settlements. Not to demand that they return the land,(or stop building on it: for the moment they no longer have anything to say about it). I can't help but think that is a little absurd and influenced by other irrational impulses like anti-semiticism. No one is above "negotiations". That is how I perceive the new palestinian position; the body language of Abbas. Being very sensitized of those things growing up in "Jim Crow" south, I'm beginning to think , by how Abbas acted toward his Israeli counterpart, that he is prejudiced. That is just as unattractive on him as it is on a klansman.

Happycat you're looking at this completely the wrong way. Yes, Israel did acquire the West Bank and Gaza (until 2005) in a war. However, in building the settlements they are clearly violating international law.

The fact of the matter is that to conform to international law either Israel says 'Ok, we won this fair and square, and we are going to annex it as part of Israel' or they leave. Instead what they are engaging in (and have done for a very, very long time!) is a military occupation of the West Bank (and I would argue Gaza as well); building settlements on occupied (NOT annexed) territory is illegal. The truth is that if Israel annexed the West Bank they would have to make all the Palestinians in the are citizens, which would 'ruin' the Jewish character of Israel, unless the openly implemented an apartheid system in which the new Palestinian citizens could not vote. So instead they continue with the reprehensible status quo and all the time, new settlements make a Palestinian state on the West Bank less and less viable. What Israel wants is the land, without the people; the settlements are a form of slow ethnic cleansing (something Israel had carried out before, though absolutely not genocide as some hyperbolic commentators say).

To the author; maybe the Palestinians are insisting on this as a precondition because the settlements have reached a stage now where even a best case scenario would barely produce a viable state? You can't simply eviscerate a territory with deep ribbon developments of settlements and expect it to still function as a state. Maybe the fact that the area that will go to Israel in any final settlement is always getting larger as the settlements expand? Maybe its absolutely clear to them that Israel is negotiating in bad faith over the settlements? America offered more than $3 billion in advanced military hardware, diplomatic support and a promise never to ask again for a very short term freeze and this wasn't enough for Israel?! If Israel isn't willing to curb its settlement building for something like that, what can the Palestinians possibly offer for the permanent freeze and much harder reduction of settlements required for a permanent peace.

Ridiculous article.

Hey Rosen, go back to Israel if you love it so much, no man can serve two masters.

The settlement freeze is not a ‘precondition’ as Israel, you, and AIPAC are now campaigning for, but an obligation Israel undertook when it signed on to the 2003 international roadmap for peace plan.

It is a matter of record that Mahmoud Abbas participated in 18 years of direct negotiations with seven Israeli governments; all without a settlement freeze.In which time the settlements and their associated infrastructure grew exponentially.

What do you suggest, that Abbas sit down for another 18 years of negotiation while Israel continues it's apartheid rampage? He has wised up to the problems of his previous approach. More power to him.

While he declines negotiations the world is now seeing the it's not the Palestinians that were the problem as defined by the Israeli's but the Israeli's themselves.

The Palestinians don't have any conditions to resume negotiations. It's time for Israel to drop its conditions that obstruct peace in the ME. It’s about Israel and its settlements, incursions and assassinations. It's not a Palestinian condition. It's an Israeli commitment from Oslo, the Arab Peace Initiative and the Roadmap that Israel needs to respect.

The acquisition of territory by war is inadmissible, and thus all settlements, whether inhabited by Zionist extremists in Hebron or apolitical suburbanites in East Jerusalem, are illegal. The world community has long recognized that a reasonable two-state solution requires a division roughly along the 1967 lines--including in Jerusalem--with at most minor adjustments.

But let me wipe the tears from my eyes from laughing so hard. The Palestinians have no interest in peace?

Then you really haven't viewed the video of your buddy, netty, bragging about how he derailed Oslo.

You can view it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oslo_Accords#Remarks_from_Benjamin_Netanyahu

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkN1KMLZH4o&feature=player_embedded

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2010/07/18/tricky-bibi/

http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100719/OPINION/707189948/1033

The Likud Party charter flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan River and stipulates that: “The Palestinians can run their lives freely in the framework of self-rule, but not as an independent and sovereign state.”

This israeli government is committed to that charter as well as to the Jewish holy war for land in Palestine, witnessed everyday by anyone who can google, by illegal settler squats terrorist acts everyday.

Israel has no interest in trading land it covets for a peace that might thwart further territorial expansion no matter how you try to spin it or blame the Palestinians. It considers itself unbound by the applicable UN resolutions, agreements from past peace talks, the “Roadmap,” or the premise of the “two-state solution.”

The Palestinains have demanded the 1967 borders for recognition of Israel as a jewish state and good for them. For all of Bibi's whining about Abbas’ 'preconditions' we all knew Bibi has his and would present them as excuses for derailing the peace process.

A couple good things will come out of this. The Palestinians will eventually have to thank you, the israelis for building them all those nice houses free of charge and of course the jews can stay and live in Palestine if they want to but they will be subject to Palestinians laws - up to and including home dispossession.

Better yet, ship all those illegal settler terrorist squats to the Negev who complain, burn land, tear down olive trees, burn mosques, run over, kill, and beat Palestinians and let them be 'pioneers' there. They deserve to wander in their own desert for the next 40 years.

You, and your other hapless israelis, act like none of us here can read, disseminate information, google, or see the reality that the israelis are no partner for peace.

Someone who invades, kills, bombs, oppressess, occupies, and then tries like hell to spin it inspite of all the facts out here, is not interested in peace and that's israel.

Rosen, the Palestinians are not the problem, you and the israeli government, your failed policies, your oppression of legitimite heirs to Palestine, your apartheid and ethnic cleansing, your moldavian thug of an FM, your ragtag IDF, and your systematic effort to wipe out a culture and people who were there before you is the problem.

If you actually want peace, you don’t build illegal settlement colonies in the Palestinian capital or on Palestinian land.

Israel is the problem. And until you get it you will go on destroying yourself, of not demographically, then morally. Is that clear enough for an obtuse person like you to understand? Good.

Perhaps you do not realize this land was a part of Jewish lands by proclamation from the United Nations in 1948. The arab nations declared war and attacked on the first day. Jordan claimed the West Bank in that war. In 1967 the arab nations again attacked Israel and lost the West Bank and Gaza along with the Goland Heights and the Egyptian Desert on the east side of the Suez in the so-called Six-Day War. Israel returned land to Egypt by peace treaty. The land has never been returned to Jordan. What was captured by the arabs was recaptured by the Israelis. It does not need to be returned. The Palestians are ethnicly Jordanians. Jordcan has refused to let them move into Jordan proper. They are kept in the West Bank by the arabs but Jews were forced to leave the arab lands. The arabs nations are at fault here not the Israelis. Wake up and lose your blindness.

I wonder why Israel never even attempted to build settelments in south lebanon??
I wonder if Abbas was in charge of negotiating the withdrawl of Israel from south Lebanon how many settelments/Israelis would be living in south lebanon now??

spin spin and more spin, thats all what this article is all about.

Hello Happycat:

Would be kind enough to share the name of college you attended with me?
I would like to ensure my children and anyone else whom I love and care for to stay as far away from that campus as possible.
You alos might want to try National Enquirer to debate and comment on its articles. Your mentality fits there perfectly.
Keep well.
Faramarz Fathi

I am disappointed that after all these years you have failed to appreciate the gravity of the settlement situation. Yes, Israel clearly has every right to exist, but can you please explain why this has to be accompanied by more territory annexation. According to your argument what was lost in a conflict should remain lost forever. You do seem to have failed to appreciate that no sensible institution, organisation or other civilised nations accept these expropriated lands as part of Israel. Israel could have resolved all this nonsense by returning land and then calling the bluff of the Palestinians to see if they really wanted peace. Alas this has not happened and the so-called international community has stood by and allowed Israel to go down this perilous journey of self-destruction. Remember that the wall that cuts through vast swathes of palestinians land would ultimately become an obstacle for Israelis themselves

Life would be so simple if it turned out like your dreams as the song goes. The disingenous way you describe the land illegally acquired by Israel is breathtaking in its simplicity and ignorance. They say that history is written by the victors and you have demonstrated that here so aptly.

The Obama Administration has messed up on Israel-Palestinian issues for two years, but your interpretation of recent events is fiction. Recently, it proposed a three-month freeze of construction on West Bank settlements. If it had gotten precisely what it wanted this would have led to no gain at all for anyone.

The Administration reportedly promised Israel a great deal if it agreed to the proposal. The Israeli government responded cooperatively. Yet what was the U.S. government offering? Apparently, the Administration was so incompetent as to contradict itself to the point where Israel couldn’t figure out the supposed deal. Then the Palestinian Authority demanded more, and even if it was given concessions wanted to sabotage talks.

In short, the Obama Administration became increasingly entangled in seeking a goal that wasn’t worthwhile, offering more and more but in a confused, contradictory manner, and having to deal with a Palestinian leadership that refused to cooperate and an Israeli government coalition that conceivably might splinter over the issue.

So the Administration abandoned the whole mess. They withdrew the offer. Israel stated it was willing to consider the offer once it was placed in writing by the US administration. That never happened. Israel never rejected this new offer; however, the Palestinians did demand even further Israeli concessions. Yet to read the explanations available to average Americans or even opinionmakers one would never know any of this clearly. The alternative explanations, mostly just blame Israel, for Washington’s failure. Clearly, you make this same mistake.

Indeed, after two years in which Israel has offered to negotiate with the Palestinians every day and the Palestinians have refused to negotiate with Israel almost every day, the ruling establishment, mass media, and academia generally persist in saying that the deadlock is Israel’s fault.

Now, if people are unable to understand the simplest points-due to preconceived ideology, failure to look at the facts, or inability to understand them-we are not dealing with a conspiracy but with what might be called intellectually structured blindness. But why let fact stand in the way of a good fiction like Israel is somehow responsible for the lack of progress in the peace talks...talks which the Palestinians refuse to enter!

I completely agree with Sam from California. Rosen's article is an insult to people who are willing to consider the facts as they are. Thanks Sams for taking the time to combat the shameless propanganda!

for the past 18 years the palestinains are trying to stop the israeli occupation by not talking, this policy works good for the israeli side as the palestinians seem to lose more and more territories over time.

You must understand that these so called settlements are just 5-10 minutes of driving from center jerusalem and other israeli cities.

After Israel left the gaza strip, the citizens expected a time of normality which never arrived, and this is the reason they will not stop building.

Further more, these settlements are being settled with average israeli public and not settlers as in the west bank which means that to get rid of those will be much harder.

I recommend the palestinian goverment return to the negotiations, before there will be nothing to negotiate upon.

I admire your sense of fairness and justice. The Palestinians refuse to talk so it is ok for Israel to continuing building. That logic will go down very well with Lieberman and his posse.
The settlement issue is of so little significance that even as the US offered more weapons and money bibi and his boys could not find it within themselves to accept. have you read the latest revelations from wikileaks? please do before you make simplistic comments such as these

The charges were dropped against Mr. Rosen because what he did was not illegal. All of your other allegations are unproven and false.

In other words, he threatened to bring to light so much classified intelligence as part of his defense that the prosecution dropped the case in order to safeguard US security.

This is the defense of a person who could care less about the United States.

He DID admit receiving and disseminating classified US intel, but, unlike the CIA and FBI, he believes that it is his right to do so. It is not. He is a traitor and a spy.

Furthermore, there was a great deal of other subterfuge going on around his "defense". Remember Jane Harmon's "this conversation never happened?" Her plan of graft, blackmail, and money laundering was all in an effort to get this spy off. The FBI recorded her telling another Israeli spy that she would "waddle in". Remember?

Ask Bill Clinton who was to blame for the failure of the Camp David negotiations in 2000, and he would tell you: the Palestinians. Israel has had other prime ministers and other approaches since the "peace process" began, and even the biggest leftists in the Israeli government couldn't negotiate a peace treaty with the Pals.

Mr. Rosen was arrested for illegally receiving classified information. The charges were dropped when it was clear that it was not illegal for him to receive the information that he was given. He was never accused of spying for Israel or any other country.

THE MAN< ROSEN> is a spy..... but it's OK now to spy for Israe....Congress will make it a constitutional right to spy on America for Israel.... It is already a rite of passage to congress anyway.

...like it's some selfless act on the part of the Israelis to stop building settlements? It's illegal. It's always been illegal. They shouldn't be doing it at all, and certainly shouldn't be patted on the back for briefly slowing construction by 10%.

1) No one demands that Palestine be recognized as a Muslim nation, why should Israel be recognized as a Jewish nation? Israel is an Israeli nation. Palestine will be a Palestinian nation. Period.

2) And...? Waiting for the relevance here.

3) Yeah, and Israel has street and towns named after people who brutally invaded Palestine and slaughtered innocent Arabs. I don't see you complaining. America has an entire national holiday named after a man who pioneered the genocide of native Americans. Again, no complaints. Funny.

4) And several of Israel's governmental officials have maps of all of Palestine as Israeli territory! No complaints... I'm sensing a pattern, Dorn.

5) I really, really do not understand this "Right of Return" business. At all. For anyone. It's been sixty years since Palestine was invaded and broken into two--very few Palestinians remember Palestine before it was Israel. Prior to that, it was TWO THOUSAND YEARS since Israel had been... Israel. No Jew remembered a time when Palestine was Jewish because it hadn't existed in thousands of years. As far as I'm concerned, there should be no "Right of Return" for anyone, because it's a dumb concept. So, I'll grant you that. Abbas should give up the Right of Return BS, and Israelis should stop acting like they have a divine right to the land that they only held for a fraction of its history.

6) Israel awarded medals of honor to the commandos who killed the Turks aboard the Mavi Marmara. BAWWW. No complaints again then, Dorn?

7) What is your obsession with the concept of a "Jewish state"? Israel is less Jewish than America is Christian, statistically speaking. You cannot, therefore, define it as "a Jewish state" using religious terms. Perhaps you're the sort of person who defines "Jewish" as a race, which raises the interesting question as to how one goes about converting to a race...

After hearing the back and forth over the Israeli/Palestinian situation my whole life, I decided to educated myself on what really went down. I started with the NY Times archives, and punched in Palestine....I went to the earliest references (1850's), and read forward....I learned several things....there were very few Damascan Arabs in this region during the 19th century (the term "Palestinian" wasn't even invented until the 1960's f6r the sole purpose of garnering international sympathy)...it was malaria infested wasteland, with tumbled down ruins, and Berber herdsmen who migrated through the region from N. Africa to what is now Jordan...the real influx of Arabs came AFTER the Jews started arriving from Europe in the late 19th century, and started creating an agricultural non-subsistence society...most of those calling themselves Palestinians didn't originate from "Palestine"...Furthermore, most of the land that is Israel, was purchased from either the Turks, or the Arabs themselves...After the owners of this land, the Turks, were defeated in WWI, the Brits, who were the conquerors of ALL the middle east, gave 80% to the Arabs, and 20% to the Jews...the Arabs freaked out, resorted to terrorism...the British papers from the 1920's-30's bears this out, and eventually the Brits gave 80% for the Jewish territories (which included all of modern Jordan) to the Arabs....and they still freaked out, eventually declared a war of genocide against the Jews in 1948....they warned all Arabs who remained in what was the newly created state of Israel, that they would be killed as well....so almost all of the Arabs abandoned Israel, to make way for the genocidal Armies of the Arab league....that the Israeli's are foolish enough to even consider a separate Palestinian state is beyond me. It is all there for the reading, you just have to take the time.