U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, after a week of denials, is naming former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk to direct and maneuver the direct talks between the Palestinian Authority and Israel, whose negotiator are meeting officially Monday night for the first time in three years.
American officials, leaked the expected appointment on the basis of anonymity, one more carefully orchestrated step in a process that has been manipulated with “white lies” to make sure that the talk will resume.
Indyk’s qualifications are similar to those of every other American Middle East “expert” who has failed to force the Palestinian Authority and Israel to accept the American dream of a peace agreement.
Indyk, who thinks the Oslo Accords were the best thing since Abraham Lincoln went to a play, played a major part in the 2000 Camp David peace talks that fell apart.
As Bill Clinton’s Ambassador to Israel, he openly embraced Palestinian Authority demands, such as Israel’s ceding the Temple Mount, The only major Arab demand he rejected was the idea of flooding Israel with 5 million foreign Arabs whom the United Nations has decided belong in Israel.
Abbas once admitted that the demand is ridiculous, but enthused by years of Israel’s “goodwill” capitulation and the international apathy towards the PA’s refusal to live up to its own commitments, he has made the wrongly-termed “right of return” an absolute requirement. If and when he wins everything else from Israel, including the Temple Mount, a PA army and almost all of Judea and Samaria, he can win the Nobel peace Prize by making the “grand concession” of giving up the “flood Israel with Arabs’ tactic.
Indyk, born in Britain and educated in Australia, said in an Israeli newspaper interview nearly two years ago that the Oslo Accords were good for the Palestinian Authority and Israel. He did not mention the post-Oslo period, in which thousands of Israelis were and still are killed and wounded by PA terrorists.
Of course, he also has praised the Palestinian Authority for reducing terror, without crediting the “Apartheid Wall, an apt description when realizing that the security fence really does create Apartheid between normal human beings and suicide terrorists.
Indyk also wrote in his 2009 book “Innocent Abroad, “It was not reasonable to expect that Arafat, or any Arab leader for that matter, would agree to an end-of-conflict agreement that left sovereignty over the Haram al-Sharif [the Temple Mount] in Israeli hands forever.”
So it is clear that that Indyk is negotiating for chairman Mahmoud Abbas on that issue.
He wrote in The New York Times in 2010, “Does President Abbas, already a weakened figure, have the courage to defend the necessary concessions to his people, particularly when it comes to conceding the ‘right of return’ to Israel? Does Prime Minister Netanyahu have the determination to withdraw from at least 95 percent of the West Bank and to accept a Palestinian capital in Arab East Jerusalem? “
Besides his insistence that the failure of Oslo are less important than the fact the Yasser Arafat and Yitzchak Rabin signed them, Indyk’s record on the Middle East is graced with viewpoints that, like those of his predecessors, have proven to be dead wrong.
He played a major part in the 2000 Camp David peace talks that fell apart.
Indyk also wrote in another op-ed in The New York Times in 2010, “Today, nothing could better help Obama to isolate Iran than for Netanyahu to offer to cede the Golan, as four other Israeli prime ministers have, in exchange for peace with Syria, which serves as the conduit for Tehran’s troublemaking in the Arab-Israeli arena.”
If Netanyahu had followed Indyk’s advice, it is questionable whether Israel would exist today, and, of course that is exactly what most Arab countries see as the key to peace in the Middle East. If Netanyahu had followed his wisdom, it is just as likely that the United States would be at war with Iran today.
Indyk also was 100 percent wrong when he said in 2009 that Salaam Fayyad was “the only game in town” as prime minister of the Palestinian Authority. Fayyad vowed to build up PA institutions so they could support state. Fayyad now is out of the picture, partly because Abbas and his Fatah henchmen could not stomach Fayyad’s attempts to overcome the institutionalized corruption, the very stuff that precludes the idea of a stable nation.