trumps envoy: new administration won't tell israel what policies to adopt

[Ken Burch]

32. It's not possible to achieve peace by coercing the Palestinian leadership

into just meekly accepting whatever the Likudniks will give them-especially if that means making the creation of a Palestinian state impossible by keeping most of the settlements and checkpoints and IDF troops in place.

No Palestinian leader could EVER agree to all of Netanyahu's demands and not be immediately driven out of power. Netanyahu wants Palestinians to basically say "Israel was always right and everything we ever wanted was wrong-we admit our entire struggle was bogus". Netanyahu wants this because he knows that any Palestinian leadership that agreed to these things would immediately be cast aside and be replaced by a rejectionist leadership, thus keeping the war going without end...which is Netanyahu's real objective-he wants the fighting to go on forever, because support for the Israeli Right would immediately collapse if anything close to peace was ever established.

How about, instead of obsessing on trying to humiliate the Palestinian leadership(a tactic you know full well can't achieve anything positive) maybe creating some of the conditions for peace by giving ordinary Palestinians breathing space...by not having the IDF in their streets constantly, by not forcing them to go through checkpoint after checkpoint just to get from one part of Palestine to another, by letting the NGO's complete humanitarian projects without making them wait endlessly for IDF approval(there was no way those SOLAR PANELS could have been weaponized, for God's sakes) and by returning the olive trees that were stolen and replanted on the illegal settlements? Would you really object to cutting the Palestinian people themselves a break? We have fifteen years of proof that collective immiseration will never force a change in the Palestinian leadership. It's time to admit that the iron fist approach has been a total failure.