Islam will fall, Christians and Jews will win, and True Peace will come to both Jew and Gentile, but only after great Chaos and Anxiety, which will be followed by the Return of the Messiah, Jesus Christ.
March 27, 2007
http://www.tribulationperiod.com/
Like Barry Rub in, the writer of this excellent article
in the Jerusalem Post, which follows our heading, I remember when Fatah took over the Palestinian movement. I was still a few years away from retirement in the NSA-USAF Branch. I have watched the Middle East maze of weird actions and events for many years. Most of the world seems destined to always elect the eternal optimists, who promise them a rosy situation, and make such promises as: “I can bring peace to the Middle East!”
If I have learned nothing else in the last forty years, I have learned that only the Son of God can bring a genuine peace to the Middle East. If one simply reads the five articles which follow, the contradictions and complexity, entailed in the multiple numbers of fingers in the peace pie, do create the same pattern I have observed in the Middle East for some 60 years. There is no sustainable human solution to the continuing Middle East peace problem. There can only be a supernatural solution by God that follows the Second Advent of His Son.
Begin Jerusalem Post Article 1
The Fall of Fatah – Barry Rubin (Jerusalem Post)
Almost 40 years ago, the nationalist group Fatah took over the Palestinian movement, a reign that ended last week when Fatah accepted a junior partnership to Hamas in the Palestinian Authority. Fatah has accepted the partnership with its Islamist rival on terms which reflect much of Fatah’s worldview but are very different from the moderate image the group wants to build in the West.
Even though there are Fatah members who prefer a compromise solution, they are in a minority and do not battle for the real acceptance of their views in that group. Fatah has never articulated among its own people – and does not articulate today – an alternative vision of peaceful coexistence.
Fatah’s deliberate use of terrorism to mobilize Palestinians emotionally has always been a central strategy, and it has had a corrupting role in both moral and political terms.
Arafat’s replacement, Mahmoud Abbas, has some moderate sentiments but is weak, ineffective, and an advocate of most of Fatah’s traditional program. The actual head of Fatah is Farouk Kaddoumi, a man who rejected even the peace process of the 1990s. His popularity reflects the basic politics of Fatah.
The mistakes made under the decades-long leadership of Fatah are continuing, and even intensifying, in the new Hamas era. The result is that any possibility of peace is being pushed decades further away.
The writer is director of the Global Research in International Affairs Center at IDC Herzliya.
Begin DEBKAfile Report 1
DEBKAfile reports: Condoleezza Rice sells Israeli PM Ehud Olmert her Middle East initiative for Israel-Arab talks based on Arab summit resolutions
March 26, 2007, 11:27 PM (GMT+02:00)
Earlier Monday, the US secretary of state called off the Monday night press conference to launch her initiative. Instead, she held a second round of talks with Olmert to overcome his objections. He finally succumbed to the creation of a US-Arab-Israeli mechanism forace talks based on the resolutions reached at the Arab League summit convening in Riyadh March 28-29.
The summit will approve the Saudi peace plan without any of the modifications requested by Israel.
Olmert and foreign minister Tzipi Livni, whom Rice met earlier in the day, spent hours hammering the phrasing for presenting their concession to the US secretary, without being seen to have abandoned the Middle East roadmap, which is the central plank of this Israeli government’s foreign and peace policy.
They decided that Rice would term the Israel-Arab diplomatic track a preface to the roadmap’s implementation. The US secretary argued that Israel has nothing to lose by engaging Arab representatives and would only improve its image. Olmert asked for the encounters to take place at the senior level of foreign ministers, in order to convince the public that his government had not been browbeaten into a concession contrary to national interests. But Rice could not make this promise. US-Israeli discussion on the framework for Israeli and Arab delegates to meet will continue.
But in Riyadh, meanwhile, the preliminary conference of Arab foreign ministers has already determined the mechanism and forum for the talks with Israel. They have opted for the UN Security Council and Middle East Quartet as sponsors, convinced that both bodies are powerful enough to impose a settlement on Israel. The US Secretary informed Olmert that she does not support this demand.
Regarding the Saudi peace plan, Israeli opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu rejected the clause calling for the return of Palestinian refugees as a threat to Israel’s existence.
Arab foreign ministers drafting summit resolutions demanded the refugees’ return to their pre-1948 homes and rejected any prospect of settling Palestinian refugees in any Arab state.
They also demanded the establishment of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.
Begin DEBKAfile Report 2
DEBKAfile Reports: Rice launches shuttle diplomacy between Israel and Palestinians, promotes Saudi peace plan. Special statement due Monday evening
March 26, 2007, 10:32 AM (GMT+02:00)
After her talks in Ramallah with Mahmoud Abbas and in Jerusalem with PM Ehud Olmert, the US secretary of state spoke vaguely of an “Arab mechanism” that would move the peace process forward at the end of the Arab summit which opens in Riyadh in two days. For Israel, this means that Rice has undertaken to mediate between Israel and the Palestinians while promoting an inter-Arab dialogue via Saudi Arabia which brings the Palestinian Hamas aboard through the Arab summit opening in Riyadh in two days.
This dialogue leaves Israel and the anti-Hamas boycott promoted by prime minister Olmert and foreign minister Tzipi Livni, trailing far behind the momentum Rice and the Saudis have kicked off. When she dined with Olmert in Jerusalem Sunday night, March 25, Rice urged the Israeli government to accept the joint US-Saudi plan. In the bustle surrounding the bid, Livni has not been seen or heard.
The “Arab mechanism” device opens up a US-Arab channel that bypasses direct Israel-Palestinian negotiations and circles round the impasse posed by Hamas’ refusal to recognize Israel and renounce violence. The Palestinian delegation at the March 28-29 Arab summit will be led by Mahmoud Abbas, chairman of the
Palestinian Authority, and Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniyeh. The delegation will be asked to vote for the re-launched Saudi peace plan on behalf of the Palestinian government.
Legalistic quibbling aside, the Mecca reconciliation deal between Hamas and Fatah may not end up in their reconciliation, but led up to this point: it established the momentum for bringing Hamas through the back door onto the Arab side of the negotiating table – first with the US, then Israel.
Syria is being wooed to make Arab summit endorsement of the Saudi plan unanimous. The Damascus-sponsored Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal was summoned to Riyadh Friday, March 23, in a bid to secure his support for the US-Arab track promoted by Rice and the Saudis.
Rice, who holds talks with Jordan’s King Abdull ah in Amm
an Monday, is shuttling busily to push the Saudi peace plan as a basis for peace negotiations, even though Riyadh and the Arab League adamantly reject any modifications.
There are big differences between the Rice shuttle today and the Kissinger shuttles of the 1970s. Henry Kissinger, then US secretary of state, took advantage of Israel’s setback in the 1973 Yom Kippur war to secure a partial Israel-Egyptian settlement. But before leaning on Egypt and Syria, he gave Israel time and the chance to recover and turn the tide of war in its favor by a surprise military crossing of the Suez into Egypt.
Rice, too, seeks to exploit Israel’s debacle in Lebanon, but her way differs from that of her predecessor in two crucial respects:
1. The Bush administration is not offering Israel time or a chance to restore its bargaining leverage by means of a second military action against Hizballah and Syria. The Olmert government is being hustled into a negotiating process in which Israel will stand alone against adversaries without choices or diplomatic leeway.
2. By throwing all its diplomatic and military clout behind the Saudi peace plan, Washington places Jerusalem in a take-it-or-leave it vice: Taking it means shrinking Israel back to the pre-1967 lines and giving up the long-promised “secure and recognizable boundaries;” losing historic Jerusalem and settling millions of Palestinian refugees in its attenuated territory.
Rejecting the Saudi plan would entail a showdown with Washington.
To talk Israel round, the US secretary is presenting the US-Saudi initiative as a component of her government’s master plan for Iran. This takes the wind out of the sails of prime minister Olmert and foreign minister Livni, who have consistently relegated the Iranian nuclear issue to the care of the US and international community.
There is no progress on the release of the Israeli soldier Gilead Shalit or even access to him after nine months.
Begin DEBKAfile Article 3
DEBKAfile Exclusive: Rice counts on Israeli “glimmerings of a Palestinian state” to ward off anti-US moves on Iraq and Iran at coming Arab summit
March 25, 2007, 5:43 PM (GMT+02:00)
US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice holds talks in the Palestinian Authority and Israel Sunday and Monday, March 25-26, after kicking off her latest Middle East tour at a conference with the foreign ministers of the “Arab Quartet” – Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the UAE – in Aswan, Egypt, Sat. March 24.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon also visited the Palestinian Authority Sunday after meeting defense minister Amir Peretz when he arrived in Israel Sat. night aboard a special Qatari flight.
She meets the visiting UN secretary and Israel leaders in Jerusalem Monday.
American correspondents in the Rice party reports her “new political horizon” will call on Israel to give the Palestinians “the glimmerings of a Palestinian state” and the Arabs to offer what DEBKAfile’s sources call “glimpses of recognition.” This semantic diplomacy is designed to elicit from the Olmert government far-reaching concessions to the Palestinians.
According to DEBKAfile’s Middle East sources, the US secretary’s plan faces half a dozen obstacles:
1. The nebulous concept of political horizon was espoused by President Bill Clinton and two US secretaries of state, Madeleine Albright and Colin Powell, for seven years without even slightly denting the Israel-Palestinian dispute.
2. This failure of US and European diplomats to contrive an end to the dispute – or even to Palestinian violence in the form of suicidal terrorism – looms larger than ever, considering the conflict is two years older than the Iraq war.
The plan to skip the first provisions of the Middle East road map, which call for an end to Palestinian violence, and jump straight to the final status talks, while leaving the Palestinians committed to “resistance in all forms”, is interesting but not workable.
As always happened in the past, some Palestinian act of terror will be sure to torpedo any peace moves,
3. A “new political horizon” plan might have stood a chance if Israel had won the Lebanon war against Hizballah last summer – in other words, beaten Iran on the Lebanese and Gaza Strip battlefields.
Since this did not happen, Iran, its Lebanese and radical Palestinian proxies – Jihad Islami, Hamas and factions of the Fatah-al Aqsa Brigades – are left with enough leverage to veto any progress achieved in US-Arab led diplomacy.
4. The Palestinian and Israeli leaders on whom Washington is banking to lead the way to the “new political horizons” are both short of the domestic clout for carrying through real motion.
5. The Palestinian unity government has not bridged the deep Hamas-Fatah dispute or ended the violence between them. It is expected to survive on paper up until the Arab summit conference opening in Riyadh on March 28. Meanwhile, Mahmoud Abbas will exploit the “successful” unity formula for all his worth to extract a maximum of international recognition and the loosening of purse-strings for the Hamas-led government, hoping to deflect Hamas from beating his Fatah by force of arms.
At the same time, the hard-line Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal and prime minister Ismail Haniyeh will make their first appearance as Palestinian representatives at the Arab summit.
6. Behind the “new political horizon” is a strenuous Saudi diplomatic drive based on the concept that wide-ranging Israeli concessions to the Palestinians will wean Syrian president Bashar Assad, Hizballah and Hamas away from their alliance with Tehran. There is not the slightest sign of this happening. Just the reverse: Assad, Hassan Nasrallah, Khaled Meshaal and Ismail Haniyeh are making hay from the double boost of solid Iranian support and the blandishments of US-backed Arab rulers.
Condoleezza Rice cannot look forward to much progress on the Israel-Palestinian diplomatic front, but her current Middle East tour may prevent the Arab summit in Riyadh carrying resolutions that contradict outright Washington’s Iraq and Iranian policies.
Begin DEBKAfile Article 4
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is flown by Israeli military helicopter over central Israel and the Israel-West Bank defense barrier
March 26, 2007, 9:26 PM (GMT+02:00)
He said on landing that he now has a better understanding of Israel’s security problems. Ban’s program Monday started with talks with prime minister Ehud Olmert and a meeting with the families of the kidnapped Israeli soldiers: Gideon Shalit, seized nine months ago by Hamas-led raiders, and the two men snatched by Hizballah, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev.
The UN secretary promised to his utmost efforts to secure their release and asked for patience.
He was later escorted around Yad Vashem, the national Holocaust memorial. The abducted soldiers’ families sent a message of support and hope to the relatives of the 15 British seamen captured at gunpoint by an Iranian warship last Friday.
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