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Israel “Sabotaging” ISG Report

The Iraq Study Group's program for Iraq hasn't been out a week and hasn't been implemented, and already the Israel fetishists of the left are announcing that Israel is causing it to fail.

In today’s Guardian, Peter Preston discusses the recommendations for Israel/Palestine in the reports suggested “New Diplomatic Offensive.”

This injunction couldn't be clearer. "The United States will not be able to achieve its goals in the Middle East unless it deals directly with the Arab-Israeli conflict. There must be a renewed and sustained commitment by the United States to a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace on all fronts." Notice that "must" word. Jim Baker and friends shout it now, in terms. Tony Blair says it again and again. If you don't cut out the cancer of hatred, loss and retribution, then nothing good will happen. There will be no rest for Iraq, no spread of democracy, no rapprochement with Tehran.

Oh, but one thing: If the moshiakh arrives tomorrow and transforms all of mandate Palestine into an Eden in which lions lie with lambs and all trespasses are forgotten forever, this will contribute not a whit to the political reconciliation in Iraq of Kurd and Arab, Sunni and Shia. And it's those reconciliations, after all, that are the central concern of the report.

Ehud Olmert, asked about the report’s linkage between Israel/Palestine and Iraq, offered the entirely benign rebuttal, "We have a different view."

In response to this provocation, an indignant Preston asks, “Who needs enemies to sabotage prospects of a wider peace when ‘friends’ do it instinctively?”

But if Olmert’s comment amounts to “sabotage” by a “rogue 51st state” (the title of the article), what exactly is he sabotaging?

The report’s program for the Arab-Israeli conflict is this: Resolution 242; Land for peace; “Sustainable negotiations leading to a final peace settlement along the lines of President Bush’s two-state solution”; and a big peace conference at which Israel and Syria come to terms on the Golan.

This is not a plan, it's America’s Christmas wish list for the Levant. There’s a sturdy international consensus on the importance of all these points; the desperate and unsolved conundrum is how we get there. The report offers nothing substantive on that. The U.S. should just make it happen. Thanks for the help.

Unfortunately, declaring that the Arab-Israeli conflict has a key role in all of the region’s problems is a hoary international protocol, fatuous but widely observed by people like Preston. We can expect much more weeping and gnashing of teeth about Israel’s undoing of the ISG plan.

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