“Palestinian (sic)” Recognition: What About Jewish Self-Respect and Memory?

Olmert Lays Down Condition for Talks with PA

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Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, speaking at a press conference with French President Jacques Chirac, said Wednesday that the Palestinian Authority (PA) must recognize Israel before negotiations can start.

He added that the PA also must end all terror and fulfill obligations of previous agreements. The PA and Israel announced an agreement in February 2005 at the Sharm El-Sheikh summit but it quickly fell apart. The PA was to receive control of five major urban centers on condition it end incitement and terror. Suicide bombers from the first city where the PA took control carried out a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv shortly after the accord.

Israel Does Not Need Palestinian Recognition

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Menachem Begin had … Jewish self-respect and memory. He had an all-encompassing grasp of Jewish history. Instinctively his memory went back thousands of years and his vision forward thousands of years. Jewish nostalgia fed his soul; it nurtured his deepest convictions.

SO WHEN, on the first day of his premiership in 1977, he was waylaid by a tall, debonair, rakishly good-looking Englishman in a bow tie and a perfectly pitched BBC announcer’s voice, and saucily asked whether he looked forward to a time when the Palestinians would recognize Israel …

“… Surely, you would insist, would you not, that the relevant Palestinian organizations recognize Israel as a sine qua non for negotiations with them?” persisted the fellow.

“Certainly not! Those so-called relevant organizations are gangs of murderers bent on destroying the State of Israel. We will never conduct talks about our own destruction.”

“And were they to recognize Israel’s existence – would you then negotiate with them?” pressed the correspondent.

“No, sir!”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t need Palestinian recognition for my right to exist.”

“… Our Jewish state needs no American affirmation of our right to exist. Our Hebrew bible established that right millennia ago. Never, throughout the centuries, did we ever abandon or forfeit that right. Therefore, sir, we alone, the Jewish people – no one else – are responsible for our country’s right to exist.”

So yes, Menachem Begin would, indeed, have had what to say to Ehud Olmert, were he around today. Never would he have put on the table a demand for recognition of Israel’s right to exist as a quid pro quo for negotiation. To him, this was a high ideological principle, a fundamental axiom, an absolute given, a natural corollary of his all-embracing view of Jewry’s extraordinary history.

Ehud, take it out.

PA Shoots Down Idea for Bilateral Expulsion

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The Palestinian Authority (PA) has rejected the idea of a bilateral expulsion and demolition of communities in Judea and Samaria, 24 hours after it was reported that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert raised the possibility.

Saeb Erakat, the chief negotiator for the PA, told an Arab daily newspaper that there is nothing to talk about with Israel unless it surrenders all of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, including the Old City of Jerusalem, which would become the capital of a new Arab state.

The Prime Minister began plans to re-sell his expulsion plan by proposing temporary borders for an Arab state and bringing in the PA as a partner instead of acting unilaterally, which virtually every country has rejected.