Something we can all agree on.
(Telegraph) — The peace process is dead again, but don’t let anyone tell you there’s no common ground between the Israelis and Palestinians.
Just listen to Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, in January 2010, addressing the subject of stalled negotiations – stalled because a then newish US president had made them contingent upon a total “freeze” on Jewish settlement construction in both east Jerusalem and the West Bank:
The Palestinians have climbed up a tree. And they like it up there. People bring ladders to them. We bring ladders to them. The higher the ladder, the higher they climb.
Now listen to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, sounding off to Newsweek two months ago about the collapse of peace negotiations once a partial construction freeze, and those negotiations, had inevitably come and gone:
It was Obama who suggested a full settlement freeze. I said okay, I accept. We both went up the tree. After that, he came down with a ladder and he removed the ladder and said to me, jump. Three times he did it.
So both Bibi and Abbas have cast the president of the United States under the deepest suspicion and given up on the arboreal metaphors for appeasement. Both are now hardening their lines, with newly galvanised political bases to support them, two years after another failed round of Washington diplomacy. Even the boundlessly optimistic George Mitchell has quit in frustration.