In a parallel development, the international hackers' group “Anonymous” announced a coordinated effort to attack Israeli and Israel-related websites with the purpose of “erasing Israel off the Internet”. Many of those involved in this loose coalition appear to be from North Africa and the Palestinian territories. They named their operation “#OpIsrael”. According to Israeli sources, what makes this operation different from prior attempts to attack Israeli sites is the high degree of coordination between the players. The coordinated attack is scheduled for April 7.

 

What do all these attacks have in common other than their obvious common hatred for Israel? - that they are happening or are planned to happen on the eve of John Kerry's trip to the region in an attempt to restart Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Is this a coincidence? Hardly...

 

The Palestinian strategy over the years since 1993 has been to agree to negotiate but to make sure that those negotiations never produce any final agreement. Arafat saw negotiations as a way to buy time in order to strengthen his position in the confrontation with Israel. He was notorious for springing up violence whenever negotiations approached an agreement. The launching of the Intifadah in 2000 was indeed proved to be a way to “kick the board” after he was offered close to 90% of his demands during the negotiations at Camp David. His heirs, Haniyeh in Gaza and Abbas in Ramallah, continue this strategy, sometimes at odds with each other and sometimes in coordination. When Prime Minister Ehud Olmert put again on the table an offer giving Palestinians control over more than 90% of the West Bank and offered to compensate with Israeli territory for those areas to be annexed to Israel, Abbas walked out of the negotiations and has not come back to the table ever since.

 

Again and again the Palestinians are avoiding an agreement on borders, even when the proposals have been sometimes practically based on their own demands. At the same time, they are refusing to recognize Israel as the State of the Jewish People in exchange for Israel's reciprocal recognition. The inescapable conclusion is that the conflict is not about “ending the occupation”, or a “Palestinian State”. It is not about fulfilling the legitimate desire of the Palestinian People to gain full control over their lives and their collective future. Palestinian leadership appears fixated on using every resource to destroy Israel. Their Agenda is not a (Palestinian) Nation Building agenda but a (Jewish/Israeli) Nation Destruction agenda, and both – the Israeli and the Arab Palestinian people – are paying the price in blood.

 

Every point agreed over the years between Israeli and Palestinian leaders regarding territory and borders has been eventually disowned by the Palestinians: In 2001 in Taba, Palestinians agreed that large Israeli settlements were to be annexed to Israel and that they would accept a territorial exchange with Israel based on the 1949 Cease Fire lines which separated Israel from the Arab countries until 1967. Here we are, 12 years later, and the Palestinian leadership is now refusing any kind of territorial compromise, demands a Judenrein West Bank and the freezing of all “settlement activity” as preconditions to come back to the table. In other words, they are demanding to be allowed to turn back the clock on their compromises, so they can extract more concessions from Israel. How does this make sense? Only if we accept the fact that the conflict is not over territory but over the fact that the Palestinian leadership and their Islamist allies just cannot accept the presence of non-Islamic states in what they consider to be part of the Caliphate...