"The direct threat to Israeli and Palestinian existence — and, in fact, to the existence of all peoples in the region — is the absence of peace in Palestine." Ahmad Y. Majdoubeh in The Jordan Times

IN CONTEXT: Nov 14, 2013 Palestinians look on at damages inside a house that was attacked overnight by suspected Jewish extremists in Sinjil, a village in the West Bank, northeast of Ramallah (AFP photo)...

Five Palestinian children suffered from smoke inhalation when suspected Jewish extremists set fire to their West Bank home on Thursday in an apparent revenge attack, the family said.

The attackers torched the front of the Dar Khalil home in Sinjil, a village northeast of Ramallah, and spray-painted the words “Regards from Eden, Revenge!” in Hebrew in blue on a wall outside the house.

“Eden” is an apparent reference to Eden Atias, a soldier who was killed on Wednesday by a 16-year-old Palestinian while sleeping on a bus in northern Israel. He was buried on Wednesday night.

The Dar Khalil family had no apparent connection to the Palestinian attacker.

“I woke up at 2:00am (0000 GMT), and four or five people came out of a white car and started breaking windows, then poured gasoline, then threw fire into the house,” mother-of-five Ruweida Dar Khalil told AFP.

“My kids were sleeping. I was scared to death. My kids almost died. I couldn’t even touch the doorknob it was so hot...”

 [AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine]

http://jordantimes.com/why-should-palestinians-negotiate

Why should Palestinians negotiate?

by Ahmad Y. Majdoubeh | Nov 14, 2013 | 21:42

The withdrawal of the Palestinian negotiating team from the US-sponsored peace talks with Israelis is more than justified. Israel has made it impossible for them to continue.

The current Israeli government is not serious about peace; actually it is doing all it can to subvert the fragile peace talks and impose its expansionist, Judaisation agenda in Palestine.

If the Israeli government had been genuinely interested in making peace, it would have done several things. For example, it would have stopped all settlement activity at once to give the peace negotiators a chance and would have made focus on peace a priority.

It, however, is doing the exact opposite. Since the start of the latest round of peace talks, the Israeli government sped up settlement activity. The latest move by the Israeli prime minister to halt — not to cancel — a plan for a huge settlement project is another of his endless gimmicks.

The reason he gave for halting this project, which would affect the peace talks and the future relations and existence of Israelis and Palestinians, was that it could anger the international community and thus affect Israel’s proposals regarding Iran!!

What a misguided, disrespectful thing to say when the Palestinians have joined peace talks even though they made clear that settlements should be halted until they come to an agreement with Israel about the future borders of a Palestinian state.

In other words, the Israeli premier would halt settlement activity to give a chance to his weird, paranoid proposals regarding Iran, but he would not do it for the sake of talks which are crucial to both Israelis and Palestinians.

Iran, of course, is another gimmick used in a delaying tactic.

The direct threat to Israeli and Palestinian existence — and, in fact, to the existence of all peoples in the region — is the absence of peace in Palestine. It is not the Iranian nuclear project.

And yet, the Israeli government is creating much fuss about the Iranian project to focus attention away from peace making in Palestine and sideline, and thus subvert, the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

The timing here is crucial. Had Iran been threatening Israel with a nuclear bomb, or had Iran come even close to producing one, the Israeli government may have had an excuse for devoting so much energy and attention to Iran. At this moment in time, however, the Israeli obsession with the Iranian issue is utterly unjustified.

For one thing, the new Iranian leadership is negotiating in earnest with the international community about inspection of its nuclear facilities; for another, American diplomacy regarding the Iranian issue appears to be bearing fruit.

In fact, the US secretary of state announced a couple of days ago that an agreement with Iran is imminent.

Furthermore, the current Iranian government is no longer provocative or hostile to Israel, as some were in the past.

So, why should the Israeli government choose to create a huge fuss about Iran now?

The only answer is that it wants to distract the focus from the peace talks.

The fact of the matter is that the Israeli government does not want peace. It only wants all the Palestinian land.

So, why should the Palestinians continue to sit uselessly and fruitlessly at the negotiating table with the Israelis when the Israeli government continues to sabotage peace?

The reason they sit and negotiate — and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said he will try to form another negotiating team — is that they have an inalienable right to an independent Palestinian state in their homeland Palestine.

And because the international community — including Europe and the US — insists that there should be justice in Palestine and that the Palestinians are entitled to their state on land that Israel has occupied and continues to swallow.

The European and American positions on Palestinian statehood and on Israel’s illegal settlement are highly appreciated. However, one expects them to close the loop by pressuring the Israeli government to stay focused on peace in Palestine and take concrete measures to show that it is serious about peace, including, first and foremost, immediately halting all settlement plans and activities.

Without such a firm position, it would be useless for the Palestinians to continue sitting at the negotiating table, while the Israeli premier is playing his games and sanctioning further settlement and occupation measures.