Barack Obama complained yesterday that the Iranians “have been unable to get to ‘yes’” on his proposal that they send their low-enriched uranium abroad for further enrichment. It has evidently not occurred to him that his own behavior might have anything to do with that. In fact, thanks to the administration’s amateurish negotiating tactics, Tehran’s best move for now is to keep saying no even if it ultimately intends to say yes.

Though the official deadline for an Iranian response was supposed to be last month, administration officials have repeatedly said they will give Iran until the end of the year to make a decision. In other words, Iran can keep the centrifuges spinning for another two months risk-free merely by delaying its response. So why on earth wouldn’t it choose to do so?

And then, of course, it can submit a “counterproposal” on December 31 — or more likely sometime in January, since it already knows that this administration isn’t too fussy about deadlines. That will necessitate a summit meeting among the six countries conducting the talks (the five permanent Security Council members plus Germany, known as the P5+1) so they can decide how to respond. In other words, more delay.

At best, the P5+1 will agree to negotiate, giving Tehran many more months of risk-free enrichment. From Tehran’s standpoint, that has to seem a likely outcome. Granted, U.S. officials claim they will not accept any amendment to the deal. But can anyone remember the last time Obama stuck to his guns when confronted by an autocrat who failed to be swayed by his charm?

Yet even if the counterproposal is unacceptable to the four Western countries, the ensuing wrangling is guaranteed to take weeks, if not months: Russia and China are sure to say the talks are worth pursuing no matter what the counterproposal consists of, and the West can be counted on to waste time trying to persuade them otherwise. So Tehran will still have bought more time.

Most likely, Iran has no intention of ever saying yes. Since there is no evidence that even the Western powers alone, much less Russia and China, will ever agree on a package of sanctions that would make it sit up and take notice, why should it?

But even if the powers ultimately did come up with a sanctions package intimidating enough to get Tehran to agree to the proposed deal, Obama’s negotiating method has ensured that, at the very least, Iran can gain many more months of punishment-free uranium enrichment just by dragging its feet. The mullahs would have to be idiots not to take advantage of the opportunity.

This really is Negotiating 101: no interlocutor will ever give you a prompt reply if you make it worthwhile for him to stall. Unfortunately, Obama and his team all seem to have skipped that class in college.

For sheer gall, Barack Obama’s labeling half of Israel’s capital a “settlement,” as Jonathan has pointed out, may be hard to beat. But a New York Times report of a new book about the Temple Mount is definitely in the running. Seeking to give readers some background, the report offered the following gem: “The lack of archaeological evidence of the ancient temples has led many Palestinians to deny any real Jewish attachment or claim to the plateau.”

We’ll ignore the fact that the Second Temple is actually well-documented in extant writings from the period, and that several sections of the Temple compound’s outer walls, as described in these writings, have been uncovered (the Western Wall being one of them).

Instead, let’s discuss why there is a dearth of findings from the Temples themselves. (1) There happens to be a mosque on the exact site where, according to tradition, the Temples once stood. (2) Israel, contrary to Palestinian propaganda, is not out to “destroy al-Aqsa”; indeed, it scrupulously avoids any action that might endanger the mosque. (3) Israel is so deferential to Muslim sensibilities that, after capturing the Mount in 1967, it handed control of the site back to the Muslim waqf. Which brings us to (4): for all these reasons, Israel has never excavated the only place in the world where remnants of the Temple could possibly be found. Nor were any digs conducted there before 1967: al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock have stood undisturbed for hundreds of years. And yes, it is hard to produce archaeological evidence if you never even conduct a dig.

What is outrageous about this report is not just the way it abets Palestinian falsifications of history, though it certainly does that: since the reader isn’t told that this “lack of evidence” stems from the fact that nobody ever looked, he naturally assumes that archaeologists did, in fact, look and found nothing.

Even more outrageous, however, is the way Israel’s generosity is being used against it: its very restraint in eschewing excavations on the Mount — its concern, again, for Muslim sensibilities, its desire to avoid even the appearance of harm to the mosques — has been twisted into “evidence” that no Jewish connection to the Mount ever existed.

This is a standard Palestinian tactic: Israel’s refusal to let Jews pray on the Mount, also in deference to Muslim sensibilities, is similarly used as “proof” that Jews have no connection to the site. After all, Muslims pray there; Jews don’t; QED. And this tactic has been wildly successful: most of the world is completely convinced that Israel lacks any rights on the Mount.

But if Israel’s generosity is being exploited in this fashion, perhaps Jerusalem needs to rethink its tactics — and start demonstrating the Jewish connection to the Mount in actions rather than words. Excavating under al-Aqsa would be too drastic a first step. But letting Jews pray on a designated section of the Mount devoid of mosques would be an excellent place to begin.

The International Atomic Energy Agency is, as Jonathan noted, deeply disturbed by its latest findings on Iran. It is also deeply disturbed by its latest findings on Syria, which it detailed in another report released this week. Syria’s explanation of the uranium traces found at a Damascus research reactor did not fit the facts, the report said, nor did these traces match Syria’s declared uranium inventory. Moreover, Syria is still refusing IAEA requests for both a return visit to Dair Alzour, the site Israel bombed in September 2007, and initial visits to three military sites whose appearance was altered after inspectors asked to see them.

“Essentially, no progress has been made since the last report to clarify any of the outstanding issues,” the agency concluded.

The real mystery, however, is why the IAEA seems to find this behavior eternally surprising — because its own behavior positively demands such stonewalling.

The IAEA has been investigating Syria for more than two years now. During this time, it has issued numerous reports expressing its concern over suspicious findings that Damascus failed to adequately explain and over Syria’s refusal to let it make the inspections necessary to answer its questions. Yet it has refused to refer the case to the Security Council for sanctions, because, says agency director Mohamed ElBaradei, there is no proof of Syrian wrongdoing.

Well, of course there isn’t. That’s the whole point of Syria’s stonewalling — to prevent the agency from getting such proof!

Damascus, needless to say, is merely copying the lessons learned from the agency’s handling of Iran. After discovering in 2003 that Tehran had been lying about its nuclear program for 18 years, the agency spent the next three years refusing to turn the file over to the Security Council, saying there was no proof Iran’s secret nuclear program was aimed at producing weapons. And when the case finally did reach the Security Council, ElBaradei lobbied vehemently against sanctions, citing the lack of a “smoking gun” that would justify punishment.

Thus all Iran had to do was ensure that there never would be a smoking gun — by steadfastly refusing to comply with inspectors’ requests.

ElBaradei thereby made noncooperation the optimum strategy. Had either Syria or Iran cooperated, the agency might have obtained sufficient evidence to justify severe sanctions. But as long as they refuse to cooperate, the agency has little chance of obtaining such proof, ensuring that any repercussions will be mild. Therefore, they are free to develop nuclear weapons with impunity.

To be effective, IAEA policy would have to be the exact opposite — one of imposing stringent penalties for noncooperation, to encourage suspect countries to “come clean” and prove their innocence. And that, of course, would require suspect regimes to actually be innocent, creating a strong disincentive to secret weapons programs.

In short, under ElBaradei, the IAEA has brilliantly hit on the strategy most likely to facilitate nuclear proliferation. Is it any wonder he and the agency won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005?

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has made several welcome changes to his ministry’s priority list, with perhaps the most noteworthy being the section on bilateral relationships. Strengthening ties with Arab states, which was at the top of that section under his predecessor, Tzipi Livni, is now at the bottom. Instead, Lieberman assigned priority to strengthening ties with the hitherto neglected regions of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

From a cost-benefit standpoint, this is a smart move. No Arab state is going to be anything but hostile in the foreseeable future. And while it is obviously preferable for states like Saudi Arabia to remain at their present hostility level rather than to escalate to Iran’s level, any investment beyond the minimum needed to ensure this much is just wasted time and effort.

In contrast, few non-Muslim states in Africa, Asia, and Latin America are inherently hostile to Israel; hence an investment of time and effort might well improve relations. And while most of these countries have little clout, they could nevertheless do much to boost Israel’s global image.

To understand why, consider this month’s UN General Assembly vote endorsing the Goldstone Report. The resolution passed 118-18-44, with another 16 countries not voting. That is a lopsided condemnation of Israel.

But of the 16 countries that skipped the vote, all were from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Of the 44 abstainers, 18 were from these regions (most were European). And of the 118 who voted in favor, almost half belong to the Organization of the Islamic Conference; most of the rest were non-Muslim states from Africa, Asia, and Latin America (plus five European states). Thus the vote could clearly have been made much less lopsided by flipping some of these states from “yes” to “abstention” and others from “abstention” or “not voting” to “no.”

Why does this matter? Because the fact that resolutions condemning Israel consistently pass by such lopsided margins contributes greatly to Israel’s pariah image, portraying it as a country with scarcely a friend in the world. If, instead, such condemnations passed only narrowly, this would portray it as a country that, despite many enemies, also has many friends. And countries with many friends are by definition not pariahs.

Could an investment of diplomatic effort flip some of these countries? It’s hard to know, given that Israel has never tried; for decades, its diplomacy has focused almost exclusively on the West and the Middle East. Nevertheless, another datum from the Goldstone vote is suggestive: the only Latin American country that did vote “no” on Goldstone — Panama — did so two weeks after its president met personally with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

And that’s the point: Most of these countries know little about Israel, and therefore care little. But if Israel made an effort to fill the knowledge gap, the caring gap might shrink, too. At the very least, it’s worth a try — especially when the alternative is for Israeli diplomats to waste their time battering their heads against a hostile Arab wall.

Writing in today’s Jerusalem Post, Liat Collins offers a pertinent observation on Thomas Friedman’s proposal that America stop pushing Israeli-Palestinian peace. Friedman argued that American intervention functions as “Novocain” for the parties: “We relieve all the political pain from the Arab and Israeli decision-makers by creating the impression in the minds of their publics that something serious is happening.”

But as Collins noted, “the pain, however, has tended to come with the peace process itself. … No Israeli — Left, Right or Center — can forget the exploding buses and cafes causing the sort of pain that Novocaine can never cure. … And the consequences of pulling out from Gaza and the security zone in Lebanon can, of course, still be felt today: No other country has had to resort to creating a rocket-proof indoor playground a la Sderot or a missile-proof emergency room such as was recently inaugurated at Haifa’s Rambam Hospital.”

And that is the real problem with U.S. involvement in the “peace process”: not only, as Friedman correctly noted, has it wasted time, energy, and diplomatic capital that could have been better employed elsewhere; it has actually made peace less likely.

Clearly, the terror produced by every territorial concession since 1993 has decreased the Israelis’ appetite for such concessions. But even more important, U.S. involvement has reduced Palestinian willingness to make necessary concessions.

Over the past 16 years, “U.S. involvement” has largely become synonymous with pressing Israel for more concessions — both because Israel is seen as “the stronger party,” with more to give, and because it is far more vulnerable than are the Palestinians to U.S. pressure, given America’s status as Israel’s only ally. Palestinians have thus become convinced that they don’t need to make concessions; they can wait for Washington to deliver Israel on a platter.

For instance, Palestinians would be more likely to fight terror if they thought future withdrawals depended on it. But they don’t, and for good reason: the world has never demanded an end to terror as the price of further withdrawals; instead, it has consistently pressed Israel to keep withdrawing despite the terror. Under those circumstances, why bother fighting terror?

Similarly, Israel is routinely pressed to make upfront negotiating concessions: just last week, for instance, Hillary Clinton reportedly demanded that guidelines for renewed Israeli-Palestinian talks promise “a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders and in Jerusalem,” meaning that Israel would have to fully concede two of the three core issues before talks can even begin (Jerusalem declined). But Washington has never demanded that Palestinians cede even an obvious deal breaker like the “right of return” upfront; this is always left to future negotiations.

As long as the Palestinians think they can rely on Washington to “deliver” Israel, they will never feel a need to make concessions themselves. And until they do, no deal will be possible.

Barack Obama isn’t likely to heed Friedman’s advice, but perhaps his successor will be wiser. The “peace process” will undoubtedly still be around.

In a letter to the International Herald Tribune, J Street’s Jeremy Ben-Ami urges the U.S. to finally close an Israeli-Palestinian deal, “the parameters of which we can all recite in our sleep.” So if everyone agrees on the parameters, how is it that 16 years of negotiations have yet to produce a deal?

The answer, of course, is that there is no such agreement — not on the parameters, and still less on the pesky details.

For instance, “everyone knows” — even Ben-Ami — that any deal requires the Palestinians to abandon their demand to resettle millions of descendants of refugees in Israel, as that would spell the end of the Jewish state. Everyone, that is, except the Palestinians, who have yet to budge on this demand.

And “everyone knows” that any deal must give the Palestinians control over the Temple Mount. (Well, actually, most Israelis disagree, but that doesn’t seem to matter to anyone — even their own prime ministers.) Yet every time Israel offers them the Mount, the Palestinians refuse to accept it, because they insist that it be accompanied by an Israeli renunciation of any Jewish connection to Judaism’s holiest site, to which Jews have prayed three times a day for millennia. In other words, they insist that Jews deny their history, religion, and cultural and spiritual heritage as the price of a deal.

Hence they rejected even the ridiculous and totally unenforceable Clinton compromise of Palestinian sovereignty atop the Mount and Israeli sovereignty underneath. That effectively gave the Palestinians full control, since if they control the top, nobody can prevent them from doing what they please underneath — nor can Israel gain access to exercise its underground rights. But since this compromise did acknowledge an Israeli connection to the Mount, even it was too much for the Palestinians.

They also rejected Ehud Olmert’s proposal last year that the Mount be controlled by a five-member international panel composed of “Palestine,” Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the U.S., and Israel, on which Israel would obviously be permanently and automatically outvoted. But its very membership would acknowledge an Israeli connection to the Mount, and that was unacceptable to the Palestinians.

And then there’s the issue of borders. “Everyone knows” (except the Israeli majority, which doesn’t count) that the border must be based on the 1967 lines, with 1:1 territorial swaps for a few settlement blocs, since relocating 300,000 settlers is unfeasible. Yet the Palestinians rejected exactly that when Olmert offered it last year. Olmert proposed swaps equivalent to 6 percent of the West Bank, but the Palestinians say their maximum is 2-3 percent. It’s not enough for them to get the equivalent of 100 percent of the territory; they want the satisfaction of making Israel suffer by having to throw hundreds of thousands of Israelis out of their homes.

So it really doesn’t matter whether “everyone” knows the parameters or not. Because until someone manages to convince the Palestinians that Israel’s cultural, spiritual, and physical suicide isn’t part of the deal, there isn’t going to be one.

When four Knesset members proposed legislation last week to institute the death penalty for child murderers, it revived a long-dormant Israeli debate over the pros and cons of this penalty in general. The latest installment, in today’s Jerusalem Post, supports the current de facto ban on executions, arguing that they deter neither murderers nor terrorists.

Regardless of whether that’s true, it misses the point: Israel desperately needs a death penalty for hard-core terrorists — not as a deterrent but to prevent them from being released to kill again. And, equally important, to spare the country wrenching emotional blackmail over kidnapped soldiers.

While ordinary Israeli murderers usually serve their sentences in full, terrorists have an excellent chance of being released early — either in an effort to “bolster Palestinian moderates” or in exchange for Israelis (or their remains, or even a “sign of life”) kidnapped by terrorist organizations. Israel releases hundreds of terrorists for one or both of these reasons almost every year. Most recently, for instance, it freed 20 female terrorists in exchange for a mere videotape of kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit.

There are no official statistics on what percentage of these freed terrorists return to kill again. While one would hope the security services track this data, no government has ever published it, possibly realizing that if the statistics were known, public support for prisoner releases would plummet. Unofficial statistics — leaked to journalists or compiled by private organizations — vary widely, ranging from 25-80 percent. But even the lower figure is hardly negligible.

And the anecdotal evidence is compelling. In 2007, for instance, the Almagor Terror Victims Association compiled a list of 30 attacks committed by freed terrorists in 2000-2005 that together killed 177 Israelis. IDF Col. Herzl Halevy said this September that terrorists freed in a 2004 swap with Hezbollah composed “the entire infrastructure of Islamic Jihad” in subsequent years — during which Islamic Jihad bombings killed at least 37 Israelis. In short, executing terrorists, and hence preventing their release, would save lives.

But beyond that, executions would also end the agonizing debate over whether to trade terrorists for kidnapped Israelis. Most Israelis, for instance, would have no objection to freeing minor offenders in exchange for Shalit; the problem is that Hamas is demanding hundreds of mass murderers — who, if freed, would almost certainly kill again. Had these terrorists been executed, however, they would not be available to trade. Hamas would either have to make do with low-level offenders or get out of the kidnapping business.

Might that not encourage terrorists to kill rather than kidnap? Well, do the math: over the past decade, terrorists have kidnapped exactly two live Israelis (plus five dead ones, for whose remains Israel also paid). During the same period, freed terrorists have killed hundreds. It may sound cold, but that’s a pretty good cost-benefit ratio.

The bottom line is that Israel needs a death penalty for terrorists now. Few things would do more to save Israeli lives.

Bernard Kouchner is “hurt” and “shocked” by Israelis’ “vanished” desire for peace. Israelis of all political stripes would undoubtedly be equally shocked at the French foreign minister’s ignorance — and at his willingness to hurl false accusations without even a minimal effort to check his facts.

“What really hurts me, and this shocks us, is that before there used to be a great peace movement in Israel,” Kouchner told France Inter radio yesterday. “There was a left that made itself heard and a real desire for peace. It seems to me, and I hope that I am completely wrong, that this desire has completely vanished, as though people no longer believe in it.”

Kouchner is, of course, half right: even most Israeli leftists have stopped believing peace is possible in the foreseeable future, which is precisely why the peace movement and the political Left have largely collapsed. But that is a far cry from saying that Israelis have stopped wanting peace. The desire remains as strong as ever; it’s just that most Israelis currently see no way of fulfilling it.

Nor is it really hard to see why Israelis have stopped believing. First, every territorial concession since the 1993 Oslo Accord has produced only more terror. Palestinians killed more Israelis in the first two and a half years after Oslo than in the entire preceding decade, and in 2000-04 (the height of the second intifada), Israel’s terror-related casualties exceeded those of the entire preceding 53 years. The withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 led to the Second Lebanon War, and the withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 produced daily rocket barrages on southern Israel. To most Israelis, bombs and rockets exploding in their cities don’t look much like peace.

This has been compounded by the complete lack of movement in Palestinian positions since 1993, even as Israeli leaders offered ever-increasing concessions. Israeli leaders routinely tell their people that peace will require “painful concessions.” Palestinian leaders are still telling their people that peace will enable 4.7 million descendants of Palestinian refugees to resettle in pre-1967 Israel, thus destroying the Jewish state demographically. And Israelis find it hard to believe in a peace whose price, according to their supposed “peace partner,” is Israel’s eradication.

None of this is news; a simple Web search would produce thousands of articles by Israelis explaining why they have despaired. Or if Kouchner doesn’t like the Web, he could have picked up a phone: most Israelis would probably have been happy to enlighten him.

But Kouchner couldn’t be bothered with the facts; he preferred to simply accuse Israelis of not wanting peace. Perhaps it’s his background as a human-rights activist showing: hurling accusations at Israel without checking the facts is practically de rigueur among human-rights organizations these days.

Nevertheless, one would expect better of a foreign minister. After all, he has actual responsibility for setting policy. And policy works better when it’s based on fact rather than fantasy.

Anyone who still thinks Turkey is a Western ally ought to pay close attention to what Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told members of his AKP party this weekend. Defending his decision to invite Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir to Istanbul for an Organization of the Islamic Conference summit, AP reported, he said he has no problem with the fact that Bashir is wanted by the International Criminal Court for mass murder in Darfur, because the accusation is clearly false.

“It is not possible for those who belong to the Muslim faith to carry out genocide,” he declared.

In other words, Erdogan is convinced that his co-religionists can do no wrong, in blatant disregard not only of the facts in Darfur but also of Muslim atrocities in many other places around the globe. And not only did he make it clear where his loyalties lie — with Islam, not the West (which supported Bashir’s indictment) — but in the process, he also rejected two of the cornerstones of the Western world, rationality and empiricism, preferring to disregard any facts that are inconvenient to his theology.

But lest anyone think this was a mere slip of the tongue, Erdogan went on to say that Israel committed far worse crimes during January’s war in Gaza than anything that happened in Darfur. Moreover, even if Bashir were responsible for state killings, he would still find it much easier to talk with Bashir than with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Hmm. Human-rights groups estimate that as many as 300,000 people were killed in Darfur in 2003-05, and the killing continues even today, albeit at a slower pace. The highest estimate of Palestinian fatalities in Gaza is 1,440. Any unbiased observer would naturally agree that 1,440 deaths are much worse than 300,000 — given that the 300,000 were killed by Muslims (who, as we know, cannot commit genocide) and the 1,440 by non-Muslims. My co-religionists, right or wrong.

Adding a further note of surrealism to all this, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said last Friday that Turkish-Israeli relations would improve if only Netanyahu would let Turkey resume its role as mediator in Israeli-Syrian talks. Netanyahu has flatly refused, saying (correctly) that Turkey has forfeited any pretense of being an honest broker. It requires a serious disconnect from reality to even imagine that you can accuse someone of being the world’s worst war criminal one moment and expect him to treat you as an impartial mediator the next. Have we mentioned yet that Erdogan’s Turkey doesn’t seem too keen on rationality?

The Bashir contretemps is hardly the first time Erdogan has behaved in a matter incompatible with Turkey’s traditional alliance with the West. But it is past time for the West to finally admit the unpalatable truth. Turkey’s departure from the Western camp undoubtedly leaves a gaping hole. But only if Western leaders finally admit that this hole exists can they start thinking, as they must, about how to fill it.

A group of South African immigrants to Israel submitted a novel proposal to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week. Netanyahu, they said, should accede to the UN’s demand that Israel investigate its own actions during January’s war in Gaza. But it should do so in the only way that makes sense: not by focusing on Israel’s actions in a vacuum but by comparing them to those of other Western military campaigns in populated areas – for instance, American operations in Iraq and Afghanistan or NATO’s bombing of Serbia.

“I particularly mention Serbia, where the number of bombs dropped on a civilian population was tremendously high,” Charles Abelsohn, one of the proposal’s authors, told Haaretz. “This is how war is conducted. But all of a sudden, when Israel is involved, there is a law of human rights that doesn’t appear to apply anywhere else.”

The South Africans are right: The Gaza war can only be understood comparatively. Only by analyzing how the level of civilian casualties and efforts to minimize them compared with casualty levels in other Western military campaigns, only  by assessing how Hamas’ efforts to use civilians as cover compare with those of other terrorist groups in other conflicts — only then can a fair determination be made about whether Israel is a war criminal, as the Goldstone Report claims, or whether it “did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare,” as British Col. Richard Kemp claims.

Abelsohn is also right that such data would “assist those who are fighting the good fight on Israel’s behalf.” Without comparative facts and figures, Israel’s assertion that its Gaza operation was a model of morality will not convince anyone not predisposed to believe it – unless, like Kemp, they have the firsthand knowledge needed to make their own comparisons. But because most people have no combat experience, they have no basis for comparison.

During World War II, according to historian William Hitchcock, the British bombing of one single city, Rouen, on one single day, April 19, 1944, killed 900 allied civilians. And that figure, which was not atypical, does not even include combatants and enemy civilians.

By comparison, according to IDF figures, Israel killed 1,166 Palestinians in Gaza over the space of three weeks, of whom 709 were combatants. Hence, even if, as Palestinians claim, the total casualty figure was higher and the proportion of combatants lower, Israel would clearly not fare badly in an international comparison.

I doubt that would matter to the Goldstones of the world. But it would matter to those who would like to think well of Israel but are troubled by the endless stream of accusations, which Israel has done too little to counter. Israel needs to produce the necessary comparative data, and its friends need to make sure it gets disseminated. Indeed, this should have been done long ago. But better late than never.

After announcing last Thursday that he would not run in January’s Palestinian election, which he himself called, Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) upped the ante this weekend by threatening to dissolve the entire PA. Both are moves in a well-known game that the Israeli media call “saving Abu Mazen.”

PA officials are open about its purpose: to extort additional concessions from Israel and, especially, the U.S. This time, they want America to publicly pledge East Jerusalem as the capital of the Palestinian state and support Abbas’s demand that negotiations be conditioned on a complete halt to settlement construction.

This game, which Abbas has successfully played many times before, rests on a simple premise: he is the most moderate Palestinian leader conceivable and therefore the best hope for Israeli-Palestinian peace. Hence, if he is weakening, he must be bolstered by new concessions.

The problem is that this premise is utterly false. He may indeed be the most moderate Palestinian leader conceivable, but that just shows how unready Palestinians are for peace — because Abbas has proved decisively over the past four years that he is no “peace partner.”

First, his negotiating positions preclude any deal. This is true on several counts but is particularly obvious in his demand for a “right of return” for 4.7 million descendants of Palestinian refugees. Combined with Israel’s 1.5 million Arab citizens, they would easily outnumber its 5.6 million Jews and could thus vote the Jewish state out of existence. Conditioning any deal on Israel’s self-destruction is hardly proof of peaceful intent.

Indeed, Abbas’s total lack of interest in a deal was evidenced by his handling of Ehud Olmert’s (overly) generous September 2008 offer, which included 94 percent of the territories, 1:1 territorial swaps to compensate for the remainder, international Muslim control over the Temple Mount, and absorption into Israel of several thousand refugees. Last week, Abbas said that he and Olmert “almost closed” a deal, implying that the current impasse stems from Olmert’s replacement by Benjamin Netanyahu. But in reality, Abbas never even bothered responding to Olmert’s offer until nine months later, long after Olmert had left office — and even then, he did so via a media interview rather than directly. And, most important, he rejected the offer, saying “the gaps were wide.”

Even Abbas’s vaunted opposition to terror has proved false. In 2005, his one year in sole control over the PA before Hamas’s electoral victory, Palestinians killed 54 Israelis and wounded 484, while 1,059 rockets and mortars were fired at Israel from Gaza. Yet not only did Abbas never order his forces to combat this terror; he explicitly and repeatedly refused to do so. He first cracked down on Hamas only in 2007, after its violent takeover of Gaza convinced him that Hamas threatened him, not just Israel. And he recently agreed to end this clampdown under a reconciliation agreement with Hamas.

In short, there is no point in “saving” Abbas. Instead, the world should finally admit the truth — and let him go.

It’s hard not to be impressed by the sheer range of people who publicly lost patience with Barack Obama’s Iran policy this week.

Most noteworthy, of course, was the Iranian opposition, whose activists chanted, as Jennifer noted, “Obama: either with the murderers or with us” during a demonstration in Tehran on Wednesday. By siding with a brutal regime against its most serious democratic challengers in 30 years, Obama is not only betraying American ideals and squandering America’s best shot at effecting real change in Iran since 1979; he is also destroying a priceless asset. Currently, Iran is the only Mideast Muslim country whose public is generally pro-American rather than rabidly anti-American. That is unlikely to last long if America is seen siding with the regime against the people.

That same day, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner told journalists in Paris that the Security Council will not even discuss new sanctions against Iran before the end of the year, at Washington’s request. He then proceeded to bluntly dissociate himself from that policy: “Our American friends ask us to wait until the end of the year,” he said. “It’s not us.”

Then, lest his listeners miss the point, he reiterated it: the Obama administration wants to wait and see whether Iran will respond to its offer of negotiations, he explained, so “we’re waiting for talks. But where are the talks?”

That’s truly impressive. Anyone remember the last time a veteran French leftist thought America was carrying appeasement too far?

The Democratic-controlled Congress sent the same message in subtler fashion on Tuesday, when German Chancellor Angela Merkel addressed a joint session. “She drew her most resounding applause,” the New York Times reported, when she declared that “zero tolerance needs to be shown when there is a risk of weapons of mass destruction falling, for example, into the hands of Iran. … A nuclear bomb in the hands of an Iranian president who denies the Holocaust, threatens Israel and denies Israel the right to exist is not acceptable.”

It’s not that Merkel didn’t mention other issues dear to Obama’s heart, like climate change and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s just that Congress, unlike the administration, has its priorities straight. Last week, National Security Adviser James Jones told the J Street conference that if the administration could solve only one international problem, it would be the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Congress understands that stopping thugs from getting the bomb is more important.

Finally, the Guardian reported this morning that previously unpublished International Atomic Energy Agency documents reveal that Iran may have tested components of a “two-point implosion” device, a highly sophisticated (and highly classified) technology that enables the production of smaller nuclear warheads, thus making it easier to mount one on a missile. This development, which “was described by nuclear experts as ‘breathtaking’ … has added urgency to the effort” to find a solution to the crisis, it said. So even an ultra-Left British newspaper has noticed that time is running out. Isn’t it time Obama did the same?

Jennifer wonders how 22 congressmen could be so incapable of making up their minds on the Goldstone report that they merely voted “present.” I’d say the answer is obvious: they’re applying to join the European Union.

As of this writing, EU representatives are still negotiating with Arab delegates over the wording of the pro-Goldstone resolution that the UN General Assembly began debating yesterday, hoping to find language that would let them vote in favor. But if no compromise is reached, they have threatened … to abstain. “There will be at least 60 abstentions, and only 120 votes in support,” Haaretz quoted an EU source “threatening” on Tuesday.

Now there’s a threat to strike terror into the hearts of Goldstone supporters: instead of the resolution passing by an overwhelming majority, with only Israel, the U.S., and a few others voting against, it will pass by … an overwhelming majority, with only Israel, the U.S., and a few others voting against.

Not that Arab delegates ever seriously feared that the EU might vote against: after all, when the UN Human Rights Council voted on the report last month, Britain and France could not even bring themselves to abstain; instead, they skipped the vote. And as the two EU countries with by far the most extensive military operations overseas, Britain and France are precisely the ones with most to lose should Goldstone actually become the new international bible for warfare. Thus, even though four EU states courageously bucked the party line by voting “no” in the HRC (Italy, The Netherlands, Hungary, and Slovakia), most will certainly fall in line behind Britain and France.

But the British-French hypocrisy doesn’t stop there. After the HRC vote, Haaretz reported, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy wrote to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to assure him that, of course, Israel has the right to defend itself — but if it wants European support in keeping its officers and cabinet ministers out of international courts afterward, it must open the border crossings with the Gaza Strip, completely freeze construction in the settlements, and resume negotiations with Mahmoud Abbas (never mind that he refuses to do so) on the terms dictated by Barack Obama — namely, a full return to the 1967 lines.

In other words, Israel has no right to self-defense unless it bows to EU political dictates — and then it still doesn’t, because these dictates require it to abandon the ability to defend itself, by withdrawing to indefensible borders and ending an embargo that has at least impeded (though certainly not prevented) Hamas’s efforts to rebuild its arsenal.

And that, in a nutshell, is what abstention means: we fully support stripping Israel of its right to self-defense, but we want to keep our hands clean while doing it. So we’ll sit back and let other countries do the dirty work instead. That, apparently, is the EU’s idea of “moral leadership”: being the “good men” who let evil triumph by doing nothing.

Following the Israeli police’s announcement on Sunday of the arrest of a Jewish terrorist, Yaakov (Jack) Teitel, the daily Haaretz published an editorial today that termed him “the Jewish counterpart of ‘The Engineer,’ Yahya Ayyash — Hamas’ expert bomb maker.” That analogy is as false as it is damaging. The two men may have shared an identical passion for killing, but there is a world of difference in their respective societies’ responses.

According to both the police and the Shin Bet security service, Teitel was a lone wolf, perpetrating his terrorist acts with no help from anyone. Moreover, when his deeds became known, he was unequivocally repudiated by his own society. Both the Yesha Council of settlements and the settlement where he lived issued condemnations. So did every settler-on-the-street that Haaretz reporters interviewed. Even on far-Right websites, the paper found very few statements of support for Teitel’s acts (and probably not for lack of trying; Haaretz usually likes nothing better than vilifying settlers). And of course, Israel arrested him itself.

Ayyash, in contrast, belonged to a large, well-funded group whose terrorist acts, far from being denounced, have consistently been lauded by Palestinian society. As leading Palestinian psychiatrist Eyad Sarraj told the Los Angeles Times in 2002, suicide bombers have “unparalleled” status among Palestinians. “Their pictures are plastered on public walls, their funerals are emotional celebrations, their families often receive visits from state officials. They become almost holy,” the LA Times report continued, “praised by imams at mosques or over loudspeakers at rallies, where children are often dressed as shrouded dead or as pint-sized suicide bombers.” Indeed, Palestinians value terror so highly that in 2006, they elected Hamas — a terrorist organization that not only holds the record for most Israelis killed in suicide bombings but flaunts its prowess in anti-Israel terror as its calling card — to run their government. Palestinians don’t arrest their terrorists; they make them cabinet ministers.

This different societal responses also explains the difference in the amount of mayhem the two men succeeded in perpetrating. In a terrorist career spanning a dozen years and about a dozen attacks, Teitel managed to kill two people. In contrast, Hamas suicide bombers killed 57 people in the two years before Ayyash met his death (at Israel’s hands) in December 1995; as the organization’s chief bomb maker, Ayyash presumably shares credit for most of these deaths. It’s not that Teitel was any less enamored of bombs; it’s just that it’s easier to perpetrate mass murder when you are backed by a large organization and a supportive society.

Haaretz’s false moral equivalence is unlikely to confuse Israelis, who have a clear grasp of the importance of this societal distinction. But it will undoubtedly be seized on by Israel’s enemies to support the canard that settlers are the Israeli equivalent of Hamas and that Israel is thus indistinguishable from the Palestinians when it comes to terror. And it will thereby deal another blow to Israel’s already battered good name.

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman told Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Saturday that he is urging his government not to resume negotiations with the Palestinian Authority until the PA withdraws its international legal complaints over alleged Israeli war crimes in Gaza. The real question is why Lieberman is having trouble convincing his cabinet colleagues of this position.

These complaints have only one purpose: to hamstring Israel’s ability to defend itself against Palestinian terror by making it fear that any defensive military operation will land its political and military leadership in the dock. After all, as Col. Richard Kemp courageously told the UN Human Rights Commission last month, the Israel Defense Forces “did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare” during its operation in Gaza this past January. And Kemp, a former commander of British forces in Afghanistan who also served in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, and Iraq, is certainly in a position to make comparisons. Hence, if Israel’s actions in Gaza are deemed war crimes, there is no military action it could take against Palestinian terrorists that wouldn’t be. Avoiding civilian casualties entirely is not possible when terrorists operate, as the Palestinians do, from the heart of a civilian population.

Yet even as he seeks to abolish Israel’s right to self-defense, PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas is also giving his imprimatur to terror attacks on Israel: last month, he accepted a proposed reconciliation agreement with Hamas that not only did not require Hamas to halt anti-Israel terror but explicitly obligated the PA security services to “respect the Palestinian people’s right to resist.” Since “resistance” is the well-known Palestinian code word for anti-Israel terror, that translates as requiring PA forces “to respect the Palestinian people’s right to perpetrate anti-Israel terror” — or. in other words, not to interfere when they do so. (Hamas, incidentally, has not yet signed the document; it is still holding out for more concessions.)

How exactly does Israel talk peace with someone who seeks to cripple Israel’s ability to defend itself even as he endorses anti-Israel terror? That isn’t an act of peace; it’s an act of war. And while Abbas may have had little political choice about jumping on the Goldstone Report bandwagon, he can hardly plead that Goldstone forced his hand: the PA filed its own war-crimes complaint against Israel in the International Criminal Court in January — nine months before the Goldstone Report came out. It even signed a special cooperation agreement with the court to get around prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo’s initial objection that he lacked jurisdiction, since Israel is not a member of the court, and the PA, not being a sovereign state, cannot be.

In short, this looks remarkably like a deliberate strategy for war on Israel. And Israel should be calling Abbas on it rather than keeping up the pretense that he is a “partner for peace” with whom it is eager to negotiate.