Know your enemies

Sir, – Uri Savir (“Know your friends,” Savir’s Corner, February 22) says that we can convince the Palestinians to respect our legitimate concerns and interests through “dialogue, mutual understanding and compromise.” He concludes that Israel must “meet the Palestinians’ interests halfway” in order for a permanent-status agreement to be possible. The problem is that moving halfway toward the Palestinians still leaves us halfway from where they demand we end up. While Savir says that Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert understood the need for compromise, there is scarce evidence that the steps these leaders took resulted in any meaningful shift by the Palestinian leadership. To this day, the Palestinian Authority maintains its maximalist demands, adamantly refusing even to recognize Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people. Each time the Palestinians have walked away from the bargaining table they have pocketed Israeli concessions and demanded that those concessions be the baseline for any future negotiations. Repeated Israeli good-will gestures (e.g., releasing over 100 convicted Palestinian terrorists simply to coax the Palestinians back to the table) have yielded precious little in the way of substantive concessions from the other side. Withdrawal from Gaza, costing thousands of Israelis their homes, led predictably to thousands of rockets being fired at innocent Israeli civilians. Sadly, in light of the total failure of the Palestinians to respond in kind to Israeli concessions, Savir’s column would better have been titled “Know your enemies.” EFRAIM A. COHEN Zichron Ya’acov