Thirty years of Israeli diplomacy that sought to obtain defensible borders, on the basis of UN Security Council Resolution 242, were abandoned. Israel dropped its insistence on a complete end of Hizbullah attacks, and replaced it with a willingness to make concessions to the Syrians while the IDF and SLA were under fire in south Lebanon. Rather than reducing the Palestinians' expectations during final status, Barak has pushed them to an all-time high, and he has set an impossible deadly deadline. It is therefore not surprising that Arafat is now increasing his demands on Jerusalem. He knows that the Clinton administration made a commitment to Israel in January 1997 that only Israel will decide and implement the further redeployments, but he expects that Clinton can be convinced to pressure Barak to accept the Palestinian demand for full control of Abu Dis and Azaria, at the edge of the city's municipal borders.
Diplomacy is just the continuation of war by other means.
We all want peace, and we can achieve it with our neighbors. The Arab side has no intention of making concessions when it knows Israel's negotiating position is so easy to erode . But that means stopping the crawl to the June 4 fault line. Ariel Sharon is leader of the Likud and the general who saved Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.